OUR STORY
The home of handmade drinks
Rebekah Hay started Hakanoa Handmade Drinks in New Zealand in 2009, inspired by a love of old-fashioned fermentation, and the unmistakable flavour of classic NZ ginger beer brewed with a living “bug”. What began in her kitchen, with help from business partner Roger King, has grown into a premium range of wild-fermented ginger beers, authentic chai concentrates and luxurious syrups.
We use fresh, ethically sourced ingredients, and all of our products are free from gluten, dairy, and preservatives. We combine time-honoured fermentation methods with careful experimentation, focusing on robust, beautifully balanced flavours and sustainable practices, including a direct-trade partnership that has helped our Fijian ginger growers convert to organic farming.
Every bottle is made to be deeply satisfyingly delicious, and a pleasure for both discerning baristas and home drink-makers to work with. We want our drinks to bring you a moment of genuine contentment.
How it all began
THE STORY OF US as told by founder, Rebekah Hay
1973, I’m 10 years old, and Joan is teaching me how to make ginger beer with a ‘bug’, and I am fascinated.
The ginger beer is delicious, as long as you follow the strict storage and drink-by rules.
If you don’t, expect to be drenched in over-brewed gassy ginger beer.
Skip ahead to 2008
After years producing special effects for tv and movies, The Global Financial Crisis changes everything. It’s time for a change, and my passion has always been cooking. I was baking 2 loaves of sourdough bread every week, carefully nurturing my precious sourdough starter. I find the whole fermentation process of the sourdough culture transforming plain flour & water into a delicious loaf captivating.
2009 I spent a lot of time in my garden hanging out with my chooks, and in my kitchen experimenting with ginger beer brewing. After months and months of trial and error, and brutally honest feedback from everyone I know, I finally produced Dry Ginger Beer that tasted how I remembered it.
2009
Hakanoa Handmade Drinks Ltd was incorporated on December 22nd 2009. The abiding principles are;
1. There’s only real food in our food.
2. Build a long-term sustainable business.
3. Do as you would be done by.
I'm all about 'let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food'. I don't use preservatives for flavour reasons firstly, but also out of respect for the health of our vastly varied gut biomes.
For our business to be successful, we need good infrastructure, strong supply relationships, and a lot of good will. Community is everything.
We pay our taxes, we pay fair prices and living wages, and we'll keep on reducing pollution everywhere it appears in our supply chain.
2010
I got a little red van, rented a bit of kitchen space in a cafe that was closed on the weekends, moved my 30-litre home brew barrels in and spent every weekend split between filling bottles and selling them to people from the side of Meola Rd in Pt Chevalier. I made a new brew every week – not all of them entirely successful! – but when I got it right, people loved the just-like I-remember-it flavour and thirst-quenching satisfaction of a ginger beer that is just sweet enough, but not too sweet.
I learnt so much on that roadside. Mostly I felt nervous, but friends stood with me, complete strangers stopped and quizzed me – and everyone was incredibly generous with advice. I gradually learned to communicate with confidence.
2011
I've become friends with Helen, who runs the Aotea Coffee cart at the City Farmers Market in Britomart, and Helen’s family. Helen and her husband founded Kokako Coffee, and they travelled a lot before they had children.
That winter, I invent Ginger Syrup to keep me warm at the outdoor market. Helen invents the Ginger Latte (my Ginger Syrup in fluffy milk) and her children adore it. I meet Roger, and we become business partners. Hakanoa Ginger Beers and Ginger Lattes are being served in a few local cafes.
2012
Helen, maven of the Aotea Coffee Cart at various Auckland Farmers markets, had travelled to India years before and loved the Chai Masala they had tasted there.
Helen thinks that the Chai concentrate she is using could be improved, and she suggests Rebekah make a Spicy Chai concentrate.
Nine experiments later, Helen declares Rebekah’s recipe to be a winner.
Hakanoa Spicy Chai has become our biggest seller by far. That's Helen on the left. She is an amazingly inspirational artist and a teacher, and she makes an excellent coffee too.
2013 to 2014
The amount of ginger beer being bottled increases every week, to keep up with sales.
But Auckland weather is changeable and some wet weeks we don't sell much at all.
Not everyone who buys it follows the instructions, and ginger beer that is not sold has to be given away or thrown away.
Roger and I can see the wastefulness of this, and I am determined to fix it. We are still using plastic bottles because we don't want exploding glass bottles. At least the plastic just swells up when the ginger beer is past the safe drinking limit.
But we are experimenting like crazy, a new brew every 2 weeks for the entire year of 2014.
2015
After a solid year of trial and error, we finally crack our low-and-slow pasteurised Dry Ginger Beer.
It has all the crispness and flavour of the short-shelf-life brew, and precisely the same ingredients - not one additive - but it stores safely at room temperature. Also, the alcohol level remains well under the legal limit for a soft drink, and we no longer need to use plastic bottles.
We enter it into the Cuisine Artisan Awards, and win the Beverage category.
We're very very happy, and very relieved :-)
2016
This is the first year that we go to Fiji and meet the Ginger Farmers of Navurevure.
Paula from Navurevure had seen that we had bought Fiji ginger through a plantation owner, and reached out asking if we wanted to buy Fiji ginger direct from his village.
We said yes, and asked for samples of ginger harvested at different times. We settled on very mature ginger harvested in July, with the deepest flavour.
Direct trade beats a fair trade certificate any day, and the only way to know for sure that our growers are getting fairly paid for their work is go and meet them, and pay them ourselves. We value this relationship hugely, and have massive respect for the hard work they do.
We've bought several tonnes of ginger every year from these farmers, and in 2019 we agreed that if they would grow organically farmed ginger, we would buy it. The changeover was gradual, manageable, and in 2024 our annual purchase was 100% organically farmed.
