Dave Gee: Life from Right Field

Dunedin-based Brewery Speights is planning a very ambitious 70+ day pub crawl... by sea. The company's building a replica Cardrona Hotel-style Ale House inside 2 massive 12 metre-long shipping containers, which they'll send by sea to London.

The ten week voyage will check in on Samoa, the Panama Canal, Barbados, and New York, before finally arriving up the Thames in London sometime in late September.

Speights ran a competition last year to find ex-pats living in the UK who were missing their southern drop. Tim Ellingham won that promotion with a suitably humourous email, and got a few dozen beers for his efforts.

But the brewery decided they could go one better... and persuaded his best mate James Livingston to help them deliver a genuine Southern Man pub to Tim and all the other kiwis living in London!

This is no 'film set' construction. It's a fully-functional pub, being made by the team behind the rest of the Speight Ale Houses, with a genuine kauri wood bar with copper bowsers, stools, a dishwasher, glass washer, and air-conditioning.


Speights have launched a competition, The Great Beer Delivery, to find three more crew members to join James on the 70+ day voyage.

They'll have cooking and cleaning duties like the rest of the crew., but with the pub taking up about a third of the deck space, the bar will be opened for two hours a night for the entire trip (or at least until the beer runs out ;-)


The ship + Ale House + crazy crew (including videographer) depart Dunedin in late July.