Nordmeyer and the 1958 Black Budget
In 1958, the New Zealand Government did something stupid. They taxed the price of beer out of the reach of kiwi men. It was part of Arnold Nordmeyer’s ‘Black Budget’.
Now, Nordmeyer never called it that, but that’s what the country labelled it. Arnold Nordmeyer was the Minister of Finance at the time and decided to take strong measures. He saw things such as beer as a luxury item and as such, he felt it should carry a higher tax. All local beers went up but the heaviest hit were quality-imported beers.
You need to know a bit about old Nordmeyer to see why he did this. He wasn’t one to drink himself, so having a few beers with your mates after a hard day’s work was a foreign concept.
New Zealander blokes didn’t take it so well. But old Nordmeyer wasn’t going to back down. People were going to have to learn to live with it.
This is where Morton Coutts came in. He didn’t believe that the Government had the right to put a pint of beer out of reach of hard working men of New Zealand. So he spent the next couple of years creating and crafting New Zealand’s first export quality beer. Making it locally meant avoiding the high tax that was forced upon imported beers.
Not only did Morton want to put an affordable export quality beer back in the hands of the common man, but he also wanted it to create an ‘export quality’ lager, which would surpass anything that New Zealand brewers had ever produced. His vision was audacious, but simple: create the best beer in the world, and create it within New Zealand so that it would evade the clutches of Nordmeyer’s Black Budget. He achieved this in 1968 when DB Export Beer won ‘Best Beer in the World’ in any class.
Nordmeyer’s Government lost the very next election and didn’t get back into power for 12 long years, by then Arnold Nordmeyer had retired, still haunted by the ‘Black Budget’.