The film opens on the rugged and inhospitable West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand. It’s as impenetrable now as it was then.

Next we see explorers, pioneers, prospectors, and the like. In the 1860s the gold rush attracted 40 000 such people from all over the world, to make their fortune there. Stewart Monteith saw his chance too and began to brew them beer, establishing his brewery in 1868. The gold fields ran out, but his ‘liquid gold’ was a huge success, and is brewed there to this day by the pioneers at Monteith’s Brewery.