Have you ever been doing an absolutely mundane task and suddenly stumbled upon something utterly weird? Like can’t stop thinking about it, can’t look away weird?

Recently I was trying to find the website for Tuatara Brewery. Now that was difficult, because they don’t actually have one, rather they have a page on DB’s website. But searching for Tuatara’s website led me to a completely different place. A weird place. A place that just doesn’t make any god-damn sense. A website called organicbeer.co.nz.

I’m not going to link to that page. At time of print it’s still there, but don’t go visit it for reasons that will become clear. This website struck me because well, almost everything on it was wrong. Not just factually wrong, but weirdly wrong.

Organicbeer.co.nz bills itself as a “travel blog about New Zealand Beer” which is a weird choice of URL for a travel blog. Then there’s the title of the website “Mikes Brewing”. Now if you’re of the same vintage of ‘craft’ beer nerd as me, that means something to you. Mike’s was a brewery in Taranaki, and they did indeed make organic beer. Mike’s went into receivership in 2017, and through a series of changes and restructuring, became a bistro in New Plymouth, which still exists to this day. So why then is this website pretending to be Mike’s Brewery?

And it is definitely pretending to be the Mike’s Brewery. On the website’s menu is a dedicated tab and page profiling Mike’s Brewery, that does reference the brewery’s old location, but doesn’t mention that the brewery has moved and no longer makes beer. This is very strange. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very off but I was also kind of hooked. I wanted to know: What am I looking at here?

At this point, I noticed a page called “NZ’s Top 100 Beers: A Brief Overview”, published October 2, 2023. I decided to give it a read and let me tell you, it’s weird. For starters this is supposed to be a ranking of top beers in NZ but it has a lot of extra guff:

And these extra sections are full of platitudes about beer and brewing that are so generic, they’re almost meaningless:

OK, fine. This person isn’t a great writer. Lets get to the list. It’s organised by beer style, with a desciption and an example of a beer that fits said style. This is a little bit of an odd way to do it, but whatever. Let’s give it a chance. Trouble is, this list is full of things that are simply wrong:

Garage Project Hāpi Daze is not a Saison. This sort of error kept happening as a I scrolled down the list. Does the person who wrote this actually understand anything about beer styles? Many beers were filed under the wrong style category and some beers were listed that I’m sure were no longer in production when this article was written, sometimes from breweries that had closed years previously. I had a realisation: I don’t think this list is written by someone with a poor grasp of beer styles. I don’t think it was written by anyone. I think it’s AI.

I suspect this was created by someone plugging a prompt into ChatGPT (or similar) such as “Write a list of the top 100 beers in New Zealand by style category”. The AI in response has gone to the internet, presumably Untappd and the now defunct RateBeer and scraped a list of top beers in New Zealand, smashing it together with a list of beer styles. Where the two lists don’t match up – styles where there aren’t a lot of beers that fit the category, the AI made connections that don’t make sense.

A great example would be Bière de Garde. I doubt there’s more than half a dozen examples of the style in New Zealand, and probably none of them are ‘core-range beers’. So the AI chooses a beer that might have vaguely similar words in it’s tasting notes. In this case, Choice Bros Reet Petite, a Red IPA.

I started looking for a smoking gun – something that proved this list was wasn’t written by a person: an AI hallucination. It wasn’t long before I found one:

Tiamana Pils Dunkel is not a beer that ever existed. I know because I was indirectly involved with Tiamana. I was there when they opened in 2015 and I was there when they shut in 2018. At no point did they ever make a beer called Pils Dunkel, or even a Dunkel. This is a completely fictitious beer.

With all this in mind, I started reading more and more articles. Pieces with titles like “10 Must-Try Craft Beers in New Zealand”, “Exploring the Strongest Beers in New Zealand” and “What Is The Most Popular Beer In New Zealand”. These are all titles you might plausibly find on a lifestyle or travel blog. But if you actually read them, everything about them is wrong. Not factually wrong. The details are usually broadly accurate, but just somehow the articles are always just off.

