Alasdair Cassels is an icon in Christchurch, or he is around Woolston anyway. His distinct looks play a part in that status: tall frame, dark glasses, long white hair and moustache – it’s quite a striking presence, but a humble and friendly one nonetheless.
The man himself is probably just as iconic as his business ventures during the past few years, specifically his boutique shopping arcade, The Tannery, and the Cassels & Sons Brewery which he co-owns with his son, Zak, and son-in-law, Joe Shanks.
The Cassels family has contributed a lot to the economy of the city, with various businesses sprawled throughout. Alasdair co-owns the CBD Bar on Madras St, as well as the brewery and shopping centre, and has recently been working on a project to clean up the Heathcote river.
The river itself is something Alasdair seems to dote on. It’s partly why he bought the site that The Tannery sits on way back in 1994.
“It told a story straight away of Christchurch in its early days, because Christchurch was really settled on the banks of the Heathcote,” Alasdair explains.
Read anything about Alasdair in the paper or online and you’ll probably hear about the Heathcote and Christchurch’s early days. He can’t help but let his passion for the city show. It’s understandable though – he seems to have known nothing but success in Christchurch.
I first met Alasdair on a drizzly spring morning. I had met him in the atrium of The Tannery to talk about the site and the shape of the city in general (who else to talk to about the city but a lover of it?), but our conversation drifted more towards another of his passions: craft beer.
He has been making his own beer at home for years and even taught his children how to do it, so of course he has set up his own brewery.
The Cassels & Sons Brewery was officially established in 2009 and started out exactly where it sits now, in The Brewery bar of The Tannery. It got off to a shaky start with the earthquake following two years after it opened, but that didn’t knock their confidence for long. In fact, the craft beer industry in New Zealand as a whole is booming right now.
According to the ANZ New Zealand Craft Beer Industry Insights 2015 report, craft beer sales have increased 42 percent in the last year alone. Beer exports to Asia have also doubled in the last two years, with the Asian market potential being 750 times the size of New Zealand, so it would seem now is the time to export.
When we spoke, Cassels & Sons didn’t yet have the capacity to export, due to hand bottling each beer and predominantly using kegs for draft beer or bottles sold at local markets to sell their product. But things are very quickly about to change.
The Brewery is situated at the entrance of The Tannery and houses their public bar, kitchen and hand-built wood fire kettle, which they used to brew their first batch of pilsner (it’s one of only two in the world according to Alasdair).
If you take a stroll to the bottom end of The Tannery car park, you will come across a second building – one of Cassels & Sons’ bigger breweries – it’s here that big changes are about to be made.
The brewery has just acquired a bottling plant that they had imported from Czech Republic. It is the biggest bottling machine in the craft beer industry in New Zealand and should be up and running in February.
The potential this $1m machine carries for Cassels & Sons is huge. The machine, a Moravek 21/24/4 Tribloc, has a maximum production rate of 7,000 bottles per hour and is capable of bottling over six million litres per year, which more than out does the current hand-bottling methods of the brewery.
“Beer is easier to make and serve in a bar. Once you start bottling it, it’s got to be really technically made, otherwise on the way to market, the flavour goes, the bubbles go. The more sophisticated the machine is, the better chance you’ve got of getting it to market so exporting and everything else becomes an option,” explains Alasdair.
He has hopes of bottling other breweries’ beers too – another way of giving back to the community.
When I first met Alasdair in The Tannery he was sat with two other gentlemen, clearly well at home in the Victorian-arcade inspired centre surrounded by his friends.
We eventually shifted into the corner of a coffee shop to chat. Something I didn’t realise at the time, but quickly caught on to, was just how popular Alasdair is. Even later when we were taking pictures in the atrium, people continuously made jokes with him, tried to have a chat and just generally looked his way.
Whether that’s because he literally owns the place or because people have so much respect for him, I’m not sure, but even just spending an hour with him I can understand the pull he has.
The Tannery is buzzing with business and visitors. It’s a really positive place to be.
The centre didn’t really come to life until after the earthquake because, as Alasdair tells me, for one reason or another, before then he had struggled to get planning permission from the city council to do anything with the site. It wasn’t until after the earthquake that The Tannery began to transform into what it is today.
“It was an absolute tragedy and all of us were shocked,” says Alasdair. “But amongst all that was a sense of excitement. There really was a sense of being able to do something.”
He explains that when the city centre was shut down in the aftermath of the earthquake, a lot of boutique family-run businesses needed a new place to settle and The Tannery offered them the perfect spot. “It was safety in numbers, so dozens of them came here.”
The building itself had to be re-built but it meant that Alasdair was able to turn his dreams for the Woolston community into a reality.
“I wanted something that was peaceful and uplifting when you walked into it. I wanted to make people feel better about things and also give them a chance to escape from the city or from, at that stage, the beaten up city.
“I wanted to create a fantasy and fairytale place which wasn’t as hard as it seems.”
Although it took a few years to really get the centre and the businesses it housed off the ground, the $20m project now has 65 happy tenants meaning all leases are under occupation. A few more expansions are even in the works, with Alice Video building a two-screen cinema at the south end of the atrium, with the Metropolitan Lounge going above it (a conference centre/ art gallery).
The news came late last year that Alasdair was planning on selling 45 percent of his shares for The Tannery in an aim to earn back some of the well-spent money he has dedicated to it.
He is planning on channelling the money into other projects around Woolston, but he is keeping the details under lock and key for now. At this point in time it’s early days, but Alasdair is confident that his shares will sell pretty easily so he can start making tracks on his next plan.
He has big hopes for the city overall, not just his little corner of it by the Heathcote river.
“In the 50s and 60s, Christchurch was a big capital of the South Island. We had head offices, bigger government departments and big banks here.
“New Zealand went through an economic reform in the 80s and what happened then was head offices and bigger government departments were taken away from Christchurch and went to Auckland and Wellington, so we shrunk and the need for a big city shrunk, and we were only left with a few parts of town that really were used properly.
“Cities like to be compact, they like to be dense, so they work better when there’s lots of people and things to do and I think this new plan we’ve got will solve that problem,” explains Alasdair.
Although the majority of Alasdair’s focus remains on the Woolston side of town, he does talk a fair bit about the city. It’s clear he has big hopes for it. He’s positive of the outcome and knows Christchurch is headed in the right direction.
“The biggest thing we need in town is patience. It might not be for a while, but it will develop slowly and it will be a good place.”
At the end of our interview, Alasdair took me along to the Brewery Bar to proudly show off their wood fire kettle. He brought it up a few times during our conversation so he’s clearly proud of it.
And it is impressive. It took him and his son-in-law six months to build by hand. I guess that took his patience too, and it must have been worth the wait. I hear a Cassels & Sons pint is damn good.
