August 2012
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July 2012
11 posts
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The Hop & Vine Festival, or, avant moi le deluge
Friday didn’t start too well for the Hop & Vine Festival. A week that started off with four consecutive days of unseasonable warmth ended in a deluge. As torrential rain flooded the outside areas of Simons @ Groot Constantia a mere five hours before the festival’s start, everything had to be changed. The tented area was abandoned: sound equipment was moved inside, kegs hurried...
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A homebrew revolution: a look inside the...
So, total disclaimer: although this blog is supposed to be a chronicle of my homebrewing experiences (among other things), I’ve never actually brewed before. While I started Suip! a year ago as an attempt to record my successes and failures in brewing, it has only really recorded one sustained failure; namely, my failure to begin brewing.
To be honest though, brewing has seemed steeped in...
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WIN TICKETS TO THE HOP AND VINE FESTIVAL WHOOOO
HEY YOU
WANT TO WIN A TICKET TO THE CRAFT BEER PROJECT’S FANTASTIC HOP AND VINE FESTIVAL ON 20/21 JULY AT SIMON’S @ GROOT CONSTANTIA?
OF COURSE YOU DO
“SO HOW DO I WIN?!”, YOU SCREAM
SIMPLY RETWEET THIS TWEET FROM @SUIPEXCLAMATION AND YOU’RE IN THE DRAW
(OR, IF YOU DON’T HAVE TWITTER, SIMPLY EMAIL ME AT NICHMULGREW AT GMAIL DOT COM SAYING “HEY...
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The Hop and Vine Festival Launch
South Africa’s oldest wine farm is streaked in gold and sepia,its roses and vine winding up and across hills. Farmhands on tractors chug by and stir around the entrances of centuries-old cellars. Groot Constantia is an estate made for postcard vistas; the culmination of colonial dreams and pastoral adventure.
That, and it’s a bloody good spot for a beer festival.
Last night was...
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June 2012
5 posts
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Review: Valley Brewery Dublin Dark
Hidden away in a light industrial park on the edge of Kommetjie, Valley Brewery has been turning out solid and dependable beers for the past six months or so. Metalworker and chief brewer Glenn Adams has precision-built his brewery, in all of its stainless steel glory, from scratch. His ethos in construction carries onto his beers: he oversees the entire process himself, from cracking the grain...
Places: The Lowlander, Grahamstown
Small towns often yield the best treasures. I called sleepy Grahamstown home for three long years, and its rambunctious student life - a deluge of cheap alcohol designed to liven up the town’s boring horizons - inhabits a liltingly happy space in my memory.
While older establishments such as the Rat and Parrot and Friar’s are better established in the minds of most as...
forvalour asked: do you get down to the cricket in SA often?
Anonymous asked: Have you ever come across Desperados Tequila Beer in SA, or more specifically in the Cape Town area? It seems impossible to find here in SA...
May 2012
5 posts
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Win one of two Good Fellas Memberships with SAB...
Drunk driving needlessly costs the lives of hundreds of South Africans on our roads every year. And every year, various companies try to create the campaign that will get the message through our skulls that driving drunk is one of the stupidest things you can do.
Nothing totally works, of course - SA still has one of the world’s most prolific drink-driving problems - but if they make any...
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The Keg King Open Tap
My apologies to Mark and Martin from Keg King for how criminally late this post is. Thanks for putting up with me.
A little over six weeks ago, at Cape Town’s German Club, a little bit of pandemonium broke loose. Ten breweries, some small, some large, some teetering on the verge of collapse, pledged over 40 kegs of beer to everyone’s favourite portable party merchants, Keg King....
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The Start of a New Craft Beer Project
This past Saturday, Banana Jam Cafe was host to the first iteration of the Craft Beer Project, a new alliance between brewers and beer lovers poised to fill the hole that We Love Real Beer left with its seeming dissolution half a year ago.
Unlike We Love Real Beer’s gatherings, the Craft Beer Project has begun somewhat smaller; trading graphic design and branded glass bombast for...
Oh God I'm on radio again
Starting tonight I will be starting guest appearances on Gary Cool’s Rock Dimension on 2OceansVibe Radio, to talk about beer and ramble on about all things Cape beer-related. I’ll be on from 21h30 or so to stutter uncontrollably and attempt to relay some semblance of news about this weekend’s local beer festivals and some other beer stuff. The rationale behind this is that...
