Student-led beer festival attracts thousands, but only a few hundred Scarfies
Turns out students are good at organising a beer festival.
Now in its eighth year, this weekend’s Dunedin Craft Beer and Food Festival should see 12,000 people pour through the gates of Forsyth Barr Stadium to sup on ale and cider and enjoy music from the likes of Don McGlashan and Ladi6.
Perhaps unusually for Dunedin, most of those beer lovers will not be students.
The festival is run by the Otago University and Students’ Association (OUSA), which launched it eight years ago on the concrete pad at Forsyth Barr as rain, wind and hail struck the roof.
“In those first couple of years, people were pretty nervous,'’ Jason Schroeder, OUSA’s events and venues operations manager admits.
That trepidation wasn’t entirely unfounded, with students’ alcohol-fuelled incidents attracting negative headlines.
Schroeder said for many it was difficult to understand why OUSA would put on a beer festival, which crucially was not aimed at students.
But word soon spread about the event, and by the next year the festival had encroached to a part of the grass, and then the year after reached the halfway line.
Within four years it covered the entire grass surface, and in recent years has become a two-day event, Friday and Saturday, with the former aimed at working professionals, Schroeder said.
⚠️ DOGS DIE IN HOT CARS. If you love them, don't leave them. ⚠️
It's a message we share time and time again, and this year, we're calling on you to help us spread that message further.
Did you know that calls to SPCA about dogs left inside hot cars made up a whopping 11% of all welfare calls last summer? This is a completely preventable issue, and one which is causing hundreds of dogs (often loved pets) to suffer.
Here are some quick facts to share with the dog owners in your life:
👉 The temperature inside a car can heat to over 50°C in less than 15 minutes.
👉 Parking in the shade and cracking windows does little to help on a warm day. Dogs rely on panting to keep cool, which they can't do in a hot car.
👉 This puts dogs at a high risk of heatstroke - a serious condition for dogs, with a mortality rate between 39%-50%.
👉 It is an offence under the Animal Welfare Act to leave a dog in a hot vehicle if they are showing signs of heat stress. You can be fined, and prosecuted.
SPCA has created downloadable resources to help you spread the message even further. Posters, a flyer, and a social media tile can be downloaded from our website here: www.spca.nz...
We encourage you to use these - and ask your local businesses to display the posters if they can. Flyers can be kept in your car and handed out as needed.
This is a community problem, and one we cannot solve alone. Help us to prevent more tragedies this summer by sharing this post.
On behalf of the animals - thank you ❤️
Poll: Would you rather: Christmas in summer forever or winter forever?
Just a bit of a fun poll to get you thinking.
If you had to live out your Christmas days, would you prefer it was a summer Christmas or a winter Christmas?
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61.7% Summer
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36.6% Winter
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1.7% Other - I'll share below
Would you like a free copy of our February 2025 issue?
Kia ora neighbours. We give away free copies to readers whose recipes are used in our magazine. We're still on the hunt for tomato recipes, so send your family's favourite way to use up your homegrown harvest, to: mailbox@nzgardener.co.nz. If we use it in the mag, you will receive a free copy of the mag
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