Brian Watson

But it depends on who you speak to.

Some of them are pretty good.

Some of them are like, no, it'll never happen.

Absolutely, because in fact, I'm down speaking at the Arable Farmers, I think, get together next Wednesday with Nicola, Greg and Christopher Luxton around, you know, just around the farming and arable farming compared to dairy.

And so, yeah, we're having a hard time.

My role there is to be able to obviously talk about the challenges we face as a brewing industry, but purely as a good George brewer, we need malted barley.

And so we need to convince the farmers to put malted barley in the ground rather than wheat or convert to dairy.

So, you know, it's a challenge.

We've been fortunate this year.

We haven't seen too many price rises because obviously all of the barley has been harvested and probably malted now.

But we are expecting next season, which is 12 months, 11 months from now, to see a significant rise in malted barley, which is just another inflationary pressure we have to deal with as an industry.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah.

Yep, definitely.

We do import some specialty malts from cool places like Bamberg in Germany because it's cool, but very, very little.

It's fruity.

And what we make here in New Zealand, particularly down in Canterbury and in Martin, the two main places, is outstanding, world-class malt.

In fact, a lot of it's exported.

Well, yes, Marsden Point shut down.

And then so now we became as a country reliant on one single source of production, which is always a risk, right?