April 2012
3 posts
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llamas-on-the-beach asked: Lyon has great craft beer at Ninikasi Opera that changes every season. It was really good. Get down here! Effie
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Coming up in May: More Suip!, beer in Getaway and...
After a much-needed break (that admittedly went on much longer than expected), regular updates on Suip! will return next week.
May’s turning out to be a very exciting month, starting out with a mini beer festival at Banana Jam Cafe on Saturday the 5th of May. The Craft Beer Project will feature 25 beers on tap from 10 breweries from around South Africa - and it’s likely to get...
March 2012
13 posts
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Tasting Notes: Porcupine Quill, Botha's Hill, KZN
Above three images from Porcupine Quill website
Porcupine Quill Brewery in Botha’s Hill, KwaZulu-Natal is one of South African craft beer’s hidden players. Tucked away in a sleepy corner of the Valley of 1000 Hills, Quill’s is an artisan’s paradise, comprising a deli, bakery and brewery, all fastidiously local-minded.
Quill’s range of eleven beers, under three...
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Photos: Valley Brewery, Kommetjie
Metalworker Glenn Adams leads a double life. Round the front of his factory in a patched-up Kommetjie industrial park, he operates an expertly-built microbrewery. An elegant setup of stainless steel, his preferred metallic medium, Valley Brewery is one in a series of new Western Cape microbreweries popping up in the nooks of South Africa’s most craft-crazy province.
While his London Ale...
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Three black beers: drinks for watching Natal lose...
Rugby season has started again. Exciting! That means that it’s time for me to have childish temper tantrums, swear at the TV and weep in submission as my beloved Sharks conspire yet again to concede 20 handling errors every match away from King’s Park.
Our opening two matches of the season provided losses against the Bulls and Stormers so utterly pathetic that I spent the rest of...
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Good bottle stores #1: CQ Tops
On Friday night, for reasons numerous and uninteresting, I found myself wandering around Green Point’s Cape Quarter, a wonderfully esoteric and weirdly upmarket shopping plaza. It was Argus weekend and my parents were in town. We, along with a group of 15 of my father’s cycling teammates and their wives, were looking for a restaurant that would accommodate a throng of tired...
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Lithuanian court quashes Carlsberg strike by... →
In an extraordinary piece of legal wrangling, a Lithuanian court has quashed a strike at a Carlsberg brewery in the small city of Klaipeda by ruling beer brewing as “vitally essential” to everyday life.
Carlsberg asked the court to stop workers striking during its “high season”, by classifying the production of beer as of vital importance.
The court obliged, placing...
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Lately...
Seeing as I haven’t posted anything new for 10 days, I thought I’d pop in and explain the absence. In between starting a promising new internship at Paperight, a Shuttleworth Foundation-funded online book distribution start-up, finishing My First Big Feature for Getaway, and naming strays on my road “Cat Lambie”, “Catrick Swayze” and other variations on that...
February 2012
23 posts
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Recipes: Graham Paterson's Braai Pizza
Graham Paterson is an illustrator. He is also my housemate.
He moved down from Durban at the beginning of this year to move in with me and a few of our friends. Despite initial suspicions that he couldn’t cook, he surprised all of us tonight by making the best pizza any of us have ever had – on my terrible excuse for a braai, no less.
Here’s how he did it.
First, make this easy...
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Places: Woodstock Lounge, Woodstock
Gentrification is a wonderful thing. Among the social upheaval of the past twenty years, South Africa’s cities haven’t exactly had the best time. Urban decay and mismanagement, coupled with middle class exoduses, left some of the country’s most historic suburbs to wrack and ruin. Modernist buildings fell apart in Berea; tenements in once-cosmopolitan Hillbrow became steadily...
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Brew Timer: a perfect brew every time →
Brewing is all about timing. Sure, I know some maverick homebrewers who manage, in strokes of equal parts genius and luck, to churn out home-run brews with little regard to precision or science. For the rest of us, though, a good recipe well followed is essential to success.
But reams of paper can be unwieldy, and clock timers can be fiddly. Brewing can be as much about multitasking as skill, so...
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"Why Not": Three Skulls Brew Works set to launch
The second iteration of the Clarens Craft Beer Festival gets underway this weekend in every beer drinker’s favourite Free State town. Such was last year’s success that the festival now has a big name sponsor in the guise of SAB, who look to be entering the craft market despite not being, in any reasonable sense of the word, a craft brewery.
Regardless of what SAB does, however,...
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