Tabla de contenidos para Winter issue 2, June 2023 en On Tap

Editor's Note ‘Beer in Community’ is a new section that hopes to explore how beer is experienced in different local environments or settings. These stories might look at persisting gender assumptions about who can drink what kinds of beer, as this article does, or the role that beer can play in building connection and community. In our first piece, which will be part of a short series, Mandisa Magwaxaza recounts the drinking customs and assumptions that were prevalent in her rural black South African family growing up. I hope you enjoy her evocative and descriptive storytelling as much as I did, and look forward to where this story takes us. I used to follow my two youngest maternal aunties everywhere they went and learned about life from the sidelines of…

“It all started with lockdown…” So begins many of the stories told over the last few years when it comes to new ventures, business ideas, or hobbies. This was certainly the case for those of us running a craft brewery during an alcohol ban, making a quick pivot to other income streams a necessity in order to keep the doors open. At Richmond Hill Brewing Company (RHBC), one such idea was to make mozzarella. I thought to myself: how hard could it be? There are already several similarities between making beer and cheese: heating and cooling, maintaining certain temperatures, using yeast or bacterial cultures to do your bidding, keeping customers happy with delicious products, and so on. Should be easy enough with a brewer’s background, right? Oh, how we were…

TECH TALK The leaves are slowly turning red (at the point of writing this), from the heart of the winelands. For the oak trees, threatened by invading polyphagous shot hole borer beetles, this might very well be their last shedding of leaves. By the time you read this, winter will likely be in full swing across the country. With this in mind, I leapt at the chance to to test the Dema-Craft 60 Litre brewing machine and in the process, brew myself something a little darker–albeit not yet a porter or a stout. The first thing I noticed, when taking this beautiful system from its box, is the solid, yet lightweight of the machine. It has a sixty-litre capacity, but it is fairly easy to handle. That is a big…

RECIPE Type: All Grain Batch Size: 20.00 L Boil Size: 24.96 L Boil Time: 30 min End of Boil Vol: 22.96 L Water additions: 30L 3.21g Baking soda 5.98g Calcium chloride 2.75g Gypsum 0.40g Epsom 0.10 Potassium Metabisulfite Mash ingredients 4.90 kg Pale Malt (2 Row) 1.10 kg Oats, Rolled Roasted 0.50 kg Caramunich Malt I 0.37 kg Chocolate Malt 0.27 kg CARAFA Special Type 2 Mash Steps: Mash at 68 Celsius for 60 mins. Mash at 72 Celsius for 10 min. Mash Out at 78 Celsius for 5 min. Boil ingredients Boil – 30 mins 46.30g Southern Aroma (5.10 %) @ 30 mins (20.0 IBUs) 26.70g Southern Aroma (5.10 %) @ 10.0 min (8.0 IBUs) 2g Irish Moss @ 10 mins 100g Cacao Nibs @…

JUNE 08 Yeastern Cape Brew CLUB German Club, Lorraine, Port Elizabeth, 6:30pm for 7pm Monthly Club Meeting. Come and enjoy some Homebrew and share knowledge. 08 Wijnland Homebrew Club Mutts Brewhouse, 6pm for 6:30pm Cleaning and sanitisation talk. 14 Freestate Fermenters Mid-Week Tasting Venue TBD 6pm Club social get-together with a wide variety of craft beer tasting. 22 Helderberg Homebrew Club Triggerfish Somerset West, 6pm for 6:30pm Irish Beers competition. 24 Northyeasters Brou en Stook Devil's Peak Brewery tour with the main brewer (JC Steyn) as the tour guide. JULY 01 Wort Hog Brewers East Rand (Wort East) Dynamite Distilling Co, Modderfontein, 11am - 5pm Worties Winter Beer Fest: 20-30 Homebrewed Beers, 10 or so on Cask. R100 Entry gets you a festival glass and free beer til the homebrew runs out! Food and other drink…

For the sixth year in a row, Greyton was the scene of Fools and Fans reverie. The event kicked off on Friday, March 31st, with homebrewers from around the country participating in both a National Homebrew Interclub Championship, as well as an Individual Homebrew Competition. The Interclub Championship called for each club to put forward their best saison, with the winners taking home prizes sponsored by bevPlus. In the end, the winners were the Wort Hog Brewers Club, followed by Wijnland Homebrewers Club, and finally the Durban Home Brewers. As for the individual competition, it was a packed playing field, with 185 entries–a significant increase from previous years. First place went to Hennie Groenewald for his sweet stout, second place to Greg Harrowsmith with a wood aged Baltic Porter and…

MASH OUT “Michigan gets COLD in the winter, like -40C, so our state is proficient in making beers that will warm you up. A Russian Imperial Stout is always my go to. How could it not, being the @SirenofStout? The intense flavors of coffee, chocolate and caramel with that warming affect makes the wintertime easier to endure.” Ann Arbor, MI (Homebrewer, Cicerone/ Beer Judge) “Nothing beats an Oatmeal Stout on a cold winter's day.” Stellenbosch (Proud member of Helderberg Homebrew Club) THOKOZANI CHIKWATU “My choice is Shackleton’s Cocoa Oatmeal Stout because it is flavourful, well-balanced and easy drinking on a cold, winter’s day.” Cape Town (Roeland Liquors) “If I’m buying, warm or cold weather, it’s a pale ale (preferably an IPA) as pictured here.” Cape Town (Homebrewer, seen here w/…

