Stanley Green
BrewNZ Bronze Medal 2006
Characteristics: A pale bronze colour, hints of fruitcake and a dry hoppy finish are all crammed into this traditionally styled ale, this is a good rounded beer that is best served at 13 º C.
Color: Pale bronze
IBU: 39.5
Hops: Pacific Gem, Willimette, NZ Cascade, NZ Fuggle, Kohatu
Yeast: House Ale
Malt: Gladfield Pale, Caramalt, Pale Crystal, Amber
Alcohol: 4.7% by volume
Availability: Year round on tap and in 330ml bottles
Tasting notes from Geoff Griggs: Modelled on a Pale Ale from the motherland, Stanley Green pours a typically English orange – bronze colour beneath a clingy white head. The aroma offers sweet caramel and toffeeish malt notes balanced with a gentle herbal fruitiness from the hops. Medium bodied, there’s a creamy, sweet and savoury maltiness that’s reminiscent of Mackintosh’s toffees, followed by a leafy hop note and dry finish.
The Story of Stanley
Every beer has a tale to tell and in the case of Invercargill Brewery’s pale ale Stanley Green – it’s one of love, loss and family.
When our first beer, inauspiciously named IBS, was re-engineered in 2006 the new recipe was named for brewer Steve Nally’s maternal grandfather Lance Corporal Stanley Green no 4342115, who was killed during WWII.
Originally from Manchester, England, Stanley Green met Edith Coles in Clevedon where they were later married. After the ceremony he returned to his regiment. Months later the 29-year old was dead.
A career soldier in the 2nd Battalion The East Yorkshire Regiment, Stanley had served in India and then in France in 1939.
Ironically he survived Dunkirk only to be killed on a training exercise in Inverness in May 1942, just seven weeks after the birth of his only child – his sole legacy the daughter he saw just once.
Stanley had been training for a commando style attack in occupied France when a new rifle grenade-launcher misfired, exploding a metre from his face.
“We all knew him as courageous and cool in action and showing cheerfulness, willingness and quiet endurance under hard and adverse conditions,” wrote the company chaplain as consolation to the newly-widowed Mrs Green.
Wrongly ruled ineligible for a war widow’s pension, yet taxed at the punitive rates reserved for single women (who it was felt didn’t really need income) Mrs Green worked two jobs, six days a week to raise their child.
Each Remembrance Day she would pore over old letters and cry but the closest she ever came speaking of her lost husband was to tell her daughter that Green was an unlucky colour.
Their daughter, Janet, became a nurse who in 1965 married young merchant sailor Gerry Nally and moved half a world away to New Zealand.
Their youngest son, Steve, founded Invercargill Brewery in 1999. When years later he decided to name his favourite beer for his lost grandfather, his grandmother was prompted to talk about her late husband for the first time.
“I think he was an ordinary man doing something extraordinary,” Steve said.
Equally extraordinary was Edith Green who lived her whole life in Clevedon. In 1983 she eventually remarried widower Harry Edwards.
She was in her 80s and widowed for a second time before the UK Government realised its mistake – back-paying years of war pension – most of which Edith gave away to friends and family.
When she died in 2007 aged 92 she was survived by her daughter Janet and son-in-law Gerry, two grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.