Rebekah Hay – Hakanoa Ginger Beer

Our suburb has drink named after it.  Hakanoa Handmade Drinks was born in Hakanoa Stree in 2009. Here’s a little more the story of Rebekah Hay the founder of Hakanoa Ginger Beer.

This story begins with the classic ginger beer that was brewed in homes all over NZ. 

When Rebekah Hay was a child in the 1970’s,  she used to help family friend Joan make ginger beer at her home. Joan had a ginger beer ‘plant’ or ‘bug’ – a jar of cloudy liquid that she kept in a cool cupboard and fed regularly with ginger and sugar and water to keep it bubbling. Joan would always make a batch a week before her kid’s birthdays, so all the bottles would be nicely fizzy ready for the party.  All the kids helped with the bottling, happy to help with the magical transformation of 3 ingredients into a delicious bubbly drink. 

Skip ahead to 2007 –  Rebekah was living in Hakanoa Street in Grey Lynn. She’d returned from nearly 10 years living in London. A dedicated foodie, she was baking 2 loaves of sourdough bread every week from her home-made starter.  She could see that the fermentation process was magically transforming her daily bread too.  

When the 2008 Global Financial Crisis hit Rebekah knew her career in digital special effects had reached it’s natural end.  It was time to make a living using her foodie skills.

First, she tried to make ginger beer just like Joan’s.  Although it tasted wonderful, it had only 7 days, stored at 4c, in which was safe to drink. After that, the brew was more likely to hit you in the eye than get into your mouth, and the alcohol level would be creeping up too.  Brewing and selling fresh ginger beer proved terribly wasteful as a business practice.  

It took Rebekah over 12 months and 26 experiments in the end before she cracked the right mix of ingredients and brewing methods, pasteurisation time & temperature, and careful balancing of each wild fermentation before she finally got real proper ginger beer into a glass bottle with a stable long-term shelf-life at room temperature.

Rebekah and her business partner Roger were elated with the results, and entered it into the 2015 Cuisine Artisan Awards – and it won that year’s beverage award. It’s hard to describe how satisfying that moment was!

In the years leading up to that win, Rebekah developed a Ginger concentrate, and then a Spicy Chai concentrate, and then a Ginger Lemon Honey concentrate, and then a Classic Chai concentrate.  Hakanoa Handmade Drinks now has a complete range of luxury café concentrates, in a class of their own. 

Rebekah founded the company with sustainability and do-as-you-would-be-done-by principles firmly at the front. Hakanoa established direct trade with the Navurevure Ginger Farmers Association in in 2016, and converted them to organic ginger farming in 2019. Hakanoa sources organically farmed and fairly traded raw sugar and black tea, and is developing supply chains with more spice growers in the Pacific region. All products are certified preservative-free, gluten-free and dairy-free.  

Hakanoa Handmade Drinks Ltd now supplies over 500 venues around NZ with a boutique premium range of café concentrates and the finest ginger beer money can buy.