Blackball Taxi Rye Stout

SEASONAL BREW | This beer is a love letter to Blackball, a firebrand of a town with fiercely convivial charm. We first visited out of curiosity & left utterly smitten. By the time we landed, gold & coal had left their mark & miner Patrick “Wild Bill” Hickey had already refused to leave his pork pie after a measly 15-minute break for a 10-hour work stretch. It was 1908, & his act sparked an 11-week miner’s strike ushering in the town’s boom which eventually ebbed in the 1960s. 

But villagers persevered, & that strike spawned NZ’S Labour movement, solidifying Blackball as a magnet for broad-minded folk who eat politicos for breakfast & mine their own good luck. On our second visit, we stayed at Formerly the Blackball Hilton, drank dark lager & laughed with locals as a reveller was ferried home in a wheelbarrow. Pure gold. We’ve been back since & will go again because Coasters in Blackball have wit & more grit than any lump from a mine.