Craig Claassen Craig started his journey in beer as a homebrewer in a London bedsit in 2004. He is a partner at Neelsie Travel and it was in 2017 that he fused his passion for tourism and craft beer to create the Beer Route, an organisation set up to promote craft beer tourism in South Africa. He is also the co-founder of Lunar Brew and current chairperson of the Helderberg Homebrew Club. Check out Beer Route at www.beerroute.co.za. Niall Cook Niall is the co-founder and brewer at Richmond Hill Brewing Company (RHBC) established in 2015. He started homebrewing at the age of 16 with the goal of finding his way into the professional brewing industry. An honours degree in Microbiology from NMU and work in Ireland and Germany in a…

Inventive brewers are creating beer–wine crossover drinks as part of their brand portfolios. Those releasing these wine-inspired beer brands, co-fermented with wine grapes and using wine yeasts, are finding that this novel beverage appeals to the open-minded and to the new generation drinker enthusiastic about the original tastes. Using grapes in brewing may not be altogether different from a fruit beer made from cherries, raspberries, and other juicy fruits, however, brewers are going one step further: they are exploring the craft of winemaking to create an entirely separate drink category. There are challenges, which include the technical aspects of how beer is brewed, and wine is made. A DEFINING STYLE While co-fermenting with grapes is a centuries-old practice, it is a trend perfected in Italy over the last 20 years…

STYLE GUIDE It was a relaxed Saturday night of wood-fired pizza and bottle shares. We started with a growler of my brewing buddy Clint’s Belgian blond and our respective spouses shaking their heads at our wild hand gestures, as we excitedly discussed the nuance of the yeast character on the delicate Pilsner malt pillow. I cracked open a fresh bottle of Orval, a Belgian Pale Ale. Only a few weeks earlier, I had heard that they were in stock over in Pretoria. I trekked out the very next day to secure a few bottles for myself: a ritual often replayed if a new batch of Belgian ales has hit the local shelves. That night–after carefully pouring the orange-copper liquid into two clean glasses–I put it aside, realising that my fridge,…

HOMEBRU In April 2022, the first-ever South African national homebrew interclub took place in Greyton as part of the Fools and Fans festival. This was founded in the spirit of greater cooperation between homebrew clubs in South Africa, and to provide a showcase for the talented brewers, many of whom could easily filter into craft breweries in the next few years as apprentice brewers. In fact, walking around the 2023 festival, it was pleasing to see that some homebrewers have turned professional, either by opening breweries of their own, or by joining breweries that have matured to the point of hiring support brewers. The idea behind bringing this homebrew component to Fools and Fans had been to develop a competition for the clubs around a base style. All the scoring…

The brewing water used for a Sweet Stout should effectively manage the mash pH, contribute to a soft, pillowy mouthfeel, and complement the complex, malty sweet character of the beer. For this 85 EBC beer, you must therefore adjust your residual alkalinity, using baking soda (sodium bicarbonate, NaHCO3), to approximately 20 ppm CaCO3, to ensure a mash pH of between 5.2 and 5.4. To obtain that pillowy mouthfeel and complex maltiness you must add lots and lots of chloride and ensure you end with a very low (0.6) sulphate: chloride ratio. Chloride is added as calcium chloride (CaCl2). Water profile used (in ppm): Acquired through the addition of the following salts to 30L of RO water:…

TWO GUYS AND A BAKKIE Tinus Lottering was born and raised in the tiny town of Newcastle, in northern Natal, close to the Free State border. By the age of 14, Tinus already knew he wanted to pursue music. About a month after writing his matric, he moved as far from Newcastle as he could, landing him in Potchefstroom, 135 kilometres southwest of Johannesburg. He soon found himself playing in a number of small bands around town, before being invited to form the Jack Rolling Dandy’s: a two-piece, hard rock band. The two bandmates practised together six days a week over the course of two years, in a rented garage space, all in between jobs and “a bit of partying.” We basically lived in my car for three years Eventually,…

With us heading to the halfway point of 2023, it is great to take stock of the work the Beer Association has been doing to promote beer and the economic contribution it makes across the country over the past few months. This has included supporting craft brewers as well as working together with our big beer members, South African Breweries and HEINEKEN to create an enabling environment for our industry and the 1 in 66 jobs it supports in South Africa. Critical to this is a legislative and regulatory environment that encourages both small and large businesses in the beer sector to grow. In this regard, we welcomed the announcement by Finance Minister, Enoch Godongwana in his Budget speech in February that the excise increase on beer for 2023/2024 financial…

