We walked from the campsite into the centre of Dunedin and the visitor centre where we booked ourselves on the Cadbury’s factory tour and the Speight’s brewery tour. We did the Cadbury factory tour first. Cadbury’s took over the factory as it had been another chocolate company previously, and it was called “Cadbury’s Confectionary Limited” as it incorporated Pascall sweets. The smell of the chocolate was wonderful. We discovered that the best selling chocolate bar in New Zealand is the “Moro” bar, which isn’t really sold anywhere except New Zealand. Moro’s are very much like a Mars bar. The tour was enjoyable and finished with a chocolate waterfall, where 1.5 tons of chocolate is dropped from a big bucket in one of the disused silos. And we got lots of chocolate to enjoy later. We learnt that the “Dessert” range of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk was a new range that they were looking at launching world-wide. This can only be a good thing as we’d been thoroughly enjoying this range throughout our stay in New Zealand, particularly the Lemon Cheesecake, Rocky Road, Triple-Decker, Mint Chips, Black Forest...

After the Cadbury’s tour we took photos of the railway station (apparently the most photographed building in New Zealand, so we thought we’d better get some pictures) then wandered around the shops before heading to the Speights brewery. The tour was excellent; we learnt about the different sizes of ‘barrels’ (such as hogshead, firkin, and even a barrel is a specific size), that the Egyptians brewed “booze”, and we got right up close to the brewing equipment. The building had been built in the 1940s following a fire which destroyed the previous building, but the machinery and the interior to us looked more Victorian in origin. Certainly the tiling in some of the rooms was reminiscent of Victorian swimming pools from home. And the huge copper brewing kettles were quite a sight to behold and were definitely from a bygone era. In another area of the factory are the giant kauri wood tanks used for brewing the seasonal and special beers. The kauri tanks hadn’t been used for a while, but to celebrate 125 years of Speights, some of the brewery workers got a cooper out of retirement and brought this way of brewing back online. The resulting beer proved so popular that they now have four of the kauri tanks up and running for different beers.

At the end of the tour was the obligatory taste test. We had six different Speights beers to try; the original “Gold Medal” beer, a Pilsner, the “Distinction” (Andrea’s favourite), the “Pale Ale”, “Old Dark” (Andy’s favourite), and the “Harvest” summer ale that had an apricot taste. After sampling all these we were a little tipsy, but there was still one more to try, so we went to the pub round the corner for a pint of the “Porter”. After that beer we decided we couldn’t be bothered to move elsewhere so had some very nice pub grub before having ‘just one more’ in a bar off the Octagon, before jumping in a taxi as it was bucketing down outside.