For starters, the structure of the articles is weird. Almost every article has a table of contents, whether it’s warranted or not. They also end with a ‘Conclusion’ section and sometimes even an FAQ. It makes it feels more like technical writing, not lifestyle or travel writing.

Take “10 Must-Try Craft Beers in New Zealand”. It starts off with a weird table of breweries and mini bios called “Main Features”, which doesn’t feel right to me. Again, it feels more like part of an abstract or summary from a technical article. After that it goes to detailed bios, which again feel like more empty platitudes, stretched versions of the “Main Features”, with details pulled and re-worded from marketing material.

Garage Project, Epic and 8 Wired are the first three profiles, But for some reason 8 Wired gets a whole extra section, titled “The Spirited Rise of 8 Wired Brewing Co.” which is an almost exact repeat of all the info from the previous paragraphs. And I do mean exact, down to the sentence level. Here is the opening sentence of section one:

8 Wired Brewing Co., a beacon of inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs and a shining example of Kiwi ingenuity and relentless pursuit of excellence.

And here’s a sentence of section two:

…embodying the essence of Kiwi innovation and tenacity, 8 Wired Brewing Co.’s journey resonates deeply with those harboring dreams of entrepreneurship.

That’s literally the same sentence worded two different ways. This feels like classic AI repeating itself – pulling information form articles and websites, shuffling keywords and subbing synonyms to endlessly recycle the same basic points.

This feeling really stuck with me. It felt like everything was made up of borrowed parts, cobbled together. Like I was looking at Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s painting of Vertumnus. Except instead of a clever collage forming an optical illusion, it’s a weird meaningless mish-mash that, try as you might, you just can’t make sense of.

This feeling peaked with the article “Unravelling Auckland’s Steam Brewing Secrets”. You would assume this is an article about Steam Brewing Co., the Auckland-based production brewery that makes beer under contract for many different breweries around the country, right? Not so.

This piece is about steam in the brewing process, as used by breweries in Auckland.

I suspect someone has prompted the software to write about Steam Brewing and confused, it’s spat out several hundred words of nonsense, including recommending visits to three breweries that I’m pretty sure don’t exist:

At this point, I think I’ve got the picture. Someone has made a fake blog about beer in New Zealand, probably using AI. Staring at my screen and feeling bamboozled, I’m left with many questions, chief among them: Why? What’s the point of all this? Is it a scam? It certainly feels scammy. But if that’s the case, what’s the actual hustle going on here? I start digging, maybe somewhere in one of these posts is this website’s raison d’etre.

I find myself looking at a list of recently published posts. So far, every article has been about NZ beer, but not the last five:

They’re still broadly beer related, except the second one. American Football? This article, while sort of about NZ it’s only tangentially related to beer. It’s mostly about watching American Football. But something else jumped out at me – there’s a link.

That’s when I realised: thus far, I haven’t seen a single link anywhere else on this website. This feels like a dog that isn’t barking. Surely if this is a scam, the point of the scam would be whatever this website is trying to push me towards, which has so far been nothing.

But now there’s a link. To the New Zealand TAB website. Gambling? Weird.

That’s when I remember the other recent article: The Perfect Pairing: Enjoying a Day at Hastings Races with a Refreshing Beer. There’s a connection there: races – horse racing – gambling. Was this the point? Some sort of asymmetrical marketing campaign for the TAB?

In a word – no. Because this isn’t an article about horse racing in Hastings, New Zealand. It’s about horse racing in Hastings, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. How does Canada fit in to all this? There’s another link on this page. But this time it’s a link to an Aussie gambling website justhorseracing.com.au, not the TAB.

On the one hand, I suspect this is AI making nonsense connections, but it also feels like the closest thing I’ve found to a pattern. I searched for a while to see if I could find any more external links but turned up nothing. A dead end.

Stepping back a bit to think about a new line of enquiry. If I can’t figure out the why of this website, maybe I should focus on the who. Each article has something I’ve thus far ignored: a byline. The author of this website is someone called Ross Walton.

