The first brewery

When Joel Polack moved to the Bay of Island he built a magnificent home at the northern end of the beach at Kororāreka (Russell), calling his estate Parramatta. Very shortly after he built New Zealand’s first brewery.
The legend goes that the first beer brewed here was by Captain James Cook made from rimu and mānuka leaves on Resolution Island and apparently was horrible.
But Polack opened the first commercial brewery in 1835. He also put up businesses and was hugely successful.
However there is no record of what that beer was like.
Joel Samuel Polack was born on March 28, 1807, to Solomon and Sarah Polack in London. Originally from what was then Holland, they have moved to Ireland then to England.
Joel worked in the War Office before beginning to travel, going to South Africa and Mauritius, America and Australia before coming to New Zealand in 1831.
Originally he lived in Hokianga and explored much of the area and began talking to local Māori about growing and harvesting crops to sell.
He moved to the Bay of Plenty in 1832 and bought land and set up businesses including his brewery.
Polack became the first man to take part in a duel in New Zealand when in 1837 he and his bitter rival, innkeeper Ben Turner had a gun battle on Kororareka Beach which ended with Turner being wounded.
Then in 1842 they had another duel in which Polack was shot in the elbow and Turner received a bullet wound to the cheek. Polack himself admitted to having a bad temper.
Polack was an advocate of an organised system of colonisation and warned that anything else would see Māori society ruined.
He was well respected by Māori who called him Porake (Polack) or Waewaeroa (Long-legs).
On a return trip to England, he sold some of his own land at auction - the first time land was sold in quarter acre lots - and wrote two books about his time in pre-colonial New Zealand.
HIs businesses faltered during the first conflict between the British and Māori and his house was destroyed, losing all his personal writings, sketches and collection of rare paintings and books.
He moved to Auckland, restarted his businesses and went into shipping, trading with America. He continued to buy land and became vice consul for the United States.
In 1950 he went to North America - going into house building.
It was there that he married Mary Hart.
Polack died in San Francisco on 17 April 1882, and is buried in Cypress Lawn cemetery, Colma, having been moved there in 1946 from Laurel Hill cemetery.
He was considered one of New Zealand’s first Jewish settlers.​