The Lion roars: How a cluster of breweries came to be owned by a Japanese conglomerate

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Sir Douglas Myers pours a Steinlager beer. Photo / Lion Nathan
Sometime in late 1939, a blue-eyed toddler turned his face skyward as his adoring father poured beer down his son’s throat from a pewter tankard, the golden liquid dribbling down the boy’s chin.

The toddler was Douglas Myers, the son and heir to a brewery, liquor and hotel empire that
was then New Zealand Breweries and, later, Lion Breweries and Lion Nathan. The moment was captured on a home movie camera Myers’ father Kenneth bought that year, and is described in The Myers, Paul Goldsmith and Michael Bassett’s outstanding book covering four generations of the family.

The young Myers was born into a grand lifestyle by New Zealand standards. In the background is the family’s sprawling estate “Glen Innes”, a huge Edwardian-style home set on 24 hectares in Auckland’s Glendowie, overlooking the Tāmaki estuary and Hauraki Gulf. The property was run like an English country home with a chauffeur, cook, a butler, maids, gardeners and cleaners.
It was wealth made largely on the back of booze, an amalgamation of breweries owned mainly by a group of New Zealand Jewish families who dominated the industry dating back to the 19th century. The business of brewing – and, later, wines and spirits – would one day enable young Myers to become one of the richest people in New Zealand, up there with commercial property investor Bob Jones and pulp and paper magnate John Spencer.
Myers would head a company with a turnover of more than $1 billion and, after selling his shareholding in Lion Nathan in the late 1990s, retire with more money than he could ever spend.
In a series of shrewd and at times risky takeovers and buyouts, the late Sir Douglas Myers would leave behind a major company that was formed more than 100 years ago when 10 of the country’s largest breweries amalgamated to form New Zealand Breweries in June 1923, issuing 500,000 shares to the public.
One of those companies was the Myers’ family brewery Campbell & Ehrenfried, which had passed to Louis Ehrenfried’s nephew Arthur Myers, Doug Myers’ grandfather, on his death. Since then a series of takeovers and name changes make the company’s history look like a chaotic Monopoly board, much of it driven by Myers.
Today Lion New Zealand operates as a subsidiary of the Australian-based Lion Group from a vast production and bottling plant, named The Pride, set in 17 hectares at East Tāmaki. Opened in 2010 by then Prime Minister John Key, the state-of-the-art plant is vastly different from the old brick breweries, including several in Newmarket, that brewers of old would know.
Lion’s master brewer David Meads joined the company 50 years ago as a 18-year-old laboratory technician in the Khyber Pass brewery, later joining the brewery training programme.
Back in the 1970s the process of making beer was manual – pouring grain and hops into vats, connecting hoses and valves, turning pumps on and off. Automation was yet to come. The smell of fermenting hops and grain hung heavily in Newmarket’s air, an issue that’s since been dealt with at the East Tāmaki plant by recirculating the odorous steam.
To Meads, brewing is a mix of science and art. These days, in a highly automated, computerised system, technicians still need to understand the consequences of “driving a mouse”, he says.
He remembers the ambitious Douglas Myers well, that era of new faces and sweeping changes, some good, some not so much.
“He [Myers] was obviously very driven, he was passionate about China.” Eyeing the huge Asian market, Myers drove the 60 per cent acquisition of the Taihushui Brewery in Wuxi in 1995, and in 1998 Lion Nathan opened a purpose-built brewery in Suzhou. (Both breweries were sold to a Chinese company in 2004 with the Changzhou Hua Xia Brewery, which was bought in 2003.)
That year, 1998, Auckland’s CBD was stricken by a five-week power blackout. Myers and his team decamped from their town offices and moved into the Khyber Pass brewery. Meads says the chief executive loved being at the brewery.
“He’d go down to the caf for lunch. I think he genuinely enjoyed seeing what was happening [in the brewery].”
With none of his three children interested in following in his footsteps, Myers sold most of his share in Lion Nathan in the late 1990s for $473 million to Kirin Brewery Company of Japan, which went on to acquire 100 per cent of Lion.
In 2022, the latest figures available, the company reported net sales of $2.23b across Australia and New Zealand. Lion New Zealand is the market leader in total alcohol sales – top in beer and spirits sales, and second in premixes and wine, with a revenue of $634.2m.
The company wasn’t always a market leader nor did it keep up with the times. When Myers returned to New Zealand from Caius College in Cambridge, at the urging of his parents who were keen for him to become immersed in the family brewery, he didn’t try to disguise his impatience with the old guard. To Myers – ambitious, forthright and, to some, cocky – New Zealand was a backwater suffering from suffocating economic controls.
In the book The Myers, Goldsmith writes that Myers thought Campbell & Ehrenfried resembled an old folks home.
“It seemed as if they had been waiting for 50 years for someone to turn up,” Myers said.
It didn’t take him long to make those in the industry aware that he had turned up. He introduced efficiencies into the company, sold off hotels and then masterminded takeovers and expansion that would result in prolonged legal action, family fallouts and a Court of Appeal judge describing his actions as “fraudulent misrepresentation” in legal action brought by his cousins.
Myers wanted a controlling share of the company, which by the early 1970s had a 50 per cent shareholding in the highly profitable New Zealand Wines and Spirits Company. He set about buying out other shareholders, including family members and shares owned by the Sir John Logan Campbell Estate. But when Myers sold hotels to cover his debt, he attracted the ire of cousins who argued he had not disclosed his plans to sell off some of the family silver to pay for his shares. They wanted either the shares returned or more money. So did the Logan Campbell Estate.
