What is Garage Project? Garage because it started in a garage, but it’s more than that. It’s also about approaching things with a garage mentality. It’s about playing around, making do and thinking outside the box. The surroundings might be basic but this is no barrier to creativity. This is bière de garage – beer from the garage. And why Project – because it’s ongoing, it’s a work in progress and we plan to keep it that way. For example, we don’t plan to come out with a fixed portfolio of beers – this is about experimenting, pushing boundaries, blurring the boundaries between styles - seeing what works. We love beer styles, but we want to take them somewhere, to reinterpret, not just reproduce them.
Garage Project was started by Pete Gillespie & Jos Ruffell with help from Pete’s brother Ian. When we started out we were tiny. Garage Project wasn't even micro brewing... it was truly nano brewing.
But what we lacked in size we more than made up for in agility and ability to experiment.
When you’re brewing on such a small scale you can afford to take risks. That suited us. We wanted to try something new.
A few years have passed and we’ve grown, but that same ethos still shapes how we do things at the Garage. Whether we’re brewing 50 litres or several thousand, we’re still here to take some risks, have a bit of fun, and try something new.
Way back in the day, when we were just starting out, we wrote a little blurb about each other to shed some light on who we are, and what lead us down the path of starting a brewery in Wellington, (if you’ve ever written your own bio, you’ll know how hard it can be!).
