Garage Project

Sludge. It’s not exactly super sexy, but what you do with it is important. Brewing creates three main organic waste streams: malt, hops and yeast. Our spent malt already gets repurposed as animal feed (and occasional crackers and dog biscuits), but sludge (the thick slurry of leftover hop material and yeast) has historically been a trickier problem to solve. For a long time, we collected it in tanks, but it still ended up being trucked to landfill as liquid waste. Not great. Enter: The Sludge Tank. In 2024, funding from the Wellington City Council Waste Minimisation Seed Fund - Organics Diversion Fund allowed us to build a proper system, designed by our own Steve Almond (Sustainability & Projects Manager) in collaboration with EnviroNZ. Sludge is now pumped from our fermenters into a holding tank, collected by EnviroNZ, and composted by Capital Compost, turning it into potting mix and soil for public use. The impact? 🌱 60+ tonnes of organic waste diverted from landfill per year 🌱 5+ tonnes of CO2 emissions prevented Very cool, very satisfying. End of story, right?....Wrong! After 8 months of doing this, we noticed something… the sludge smells incredible! Concentrated hop aroma, bright, fruity, punchy. Too good to compost, and you know that here at Garage Project, we're always wondering if things can be made into beer, and this sludge was no different. We gave hope a chance, and we are so thrilled to announce that our recycling experiment was a delicious success! Introducing: Sludgefest, Radical Recycled Hop IPA - 9.5% This tasty beer is brewed by giving those leftover dry hops a second life before they make their noble exit to compost. Multiple doses of leftover dry hop ‘sludge’, still loaded with hop aroma and flavour, pumped straight from other beers into this tank of Sludgefest making it technically our most heavily hopped beer ever. Waste’s only waste if you waste it, and, trust us, You won’t want to waste a drop. Artist: @gwilart

WOW CHAMPION INTERNATIONAL LARGE BREWERY at the AIBAs 😭🏆😝 Massive honour to take home this award, with Pete over there alongside our Aussie crew to accept it on the night! Huge thanks to everyone who drinks our beer, stocks our beer, collaborates with us, and helps make all of this possible, and thank you @melbourneroyalawards ! We’re pretty bloody stoked about this one! LESHGOOOOOOOO

The bee was a paid actor

Remember last year? We barely had time to crack a can before these were gone, which left us with two choices: leave you hanging, or get back to work. We chose the latter. @mikkellerbeer works with select top breweries across the world, and we’re stoked they have chosen us as their partner for Asia Pacific. These Mikkeller beers are brewed in New Zealand by Garage Project, with specially selected hops from Nelson Lakes, local Gladfield malts, and sprinklings of our own lot-selected Yakima Chief Hops. A popular drop that will not last. Windy Hill - Hazy IPA 7% 🌬️ Forest Friends - West Coast IPA 6% 🌲 Mysterious Path - Hoppy Pilsner 4.7% 🔍 But why stop there? Skinny Dipper - Hazy IPA 5.5% 🩳 👙 Splash out with this new hazy IPA, brewed in collaboration with @mikkellerbeer and the pick of the hop harvest from our Nelson Lakes farm. Motueka, Cascade and Nelson Sauvin bring super juicy stone fruit and bright citrus top notes in a lush smooth hazy base that’s as refreshing as a moonlit dip.

Come try Skinny Dipper, our new collaboration beer, brewed nude (🤪) with our mates at @mikkellerbeer . Pouring now at Garage Project venues and participating venues around the country for an exclusive first taste. Pouring from Friday‼️

Two classics, two sides of the stout coin.⁠ ⁠ We make a lot of new things, but we’ll always come back to the beers that carried us through those long, dark Aro Valley days. Aro Noir is our American stout, brewed as an antidote to the gloom that comes with being in the wrong side of the valley in winter. Cereal Milk is smooth and creamy, like the best part of breakfast, turned into a stout.⁠ ⁠ Aro Noir - 7% Friendly Roasted Stout⁠ ⁠ Aro Noir is a pitch black and full flavoured stout. At its heart is a blend of four malts, with Columbus and Summit hops, creating a citric bitterness and aroma that marries nicely with the roast malt character. Yes, it is inspired by the darkness of a Wellington winter in Aro Valley, but truly it is a stout for all seasons. Join us on the dark side.⁠ Artist: Sean Johnson ⁠ Cereal Milk Stout - 4.7% Breakfast of Champions⁠ ⁠ Cereal Milk. Let's be honest, it's the best bit of breakfast in a bowl. Here in this beer we've combined this creamy comfort food with the rich, roast character of the milk stout. Brewed with corn flakes, oats, chocolate wheat and a generous dose of milk sugar, Cereal Milk Stout is rich, smooth and redolent of the sweet remnants of the breakfast bowl. Grab a spoon and dig in. Artist: @sick.days

