SUIP!
A young man's misadventures with South Africa's beers, bars and breweries.
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suip (v) Afrikaans: to drink, often to excess.
Suip! is South Africa’s first independent beer blog.
From umqombothi to craft, homebrew to the mass-produced lagers of SAB, beer is very obviously a large part of South African life. Although it’s home to the one of the world’s largest breweries - or more likely, because of the existence of SAB - beer knowledge and expertise in South Africa are, frankly, lacking.
“Well,” you might assert, “don’t South Africans have a lot more things to worry about than beer?” True, but beer is humanity’s most basic relaxant: it came before organised religion, competitive sport or written literature. Beer has shaped South Africa’s political and commercial spheres for centuries. From racial prohibition during apartheid, to its association with national sports teams, from township beer halls to the JSE, beer is strongly intertwined with South Africa’s social, economic and cultural fabric.
And I like that. That’s not to say I’m a beer connoisseur. On the contrary, I know very little about beer, other than the fact that I love it. Suip! is a quest for unpretentious, innovative local brews made in all nooks and crannies of the vast, unpredictable nation that is South Africa. Join me, and hopefully we’ll learn something together.
About Nick!
Suip! is the slightly self-indulgent hobby of Nick Mulgrew, a young writer living and drinking in Cape Town, South Africa.
He writes features and takes photographs for magazines, contributes food and drink reports for GQ.co.za and is a sometimes-academic, focusing on narrative non-fiction in South Africa. He holds a first class honours degree in Media Theory and Practice from the University of Cape Town and an undergraduate degree in Journalism, English and binge drinking from Rhodes University in Grahamstown.
He also:
Cannot ride a bike.Learned to ride a bike in January 2012.- Plays guitar in a band called The Life of Riley.
- Drinks beer every day but seldom gets drunk.
- Is a pescetarian.
- Has tiny hands for a man.
You can reach Nick at nichmulgrew@gmail.com or @SUIPEXCLAMATION. Please hire him and give him some money so he can pay for electricity.
