The Behemoth Beer Company, and most craft beer brands for that matter, are known for the witty and eccentric names of their products.
Over the years, Behemoth has released many such satires: the Procrastination Pale Ale, a tongue-in-cheek nod to everyone’s failing habits. Then there’s The Dude Abides, a white Russian imperial stout inspired by the film The Big Lebowski. Perhaps most memorably, there’s Im-PEACH-ment: A peach-infused sour released as a satirical nod to US political events.
If ex-lawyer and Behemoth CEO Andrew Childs ever creates a lawyer-themed beer, and he plans to, he has a fair few ideas about what he will call it.
“Ball-washing bastards!” he jokes, referencing the famous contemptuous term for lawyers in the film The Shawshank Redemption.
“No no! It would probably be some kind of courthouse Latin term. New Zealand’s such a casual country, yet we’ve got all these old English ways of doing things in the law. It’s about making fun of it from time to time.”
Whatever Childs and his team name it, the beer is sure to be a success, much the company in general. Since he left the law and started brewing beer 15 years ago, he’s turned what was a tiny kitchen homebrew operation into a giant of craft beer.
Behemoth is now the third-largest independent brewery in New Zealand, selling into supermarkets nationwide and exporting to half a dozen countries. It runs four venues – three in Auckland, one in Wellington – with around 40 staff, brewing roughly a million litres of beer a year. At its peak, the business carried as many as 70 people on the books, and its 2025 sales revenue was $11 million.
The trophy cabinet backs up the scale. Behemoth has been named champion medium brewery more than once, and picked up style trophies across IPAs, stouts, and low and non-alcoholic beers. Port Pounder APA, one of its flagship cans, is the biggest-selling 440ml single can in New Zealand supermarkets. And this year, by Childs’s own measure of the grocery data, Behemoth is the fastest-growing brewery in the country.
And all of it started at a New Years Eve party during Childs’ years as a government lawyer in Wellington, when one of his friends assigned him a resolution to follow his passion.
“I asked everyone to make a New Year’s resolution for me. My mate Paul gave me one to start brewing beer, because he knew that’s what I’d always wanted to do.”
After setting up a homebrew kit in his kitchen, Childs very soon got the brewing bug. At the time he was working in the policy team at ACC, and before that for the IRD, mostly working on legislation. But after four years into his career, much of it during the GFC, he realised that he had more of a passion for lager than the law.
“I got into law because I read too many John Grisham books and watched The Practice, but I didn’t really want to do litigation or anything like that.
“I just jumped into brewing. I quit my job at ACC and started working at a brew pub in Wellington.”
He soon revealed a talent for brewing, winning the Best of Show award at the Wellington in a Pint competition with a coffee brown ale.
On the back of his win, he moved to Auckland, got a job at homebrew wholesale company imake Ltd (parent company of home brew supplies brand Mangrove Jack’s) working as “The Beer Man” in marketing, product development and recipe creation.
It was here that he started tinkering with his own project in his spare time, forming the blueprints for what would become Behemoth – named, fittingly, after Child’s considerable 6’5 stature.
“Maybe I spent a little bit too much time on my own business,” he says. “But I did tell my boss in the interview that that’s what I planned to do, even if he did forget.”
After he launched Behemoth in 2013, it remained a side hustle for over a year, run alongside his day job. He was lucky enough to get some investment on board from a distant relative to help grow the startup.
But just like his homebrewing venture, the accolades for Behemoth’s beer quickly started coming in. “We won heaps of awards in our second year,” Childs says – in 2014, Behemoth’s Brave Bikkie Brown Ale took Best Festive Brew at the Brewers’ Guild of New Zealand Beer Awards, and a gold medal and Best in Class trophy at Beervana, going on to become one of the festival’s best-selling beers the following year.
“That kind of spurred us on and got us a bit of attention – we became a Foodstuffs brand for a long time, so they put us in every New World, Pak’nSave and Four Square in the country, which was huge.”
Despite the attention, Childs says those first couple of years were very challenging. There was no real scope to pay himself, so he lived off his credit cards.
For those early years, Behemoth operated as a contract brewer, partnering with nine local breweries and never having its own facility. But the business kept growing, and by 2019 it was ranked 26th on the Deloitte Fast 50 (Upper North Island) with 251.92% revenue growth over three years.
The following year, the company’s crowdfunding campaign raised $1.8 million in 20 minutes, allowing it to expand brewing capacity and open its headquarters, a brewpub and eatery called Churly’s, on Auckland’s Dominion Road.
If it sounds like Childs’ success with Behemoth was a walk in the park, it was anything but.
Churly’s opened in August 2020, two weeks before Auckland went into its second lockdown.
Then there was the false post-COVID economy, encouraging many businesses to expand rapidly only to overreach and stumble once the market retracted.
“COVID – that’s where we had our massive growth,” he says. “Everyone was doing nothing but drinking. It was very good for us, but the post-COVID economy was a whole different beast. It took a while for us to come to grips with that.”
Put simply, Childs says the biggest challenge during that time was trying not to lose money, and figuring out how to stem the flow. Bankruptcy was a very real risk for him he says, and the fact that the business still exists came down to one reason:
“Pure f–ing stubbornness,” he says. “But determination might sound better. We checked under every rock. We had to do a couple of restructures, which is about the least fun thing you can ever do. We saved a huge amount of costs out of the business and we’ve focused on what the market wants.”
It also helps that he runs Behemoth with his wife, Hannah, whom he describes as the organised one, while he’s the ideas guy.
“She’s more involved in the hospitality side of things because she studied at the Culinary Institute of America, where Bourdain studied.”
“Without her, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing,”
Andrew and his wife Hannah (left) who is a co-founder of Behemoth.
As for the highs of owning a brewery, Childs says one of his proudest moments was buying a Behemoth beer in Disneyland, courtesy of American-based Ballast Point beer who brewed Behemoth for a time.
Otherwise, it’s working with a good team, and getting that kick when someone comes into the pub and says they like the beer. “I still get the same buzz from when I was a home brewer and someone liked my homebrew. So it’s just on a much bigger scale now.”
Has there ever been times where he regrets leaving the safety and comfort of the law and its salary?
“Never. Not even for a nanosecond,” he says.
“I’ve chosen a stressful life. It’s the highest of highs and the lowest of lows that I think you can only get from being your own boss. But even if it’s 95% stress and 5% good, you’ve got to just make the most of the good stuff.”
But what about the name of his upcoming lawyer-themed beer? If he had to pick something, seriously, what would it be?
He thinks for a moment.
“My Learned Friend,” he says finally.
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