There’s an about page too. And just like every other page on this stupid website, it contains a lot of words, but almost no information. As near as I can tell, he is apparently some dude who likes beer and has visited some breweries. That’s it. That’s the only biographical data to be found. But a name is something to go on, and there’s a picture too:

This might be useful. If I can find some other record of this Ross Walton and if I can match another photograph, maybe I can crack this thing.

The trouble is, Ross Walton is a very generic name. Only a few degrees less generic than ‘John Smith’. A simple search is going to reveal scores, maybe hundreds of Ross Waltons. So I try a series of searches.

“Ross Walton + Beer”, “Ross Walton + New Zealand”, and so on point me straight back to organicbeer.co.nz. Even filtering out those results I find multiple records of Ross Waltons, none of which I can positively ID.

Social Media is the same: FB, Insta, that other one, and LinkedIn. Too many results, nothing solid to go on. It doesn’t help that he looks like a generic, late millennial white-boy. That describes a pretty big chunk of the ‘craft’ beer demographic and yes, I’m in a glass house on this one.

I tried to get a bit clever and go the Companies Office. I’ve spent a lot of time tracing breweries and the people who own them through the through the Companies Register. Again, multiple Ross Waltons or variations thereof, but nothing verifiable. It’s the same for IPONZ.

I’m stumped. But I’m also looking at that photo. I had originally planned to see if I could find any other pictures of Walton and match the face in that photo. But what if I matched that exact photo?

I ran a reverse Google Image search and immediately found the original. And I can say it is the original, because the version on organicbeer.co.nz has been cropped:

And the source of the photo sparks joy: it’s Alchemy Street Brewing. Eureka! An actual connection to a New Zealand brewery! I’ve struck gold!

But have I? Straight off the bat there’s a few issues. First of all, there’s no mention of anyone called Ross on the Alchemy Street About page. They’re brewed/run by Ed Bolstad. There isn’t any mention of a Ross on their Facebook page. Nor does that particular photograph appear on their social media. Finally, after looking a pictures on their Instagram, I noticed that photo doesn’t even appear to be taken in Alchemy Street’s taproom. Is it of someone involved in the business or a stock photo?

I went back to Google Images and ran the uncropped image through a search again. I confirmed what I’d feared: it’s a stock photo, versions of which you can find all over the web. A dead end again.

Am I being too clever? Too laser-focused? What if I cast the net wide? I mean, really wide? Like, just Google searching “Ross Walton” wide? So I did. And I found something… else.

It’s a website: rosswalton.com. Although to call it a website might be a bit grand. It’s more like the idea of a website – a simulacrum.

Outwardly it looks like a blog, with six posts on it, but weirdly they’re all published on October 4, 2023. They’re just text. No photos, no links. But what struck me most of all was that they are tonally identical to the posts on organicbeer.co.nz. By that I mean there’s a lot of words, but next to no information.

Take this quote for example:

At first that feels like information, until you realise it’s so vague that it’s completely unverifiable. I tried searching for things called the Innovation Award and the Technology Pioneer Award. I found multiple different awards with those names, none of which seem to have been won by a Ross Walton.

Something else has caught my eye:

AI. Yeah, that figures. If this site and organicbeer.co.nz were written by the same AI, that would explain why they have the same weird, alien tone. But then what’s the point of all this? Is this all just someone messing around with AI tools? How does online gambling fit into that? I was pondering this when something else occurred to me: Internet scrubbing.

If you’ve never heard of it, a simple summary would be someone attempting to remove as much of their online presence as possible – things like deleting your social media accounts and requesting removal of yourself from online public records. But there’s another technique to, if at least not remove, then hide something someone don’t want known about them that can be found online. A technique that we might call “flooding the zone”.

Say someone has been convicted of minor fraud, and there’s an article on a news site about it. Next time they apply for a job, if the employer searches their name and finds that article, then there’s no way they’re getting the job. You can’t delete those articles, but what you can do is push them so far down the Google search results that no one ever sees them. The way to do that is by publishing inane, vaguely positive ‘articles’ about yourself, or with your name in them that populate search result ahead of the negative press. Articles that look very much like these ones.