RED BRIDGE Trinity Coffee Co. Collab: Coffee Porter Every winter, we brew a chocolate malt & cold-brew coffee porter in collaboration with local Knysna coffee roastery; Trinity Coffee Co. Gerhardt–the owner and roaster of Trinity Coffee Co– roasts a Brazil coffee and then uses a drip method to create a cold-brew coffee. We then add the cold brew into the finished beer in fermentation. Lighter than a stout with layers of flavours from the malt and coffee with a subtle creaminess, this makes for a great winter beer for the colder days. Excellent in a beef pie. Cans will be made available on the online store. KENNEL BREWERY Launching two new beers! The Biggest Little Beer Hop is in collaboration with Biggest Little Beer Shop. DARK BEER MONTH In June,…

WORLD OF BEER " Where's her hijab? " " Lmfao Middle Eastern flavour back to craft beer? Ah yes, who can forget such flavours as halal. " " Honestly, isn't the Middle East mostly Muslim and they reject alcohol? " These comments on a brewery’s Instagram page stopped me cold mid-scroll. Founder and sole brewer, Zahra Tabatabai, whose parents immigrated to the US from Iran, had shared screenshots of posts on her page in response to her Persian-inspired beer business, Back Home Beer. The comments–intended to belittle and ultimately silence–brought out a familiar feeling in me. That feeling is frustration with the continued erasure of women, people of colour, and other so-called marginalised groups from their roles–even their very existence–in history. And in this case, that applied invisibility feels particularly…

Along with mash temperature management, high attenuation can be achieved in many ways. For Blond or Golden strong Belgian ales, the easiest is the addition of simple sugars to the wort, but preferably to the fermenter as primary fermentation is about to conclude. When brewing Dubbel or Dark strong Belgian ales the attenuation is assisted with the use of Belgian candy syrup, fragrant inverted sugars showcasing a sortie of Maillard reaction-based flavours. These ales do benefit from a controlled fermentation start, with a free rise in temperatur towards the end to achieve the desired attenuation. Yeast selection plays a big role in the characteristic flavour profile of Belgian Ales. As an alternative to commercially available yeast, you could also repurpose the yeast sediment recovered from the bottles of your favourite…

• Fermentis S-33, because its maltotriose negative and can leave some residual sugar for a good body and mouthfeel. • LalBrew Windsor™ - For a deliciously balanced sweet stout, because it doesn't over-attenuate, leaving behind the desired level of residual sugar and a satisfying mouthfeel • AEB Fermoale AY3 - For traditional British flavours to accent the dark roasted malts of the sweet stout. Fermenting at lower temperatures will result in lower attenuation and an accentuated malt character. • Hennie’s co-pitch: 11.5g Lallemand Windsor Yeast & 5.75g Fermentis S-04.…

MEET A The marula is just one of those quintessentially African fruits. It comes bursting with distinct sweet and tart flavours and unique aromas that can only be found in this particular fruit. It's this uniqueness that makes the very popular Amarula Liquor one of South Africa's proud exports. The marula tree is a significant one in many African cultures as it is viewed to be sacred in most tribes, and is respected for its medicinal properties. This seasonal fruit is also known as "nature’s bar” as even wildlife such as elephants, monkeys and warthogs are said to get "drunk” after gorging themselves on the marula. I took a trip to Limpopo to learn the art of making the perfect "marula beer" and met Miss Phaswane Enica Phala, a very…

EASTERN CAPE BREWHAHA Jeffreys Bay Marius Deetlefs +27 72 071 6106 brewery@brewhaha.co.za brewhaha.co.za BRIDGE STREET BREWERY Port Elizabeth Grant Davies +27 41 581 0361 grant@ingoodcompany.africa bridgestreet.co.za RICHMOND HILL BREWING CO. Port Elizabeth Niall Cook +27 78 396 5485 niall@richmondhillbrewing.com richmondhillbrewing.com TABLE 58 BREWING East London Paul de Klerk +27 43 748 2815 info@table58brewing.co.za table58brewing.co.za FREE STATE APPOINTMENT CRAFT BEER BREWERY Kroonstad Rudi & Coal +27 82 371 3794 rudi@regalhq.co.za GAUTENG SWAGGA BREWERIES Henley on Klip, Meyerton Justin Goetsch +27 10 109 0388 pub@swaggabrewery.co.za swaggabreweries.co.za KWAZULU-NATAL BALLITO BREWING COMPANY Ballito Gary Wilby +27 84 512 5263 greatrailroadbrewing@gmail.com ballitobrewingcompany.co.za DRAKENSBERG BREWERY Cathkin Park Nick Roberts +27 83 296 4552 info@drakbrew.co.za drakbrew.co.za KWAZULU-NATAL LIONS RIVER CRAFT BREWERY Lions River Ronald McClelland +27 83 775 8549 macsas@mweb.co.za NGUNI BREWING CO. Westmead, Durban Grant Hulbert…

Beer lovers from across the continent congregated at the Hotel Verde for BeerEx Africa, a two-day conference and expo. Formerly known as the Craft Brewers Powwow, BeerEx featured speakers from seven countries, including American beer celebrity Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware. As well as listening to technical talks and inspirational lectures, attendees joined in a number of beer tasting sessions, enjoyed a food pairing with British beer writer Melissa Cole, networked in the expo tent and danced to a live band comprised of people that work in the South African beer industry. The event culminated in the 2023 African Beer Cup awards party, held at Woodstock Brewery.…