In the ensuing court case, the infamous Coleman v Myers, Judge Peter Mahon ruled Myers had done no wrong. But Justice Owen Woodhouse in the Court of Appeal thought differently, finding Myers guilty of fraudulent misrepresentation, having failed in his fiduciary duty to shareholders.
It was a decision that cost Myers millions in both legal costs and settlement but worse, it was a blot on his family name that followed him like a dark shadow.
Determined to break free of the taint, Myers planned another takeover – to gain control of New Zealand Breweries, renamed Lion Breweries in 1978. In what was an audacious gamble, he borrowed $27m to buy enough shares to take control of Lion, but at the time he was unsure if he’d have the funds to pay his debt.
Myers had earlier exercised an option to force Lion to buy his Campbell & Ehrenfried half share in New Zealand Wines and Spirits. The amount to be paid went before a protracted arbitration process until, in 1982, a payment of $24m was agreed, enough to enable Myers to climb out of a mountain of debt.
In 1989, the year after Lion Corporation merged with LD Nathan, Myers masterminded the startlingly bold acquisition of Bond Brewing in Australia, owned by Australian tycoon Alan Bond, who was in financial trouble. Bond Brewing was about 10 times the size of Lion in New Zealand yet by late 1990, Myers had stitched up a deal. Lion Nathan bought a 50 per cent shareholding in Bond’s company and later bought the remaining 50 per cent.
On a tour of the East Tāmaki plant, it’s clear the company’s history has been preserved as a proud part of its heritage. One of the company’s early delivery trucks is on display in the foyer. In the archive are folders of photos, books, ledgers and documents dating back to the 1800s.
Centre stage is the lion logo, originally featured on the family crest of Richard Seccombe who founded the Great Northern Brewery in 1860. After Campbell & Ehrenfried merged with Seccombe’s brewery in 1915, its name was changed to Lion Brewery. At some stage during the 1960s the lion logo was stylised and lost its testicles in the remake. One of the first things Myers did when he became managing director in 1970 was to put the balls back on the Lion, a story that is legendary within the company.
As a carbon-zero certified beverages company, nothing is wasted. Rainwater from the roof is used to flush toilets and wetlands that have been established in the grounds; carbon dioxide is stored and recycled; the husks and protein left over from the grain are sold for cattle food; used yeast is sold to Sanitarium to use in the process of making Marmite; and steam is recycled.
In the bottling plant, the new glass line can process 900 bottles a minute with a sophisticated camera system checking that all labels are on straight. Across four lines, Lion can process 160,000 cans and bottles an hour. Stacked high on huge pallets is the company’s latest RTD, Kirin Hyoketsu, a lemonade-tasting alcoholic drink that is taking off with students.
Nearby is a production line of brown “swappa crate” ABC quart bottles being filled with beer, a system that has run for around 100 years and operates between Lion Brewery and DB.
Meads is obviously proud of the immaculately clean brewery and bottling plant.
“Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning is the mantra of any brewer. You’ve got to keep things clean,” he says.
Included in the tour is a food-and-beer match, designed by Meads who has become a bit of an expert on the subject. First up is smoked salmon with cream cheese on rice crackers, teamed with Steinlager Classic beer, developed in 1958 in response to Finance Minister Arnold Nordmeyer’s austere “Black Budget” which cut beer imports. The beer was originally called Steinecker after a German company that made brewing equipment. But Heineken got their hops in a tangle and took New Zealand Breweries to court, claiming the name and label were too close to theirs. They won, and in 1962 the name was changed to Steinlager.
Meads swirls the light lager around in a small stemmed wine glass, holding it up to the light. You won’t catch him drinking from a beer bottle.
“The thing about beer is you want to appreciate what it looks like, a nice colour, and foam on the top.”
The glass must be clean, he says. He’s not keen on rinse-aid type additives in dishwashers, which apparently leave a film on the glass that in turn interferes with the surface tension of the foam. The foam can collapse quickly as a result, leaving the beer looking more like a glass of cold tea, he says. Who knew?
After the swirl comes a “gentle” sniff of the Steinlager and a taste. A little bitterness that comes from the Dr Rudi green bullet hops, Meads murmurs. He’s on a roll, talking about the “creamy, oily, unctuous” flavours of the salmon and cream cheese, and how the beer cleans the palate.
“I get more of the grassy herbacious characters coming through from the hops.”
Next up are dainty samosas with sweet chilli sauce, paired with a low-carb Speight’s Summit Ultra. It’s Lion’s biggest seller – in cans, bottles, quarts and kegs – and the number-one seller in New Zealand. Spicy crumbed chicken is matched with Mac’s Magic Hour hazy pale ale. Meads swills the slightly cloudy ale in his glass and remarks on the “hop character”.
We sniff, gently, and he’s right. It smells like the cold-storage hop room we saw on the tour. “Beautiful,” he says.
For a bit of fun, Meads likes to finish off with a dessert course. Today it’s a rich chocolate, coconut and raisin brownie paired with Emerson’s London Porter. Specialty malts give the stout its flavours, “burnt, chocolatey, toffee, coffee”, a delicious contrast with the sweetness of the brownie.
Porters go well with fruit cake, chocolate pudding and tiramisu, Meads says. Wheat beers work well with apple tarts, never mind the dessert wine.
And his all-time favourite? Gingernut biscuits, blue cheese and a Porter. “Just lovely,” he says dreamily, “It goes really well.”
Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based business, features and investigations journalist, former assistant editor of NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.
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