Tuatara IPA

This week’s beer comes from the other side of the ditch in Wellington, New Zealand: Tuatara IPA. 

Before I get into the detail of this extremely tasty beer, a few important notes.  Wellington is home to a fantastic craft beer scene and is also notably the home of Garage Project among other excellent breweries.  Tuatara is no exception.  One disclaimer, they are owned by a larger brewer and, as I have mentioned I’d very much prefer to highlight smaller independent brewers. But credit where credit is due, they make a delicious beverage and fully deserve to be featured here.

Second note, for those who are curious, a tuatara is a cool crazy little 3-eyed dinosaur looking lizard native only to New Zealand.  The third eye in the centre of the forehead is only visible in juvenile tuataras before opaque scales grow over it as the tuatara gets older.  That does add some context to a bit of Tuatara’s packaging, but mostly it’s just a cool fact about a cool animal.

Ok, so after a bit of a detour, to the beer!  There are any number of Tuatara’s beers that I could have written about here (their APA and Vasta Farian are also delicious), but their IPA is simply just a great beer.  It’s super hoppy in a kind of pine-y way.  It’s got a good enough kick to satisfy my hoppy tastes, but isn’t too heavy and not too strong and therefore very easy to drink a few (or more) of in a sitting.  It’s simple, it’s hoppy, and it’s done really really well.

The packaging definitely deserves a mention as well. The neck of the bottle itself (and this is true of all Tuatara beers) is actually moulded and shaped like a lizard or tuatara tail.  And the bottle cap features a big eye on it as a reference to the tuatara’s third eye.  These are kind of little things, but they’re actually really cool.

So whether you like delicious hoppy beers, or you just love lizard-shaped drinking vessels, I heartily recommend tracking down a Tuatara IPA or any of their other offerings.