Morton & His Inventions
It takes a particularly brilliant mind to see the world the way Morton Coutts did. He believed that if you don’t have what you need, build it. And if what you need doesn’t exist, invent it – and that’s precisely what he did every single day of his 100 years.
When Morton Coutts was just 12, he got into a fair bit of trouble for x-raying a local cat. What young Morton had done was build himself a fully functioning x-ray machine. And, truth be told, what else was a 12-year-old boy going to do with it?
The next year he built himself a two-way radio station. It was a great success. His homemade kit made him the first New Zealander to broadcast a shortwave radio signal and the first person ever to send a radio signal across the equator.
Invention followed invention. It seemed that if Morton put his mind to a problem he’d find a solution.
The birth of Continuous Fermentation.
When Morton took over the family brewery, he used the same ingenuity and lateral thinking he’d applied to his inventions. And it wasn’t long before the spanners were out again.
It was here that Morton created the world famous ‘Continuous Fermentation’, a groundbreaking brewing process where raw materials are added to one end of the system and beer is continuously withdrawn from the other – effectively a beer tap that never turns off!
Described by the London Star as ‘a brewer’s dream and yours too’, soon some of the world’s biggest breweries were banging on DB Breweries door to also implement Continuous Fermentation. Using this process Morton created DB Export, New Zealand’s first export quality beer which was the first New Zealand beer to win ‘Best Beer in the World’.
Morton continued tinkering, inventing and developing brews, right up to the ripe old age of 100.