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,...
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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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Keg King: Party Royalty
I had a housewarming on Saturday. I recently and very happily moved into a large house in Woodstock with three of my childhood mates and one lovely woman after a year living on the mess of traffic and chip packets that is Rondebosch Main Road. We’ve worked very hard on the place: converted surplus building materials into tables and benches, battled with unstable curtain rails and painted a...
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Photos: Hout Bay Harbour Market
Cape Town is market city; Hout Bay is market town. Just down the road from the tourist trap stalls of the decades-old Lions Craft Market and yappy curio sellers by Mariners Wharf is a colourful and gratifyingly authentic indoor market.
In an old harbourside warehouse, made complete with wafts of rotting fish from nearby factories and docks, a hundred or so vendors of all kinds set up shop to...
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Places: Sgt Pepper, Long Street, Cape Town
There’s a well-worn staircase off the sidewalk towards the top end of Long Street. Down a dark corridor, barricaded by a broad-shouldered, black-suited bouncer, these stairs used to mark the entrance to Zula, a bar and live music venue which was the clown car of Long Street: no matter how full it already was of straight-fringed girls and James Dean-coiffed boys in second-hand leather...
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One for the Road?
Well done, Holland. You’ve just made the best thing ever.
In a small village deep in the - ahem - nether of the world’s most notoriously party-friendly country, metalworkers Thomas Tolkamp and Dinand Veerbeek created a series of 400cc buggies, each equipped with comfortable bicycle-seats-cum-bar-stools, a fully-equipped driver’s station, a 3mm auxiliary input for mp3 players...
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Why does beer skunk? →
Damn thiols. Damn skunks.
A recent trip to Panama led Chris Washenburger from Denver Off the Wagon to investigate why beer goes off in the sun. We all know light damages beer, and that’s why it’s kept in dark bottles – but what are the exact reasons for it? Here, Washenburger offers a little bit of organic chemistry, explaining how ultraviolet rays change the chemicals residing in...
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Woodmill Lifestyle Market Boutique Beer Festival,...
Woodmill Lifestyle Market Boutique Beer Festival
Vredenburg Road, Stellenbosch
Friday 3 February 2012, 1730-2200
Wine country gets a beer festival this weekend when the Boutique Beer Festival kicks off tomorrow night at Woodmill Lifestyle Market in Stellenbosch. A recent (and still relatively little-known) addition to Stellies’ upper crust, the Woodmill is a comfy indoor market held...
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January 2012
16 posts
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Places: Banana Jam Café, Kenilworth
At first, Banana Jam Café makes perfect sense. A mélange of Rastafari tricolor and terracotta, this Caribbean hideout in Kenilworth’s Harfield Village is a local legend. What started out as a tiny café across the road in 1999 is now a 150-seater homage to what most people think Jamaica might actually look like – sans slums and spliff smoke, of course. Reggaeton lightly pulses through its mango...
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Places: Saints Burger Joint, Gardens, Cape Town
Saints on Kloof Street is Cape Town’s newest burger joint. This Gardens portmanteau of rock ‘n roll, bike culture, Camelthorn beers and endless varieties of hamburger, replete with tattoo ceilings and a staircase printed with the lyrics from the last stanza of Stairway to Heaven, is well considered, exquisitely styled and, perhaps surprisingly, has its act together -...
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The Suip! & DIY Guide to Beer in KZN: Part 2 →
Yesterday, the second part of the Suip! and Durban Is Yours Guide to Beer in Kwazulu-Natal went up. I slogged through numerous arduous dinners and contributed handsomely to climate change in my search for a handful of the best pubs and restaurants to enjoy in my hometown. The criteria: a progressive attitude towards craft beer; well thought-out and well-priced food; a special atmosphere.
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75 year-old Edward VI Coronation Ale bottles... →
Seventy-five years ago, the then-King of England Edward VIII abandoned the Britannic throne to elope with American socialite Wallis Simpson, leaving his brother, a very dapper Colin Firth, to inherit both the crown and a lifetime of opportunities to garble his way through public speeches.
Disregarding the artistic licence used in The King’s Speech, Tom Hooper’s Oscar-winning...
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Review: Southyeasters Mango Ale
Somehow, against any faculty of reason or expectation, a Caribbean-themed café has become one of Cape Town’s most craft beery craft beer bars. All rastafari tricolour and terracottas, it’s an odd place to find what is possibly the Western Cape’s most varied non-festival bank of craft beer taps, built for them by the men from Jack Black after Banana Jam’s forward-thinking...
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More Cowbell!
Durban’s central suburbs are a bit of an anomaly. Half chic, half stuck in time, it’s the sort of place that the hip and frighteningly uncool rub shoulders quite easily. Seemingly frozen in the amber of its Eighties and Nineties heydays, a suburb like Musgrave isn’t exactly known for progressive dining. But in an unassuming corner of Durban’s most famous once-famous suburb rests one of its...