I went digging to see if I could find any evidence of criminality by Mr. Walton. And I mean deep. 20 pages of search results turned up nothing. So I went to news sites – Stuff, Newsroom, RNZ, NewstalkZB. Still nothing. Further afield – The Guardian (AUS), The Guardian (UK), and so on. Nothing. Which isn’t to say I didn’t find evidence of various Ross Waltons committing various malfeasances but nothing I could link to the two websites though New Zealand, beer, brewing, tech, AI, cybersecurity.

I’m really running out of options now. But I’m still looking at website’s URL and I get thinking: I was pretty sure oragnicbeer.co.nz used to belong to the Mike’s Brewery. There’s a way I can prove that, using The Way Back Machine.

The Wayback Machine, also known as the Internet Archive, is essentially a website that archives other websites. It takes periodic snapshots of any given site to that you can look up at a later date. If I wanted to see what content was hosted on organicbeer.co.nz in say 2012, I can go and view a snapshot of that website in that time period.

So I did. And I was correct. There are captures of that website going back to 2004. The most recent ones, December 2023 to March 2025, show the website as it currently exists. But if you jump back in time to the mid-2010s and visited that URL, you would be redirected to the Mikes Brewery website (a separate URL, mikesbeer.co.nz). I actually kind of recommend it as a fun way to view the evolution of their website over time. The earliest captures, show you what it looked like when they still went by the name White Cliffs Brewery.

Captures of the Mike’s Brewery website (the real one) are found from 2004 to early 2018, and then they stop. This would be the point that Mike’s Brewery gave up ownership of the domain. This is when I noticed something else – a series of isolated captures from July 2020 to March 2022. When I viewed them, I discovered something that I was not prepared for. Something that absolutely blew my mind.

There’s another whole version of this website. With a different aesthetic and different articles:

It even a logo:

When I saw it had a logo, I wondered where they’d got it from. What I haven’t mentioned thus far is that most of the photos that illustrate this website have clearly been scraped from the internet. I assumed this had been stolen from somewhere. But I did a reverse image search, this one turned up no results. It doesn’t exist anywhere else on line. This thing is bespoke.

Looking at it, it’s not obviously made by one of those online logo generators. Nor does it have any of the most obvious signs of AI generation – typeface inconsistencies or melting letters. But also I’m not saying it’s not AI generated. It is ugly enough to be.

While a whole new website opens new possibilities – there are six new articles to read. But what I quickly learn is, while they are completely different, they are more of the same slop as we’ve already seen. Take the article “The Best Craft Breweries here in New Zealand”. Here’s the opening sentences:

That feels like AI to me: *Beep-boop* I am not a computer, *WHRRRRR*. I was reading a piece called “The Incredible Evolution of Beer” when something jumped out at me:

There it is: online gambling. And this time it’s not a subtle link, slipped in. This time it’s “Beer is like gambling. People like gambling. Gamble here.” What the fuck? Combing through the other articles, I found multiple references to online gambling. The most egregious being from “Put Down the Beer for Now. Do This Instead”. You know what advice it gives for a safe and healthy alternative to drinking? That’s right, gambling!

Is your highly addictive and detrimental hobby getting you down? Why not try a different highly addictive, detrimental hobby? Enjoy responsibly!

At this point I’m fairly certain that this is a grift and online gaming is the point of it. But at the same time, building multiple fake beer websites for the purpose of funnelling what can only amount to a handful of people to gambling websites just feels too, baroque.

I’m still pondering the URL. It has to be important somehow. Finally, something occurs to me: it’s a .nz. There’s an online function called a whois search. Essentially, you can enter a web address into a whois page and find out who has registered the domain.

Usually this will only tell you which domain company a website is registered with. I had done it with rosswalton.com, and gotten nothing useful back. But .nz domains are a bit different. There’s a database kept by the New Zealand Domain Name Commission of all websites that end with .nz, which contains more information than other online whois databases. And it’s searchable at at dnc.org.nz.

I plugged organicbeer.co.nz into the search box and immediately I had two new pieces of information: a name, and a company.

