Dunedin Day 3 19/7/13
We started early, we had the car till 5pm but decided to drop it first so we had the rest of the day. The airport is about a half an hours drive away we drove over filled up at a little petrol station where the owner regaled us with details of the americas cup progress among other things.
We arrived dropped the car and had a spot of breakfast before heading back via super shuttle van we also booked that for tomorrow morning when we fly back to Auckland and the home.
After a brief rest we booked ourselves in on the 6pm tour of Speights Brewery with an accompanying 2 course meal at Speights Ale House. For the rest of the day we headed to Cadbury world Dunedin.
We got on the full tour for 3pm and spent a while wandering around the little museum. They had some Cocoa beans you could try they were really bitter. The museum went through the history of chocolate how the aztecs uses cocoa beans to make a drink which early spanish explorers brought back to spain and where it became popular with the rich and powerful. The secret of cocoa beans and how to turn them into chocolate eventually spread and everyone began drinking it. It then talked about the history of Cadburys how John Cadbury a quaker who set up a tea and coffee shop he also sold hot chocolate. He experimented with the then popular drink and eventually found that by adding milk it made it a more pleasant drink. He setup a factory that sold his drinking chocolate to the public in various forms but it wasn’t until his sons took over and he was dead that they perfected the solid chocolate bars.
The Dunedin plant was originally Hudson biscuits and they also made chocolate but the sold to Cadburys at somepoint. We then got rounded up for the factory tour we were given a little bag with a chocolate in it and hair net and beard snout. We had to remove all electronics before going in and wear the hair and beard covers as it’s a food production environment.
Chocolate starts with beans which are allowed to ferment then are roasted the shell is then removed and the cocoa nibs are taken out and ground down to extract the coco butter and the cocoa mess. Depending on the type of chocolate they then mix in milk sugar and other bits with the cocoa crumb. White chocolate is made with cocoa butter and dark they don’t use milk.
We saw the mixing machines and chocolate tanks where the stuff is mixed then melted. Various pipes then pump the liquid chocolate into the machines making the sweets. Each pipe was color coded. The site doesn’t make any blocks of chocolate for the home market but they do make ones for the catering industry. We could see the bars coming out of the tempering machine they were huge 12kg blocks 5cm thick each block was just in a plastic tub the worker knocked them out of and bagged them up.
Next we saw a machine making Chocolate buttons out of white chocolate. You could see the machine pump the chocolate into nozzles and then onto a conveyer in drops that cooled as it went through the machines. As the end they get removed and gathered up and dumped into a box. The boxes when full went on another conveyer to somewhere else for stacking and the like.
Next we saw how they made Easter eggs with a hollow shell that had chocolate put in one half then the other half secured on top and a machine would spin them all around to evenly coat and set the chocolate in the shape. When it was done they popped the eggs out and wrapped them. Some of the more complex shapes were wrapped by hand. The factory makes all the eggs for New Zealand which is quite a few but still a lot less than other countries.
After that we saw machines that would make boxes of roses they were a series of machines that each had one of the types of sweet in a big vat. They would pull the sweets up and them into the machine and add the right amount to each box. On some of the smaller machines they use pick and place machines to put the individual chocolates into the boxes and them seal them.
We saw a machine and line loading caramels into bags then onto a line that then had people load them into boxes another machine sealed the box and then a conveyer took them off for shipping. The part of the tour was into one of the large tanks painted cadburys purple. They had a machine in there that dumped a ton of liquid chocolate and took a picture. The chocolate got recycled they used the same chocolate for a year so it was probably not that nice by that point.
After that we had a nice sample of chocolate while they talked about how some sweet called jaffas which I’ve never encountered before. We left via the shop which was loaded with chocolate of every type.
We headed out and went for a coffee to pass the time till our next tour. I had a mocha to get some chocolate the factory had smelt of chocolate all the time and it made me feel quite hungry.
Then we headed to the Speights Brewery tour. The brewery is a pretty old brewery the original building is still in use but it’s being updated and strengthened for earthquakes. They had a plant in Christchurch that was damaged beyond repair in the earthquakes so they are updating the plant in dunedin for more capacity and structural stability.
Speights is owned by the Japanese brewer Kirin and owns a lot of other brands and business and was going to acquire the southern hemisphere coke company. The building is pretty tall and uses a gravity feed system all the ingredients are loaded in the top and naturally flow down the product exiting at the bottom. This meant we needed to go up to the top floor but the big lift was not ready so they stuffed us into a little service lift three at a time. First we saw a little history on beer and the Speights brewery in a small museum section then the tour proper began. We saw the various ingredients Hops Sugar Malt and barley. The hops were sourced locally and made in pellet form which allows them to keep better and store easier. The sugar was from Australia and I forget where the rest was from,
Next we saw the water purification and holding tanks made from some old kettles. The brewery has it’s own supply and it makes a tap with free water available to all out of the front of it’s building. With the fresh water they then had the Gyle room where huge wooden casks are used to mix the brew they’re made from new zealand wood and are huge. From there the brew goes into the kettles which are mostly copper.
After that we headed for the most important part of the tour the tasting. There were five beers to try and one cider golden, summit, old dark, distinction, the award winning triple hop, and the cider. It was help yourself and so we did trying everything at least once, they were small glasses but still. The only down side was the beer was violently cold so much so you couldn’t taste some of it.
We had the ale house booked for dinner and it was now a little late so we headed over. We got a two course meal either starter and main or main and pudding. We went for main and pudding you also got a glass of beer.
I had pork ribs and then chocolate mud cake with a summit ale. Byrnie had steak and cheesecake with a distinction. The food was excellent the ribs really tasty and the hot chocolate cake and some nice cold ice cream was wonderful.
We staggered back to the hotel up a really steep hill and relaxed for the night watching the truly awful Ghost Rider Spirit of Vangence which managed to contradict previous cannon and have some shockingly bad acting as well as Christopher Lambert as a ninja monk or nunk.
Tomorrow we head home and the holiday is over, it’s been a fun trip with some nice places and some good meals and great scenery. It’s been good fun and it’ll be tough to get back to normal again but such is life. Our planning and so on seemed to work out well we had a good duration of stay this time not too little or too long it’s been a nice revisit to NZ and a good time.
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