Three Sisters Brewery Acquires Gisborne's Sunshine Brewing and Iconic Gold Brand

Sunshine Brewing, the Gisborne institution that helped spark Wellington's craft beer revolution with a single lager, has a new owner: New Plymouth's Three Sisters Brewery stepped in to purchase the multi-award winning brewery, its iconic Gisborne Gold brand, and its taproom for an undisclosed sum, saving it from potential closure.

Three Sisters founder Joe Emans was direct about the intention. "Our plan is simple: Sunshine stays Sunshine - a Gisborne brewery with its own identity - while Three Sisters provides the operational backbone and production capacity to support stability and growth," he said. Emans told Radio New Zealand he also plans to keep the brands distinct and let each operation do what it does best, and that he is hopeful of retaining Sunshine's key staff. Pursuit of Hoppiness publisher Michael Donaldson reports the settlement date is March 30.

The deal carries real historical weight. Sunshine was born in 1989 when surfers Geoff "Lumpy" Logan and Gerry Maude conceived the idea out on the water, launching Gisborne Gold in the process. That lager became a genuine 1990s fixture in student flats and at influential Wellington bars, and Donaldson argues it carries a legacy well beyond its home region. "Gisborne Gold is a hugely popular beer in the East Cape region and Sunshine Brewery are an incredible local brewery and they are New Zealand's longest running independently owned craft brewery, so it's a really vital part of the landscape," he said. RNZ characterised Sunshine more cautiously as one of New Zealand's oldest running independent craft breweries, and current owner Martin Jakicevich had mixed feelings about letting it go.

Jakicevich and two partners, Mark Young and Peter Thorpe, had purchased Sunshine in 2013 and rebuilt it from the ground up: relocating to a new site, purchasing brand new stainless gear, and establishing the taproom that now adjoins the brewery. That taproom is explicitly included in the Three Sisters purchase, along with the physical plant and the Gisborne Gold brand.

For Three Sisters, the acquisition solved a problem that building alone could not fix. As Donaldson wrote in Pursuit of Hoppiness, the physical constraints of Three Sisters' New Plymouth building were the limiting factor: the brewery simply couldn't fit the capacity it needed, and plans had been drawn up to add tanks and push through arduous multiple-batch brew days instead. Emans confirmed in a radio interview on the Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive programme that the funding originally earmarked for Taranaki expansion was redirected to purchase Sunshine outright. Donaldson noted that buying ready-made stainless in Gisborne made more practical sense than sourcing second-hand equipment in a market already saturated with breweries looking to offload capacity.

The transaction is being described by commentators as genuinely unprecedented in the New Zealand craft sector. While DNA Brewing in Blenheim previously bought the Hop Federation brand, that was a brand sale without the physical plant. Donaldson put the deal in context against the larger buyouts that defined an earlier era of New Zealand craft consolidation: "By the time Tuatara sold to DB and Asahi picked up Founders, these kinds of buyouts almost felt run of the mill and then we entered the era when everyone agreed that buyouts were done. I never thought I'd see the day when one small craft brewery would buy a bigger rival, lock, stock and barrel." He estimates, with his own caveat that it is a guess, that Sunshine may produce as much Gisborne Gold alone as Three Sisters' entire current output.