Which I will not share with you. The reason for this is pretty simple. I’m 99% sure that for the first time in this post, I’m actually talking about a real person. Which is to say I think Ross Walton is fake, but this guy and his company are definitely real. On the one hand, everything I’m writing here is publicly available information. Nor am I accusing anyone of anything illegal or even particularly unethical. On the other hand, I don’t want to bring any kind of heat on this guy, or invite it into my life. If you really want to know those details, they’re there for the finding.

So this outfit is an SEO company out of Ukraine. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. To put it simply, SEO covers ways in which website owners attempt to push their website to the top of search engine results, thereby getting more people to visit their site. It’s one of those incredibly important but also very boring things that has massively shaped the way the internet works.

For the first time ever, I feel like I’ve hit bedrock. This has to be the answer. I just have to make the final connections. I spent a lot of time tracing the online footprint of this guy and his company. But I couldn’t track it back to beer or New Zealand. Eventually though, I found it on what I would describe as a slightly skeezy-looking Vietnamese tech website. I found an article that mentioned both him and his company extensively. It was Vietnamese but as soon as I had translated it, I knew I’d found the answer. The Rosetta Stone that made everything else fall into place:

Bingo. Cracked it.

This piece is essentially a report on a presentation this person made to a tech conference, laying out how this company makes money from expired web domains. The translation was a little patchy, but the gist of it is summarised here:

Basically what they do is buy old website addresses for cheap and fill them with content. That content drives views, thereby increasing the value of that web domain to companies that want to sell you something. That domain can then be on-sold to said companies at a higher price.

That’s what’s happened to organicbeer.co.nz. Mike’s Brewery dropped the domain back in 2018, and it was re-registered by this company in 2020. I even spotted this little nugget of info that more or less confirmed my deepest suspicion:

I’m pretty sure that’s why organicbeer.co.nz feels like AI slop: because it is.

Mystery solved. Unwittingly, I’ve probably added a few cents worth of value to the domain name with the several hundred clicks I made researching this article. You can see now why I haven’t linked directly to the website. And I’ll say to you now: don’t go there either. There’s no point.

I still haven’t figured out how exactly online gambling fits into this. My best guess is that it’s some sort of affiliate marketing program. If you click on that link, that referral is recorded. If you then go on to make a purchase on that website, the original website gets a cut for that referral. Across 10,000 websites, it might be a viable revenue stream. I am however, speculating here.

I’ve been writing all this up for a couple of weeks, and looking back I feel a little deflated. I’m happy I figured it out, but mysteries are almost always more exciting than answers. I’m left with a question: why did I get so obsessed with this that I sent literally hours searching for the answer?

Partly it’s because I can’t resist the chase. Like a foxhound, once I had the scent I just had to keep going until I’d run it to ground. But there’s something else that’s been bothering me that took me a while to figure out.

I’m a certain vintage of ‘craft’ beer person. I came up in the late 2000s, and back then ‘craft’ beer was these folks we knew: we were mostly all friends, or at least friendly collaborators. We drank in each other’s bars, visited each other’s breweries and attended each other’s events.

Someone and unfortunately I don’t remember who, once described the era as being like the early days of Britpop: going down to Marchfest from Wellington was like Blur going from Sheffield to Manchester to see an Oaisis gig. You knew you’d run into the Gallaghers at the Sprig and Fern afterwards.

That started changing as the industry grew and matured. Frankly it needed to and that was partly why I started this blog. Even though I’m not behind the bar anymore, I do still have something of a fraternal relationship with the ‘craft’ beer industry. People like Søren Eriksen from 8 Wired are still friends, who I’m always happy to see.

So when I see their names and businesses being used by something that seems like a scam, I don’t like it. Now it turns out that’s not really the case. As I said, there’s nothing illegal happening here. I also don’t think anyone has or will be harmed by this website, except maybe a couple of tourists left wandering around Auckland, looking for breweries that don’t exist. But it still just doesn’t sit right with me.

Rather than end on a down note, here’s something a little cheerful: proof that AI still has not and may never supplant human beings. It’s my favourite AI-oopsie from this whole experience:

Armpit. Bowling.

You’ll have to try harder that, GPT.