We’re trying something new this May. New Zealand Sign Language week kicks off on May 4, and this year marks the 20th anniversary of NZSL’s recognition as an official language in New Zealand. It’s such a cool milestone that we’re devoting a whole month to celebrating it. This is FRESH May, brought to you in collaboration with Deaf Aotearoa and New Zealand Sign Language Week, with art from Ryan Cassidy.⁠ ⁠ Fresh May '26, Monthly Hazy IPA - 7%⁠ ⁠ It’s a big hazy for a big anniversary. Light lager malt, wheat and malted oats deliver a signature glowing green gold haze. Hot side hopping is 100% Nelson Sauvin, with a blend of T90 and cryo to lay down the full spectrum of Nelson flavour. Then dry hopping with the same tag team of T90 and cryo Nelson along with Strata and Oregon Chinook. The word juicy gets bandied around a lot when describing hazies, but we struggle to find a better word to describe the near perfect balance of citrus and tropical fruit flavour, patisserie-sweet mouthfeel and mouthwatering hop bitterness. Damn, May’s juicy!⁠ ⁠ So crack a can of FRESH, and while you’re at it why not go online and learn some sign. It’s fun and who knows where it will lead. Happy 20th NZSL!⁠ ⁠ Artist: @ryry.cassidy

We’re celebrating New Zealand Sign Language Week all month with FRESH May 🙌 It’s the 20th anniversary of NZSL’s recognition as an official language in New Zealand, so we’re doing something special to celebrate this incredible milestone!!! Come into one of our venues and try ordering your FRESH May in New Zealand Sign Language! Our team are there to help, and there are spot prizes up for grabs if you give it a go.

Get it up ya

This week’s Wild Rumpus looks a little different... Welcome to our WET HOP WILD RUMPUS! ™ This week is all about wet freakin’ hops, the final two beers in the three we are releasing this wet hop season. We have Bine Mind, our Hopstock Festival entry, made in collaboration with DosKiwis, and Harvest Home, a wet hopped Saison. Wet hop beers rely on precision; it’s a race against the clock to get those wet hops into the brew for your drinking pleasure. So drink! And Enjoy! Bine Mind, Unfiltered Wet Hopped IPA - 6.6% Can’t get your mind off hops? It’s a fresh harvest hit for the hop obsessed. Bine Mind, punchy unfiltered IPA, brewed with absurd quantities of freshly picked Nectaron and Rakau cones for a complex blend of pine resin, stonefruits and bright citrus lemon kush. Get your head in the hop field. Brewed in Collaboration with Catalonia’s DosKiwis - Great minds think alike. Artist: @siandesigns Harvest Home, Wet Hop Harvest Saison - 6.2% The blind reaper has cut the last neck and the hops are lying in the oast. Time to make merry. Harvest Home Saison, brewed with harvest fresh organic raw wheat & pilsner malt, infused with a subtle addition of coriander seed & Yen Ben lemon rind, then steeped in a hop back brimming with freshly picked ‘wet’ Southern Cross & Nelson Sauvin cones. Bring it home. Artist: @harkenback

We wonder what you could keep in here? WIN WIN a BEER BEER FRIDGE FRIDGE so BEER BEER stays COLD COLD.⁠ ⁠ Perfect for the bar, the batch, the flat, or the office (!?)⁠ ⁠ To enter:⁠ 🍺 Make sure you’re following us⁠ 🍺 Like this post 🍺 Tag a mate who needs a BEER⁠ ⁠ The winner will be drawn on Friday 1st of May, must be 18+ to enter.

It’s that season again - the NZ hop harvest! There’s a real romance around this season, racing to get whole cone, wet hops straight from the field to the tank. And beyond that - hop harvest is when we select hops that will shape our beers for the whole year. So much of getting the best quality hops is picking them at the right moment - which, at the end of the day, is totally qualitative, rather than scientific. You go into the field, pick a cone, rub it between your palms, smell it, and decide: is now the moment we go? It gets a bit scary when your window for picking at all is getting smaller, and you’re waiting, waiting to see whether you can actually capture that peak moment. It’s what makes hops so exciting, and gives us such huge respect for the sensory skills and steel balls of hop growers - shout out to our good friends at Freestyle Hops and Nelson Lakes! We’ve done three wet hop beers this year, and we’re releasing one this week. The other two? You’ll have to wait and see. And the first beer is....🥁🥁🥁 One Day in March, Fresh hopped hazy harvest IPA - 6.2% A juicy blend of Nelson Sauvin & Rakau hops, all picked on the same day at Freestyle hop farm, half of the harvest was rushed still wet from the field to the Garage and plunged straight into this beer, the other half was quickly dried and added to the fermenter. The result is a beer overflowing with lush citrus, resinous pine and tropical fruit. Just New Zealand grown hops at their harvest fresh best. Artist: @rebeccaterborg_illustration