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Photos: Starlings Café Garden Market
It’s not strictly beer-related, but it should go hand-in-hand: support your local market. Respect for local produce, artisanship and small-batch craft is the foundation of craft beer. Without it, we wouldn’t have amazing things to eat or drink.
Starlings Café, a favourite spot of mine on Belvedere Road in Rondebosch East, has a tiny but useful market in their back garden every...
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Review: Duff Beer
There’s always the slightest bit of apprehension when I discover something’s become defictionalised – you know, when a company buys the rights from a film studio to make their fictional product into something real. It’s problematic: Wonka Bars can’t actually be as good as they are in Charlie’s universe, and a real-life Sex Panther cologne can’t actually have bits of real panther in it, as...
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The Best Beer on the Table Award 2011
Today, Suip! and Homebru.net proudly present the Best Beer on the Table Award 2011.
The Southern African beer world doesn’t have many awards. Most praise handed to South African beers or breweries is, well, meaningless. It’s awarded by hack food writers in ill-considered feature pieces or given out at bogus competitions to which only multinational breweries are invited. (Has anybody...
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Shebeen Sales to Pumpkin Ales
‘Then on Friday I got this call from a shebeen. They said my rep hadn’t arrived with the beer.’
Chris Barnard shrugs. Eleven years ago he was a simpler man, a Capetonian plastics manufacturer working in Paarden Eiland with a part-time penchant for homebrewing. He’d recently spent a year visiting German hamlets with his soon-to-be wife, indulging in their seemingly ...
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Suip! and Homebru.net's Best Beer on the Table...
(Photo by Joakim Löfkvist)
So, this Friday my Swedish SA beer conspirator, Joakim Löfkvist (writer of Homebru.net and the most active reviewer of SA beers on Ratebeer, where he goes under the handle of Jolo), and I will be announcing what we deem to be the best three beers we’ve tasted over the past year. It’s what we call The Best Beer on the Table Award, and it’s very...
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Places: Spiga D'Oro, Florida Road, Durban
Spiga D’Oro, on Durban’s Florida Road, is almost certainly the city’s number one Italian eatery, if not for quality, then certainly for quantity. It used to be small: a tiny but vibrant pavement eatery on Florida Road, a place that didn’t take reservations and put out superlative antipasti, pizza and pasta inexpensively until the wee hours. It has more than once been...
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An Auld Gray Town (and a couple stouts)
I spent the week before Christmas in Dundee, Scotland’s fourth city, home of the RRS Discovery and my mother’s hometown. Dundee is a world leader in biomedicine and biotechnology, but not much else, least of which in cuisine: pie on a roll is a staple (though personally well-loved) meal.
Forty minutes from Dundee’s gray- and brown-brick streets and foggy river (the River Tay...
Hoptopia's Top Ten Beers of 2011 →
At a time of year best known for sweeping summative statements, it only feels appropriate to link to the best top ten beers list I have yet found online. Hoptopia’s Lee Williams provides a well-considered, image-based list. He writes:
Over the course of 2011 I had the privilege of tasting somewhere in the region of 1300-1400 different beers. Selecting only 10 to highlight as the best I...
December 2011
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Notes from London: Part Two
The past few days in London have been hectic. Christmas is a big deal in Britain - not for the religious aspects naturally, but - you know - for shopping. Fighting through the crowds on Oxford, Bond and Carnaby has been my family’s prime occupation since we arrived. I’ve had a nasty cold though, so in between finding Perfect Gifts for our extended family, I’ve ducked away into...
Cicerones: beer's sommeliers →
Let’s face it: ask most waitrons or bottle store employees about the differences between their beers and you’ll get a blank look. Even in cafés proud of their beer lists, you’ll likely find a dearth of intimate knowledge about what they’re serving – well, other than saying, you know, they’re “real” beers.
But what makes a beer “real”? Even...
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Photos: Selfridges & Co., Oxford Street, London
Selfridges is an urbanite’s food paradise. Under the swarming floors of designer goods, Chanel-toting Japanese women and faux-fur coats is a food hall devoted to oddities and foodie indulgences. A store in which the very forefront of consumer and luxury goods have made their names for 102 years - not to mention the shop floor on which Louis Blériot displayed his Channel-crossing plane...
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The Suip! and Durban Is Yours Guide to Beer in... →
Last week I began a series for Durban Is Yours, notable for being recently voted SA’s Best Music Blog at the SA Blog Awards, as well as being edited by my friend and sometimes-dickhead Bob Perfect. This week’s piece is a quick (and rather polemic) overview of Kwazulu-Natal’s most influential microbreweries, including Shongweni Brewery, Nottingham Road Brewery and Zululand...
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Notes from London: Part One
So, I’m in London. It’s a great place. Bracingly cold mazes of cars with iced windscreens and streets of unfairly attractive people under the crispest of blue skies. Although South Africa is my home, Britain is where most of my family live, including my brother and sister-in-law, who I am currently visiting for the next few days. I then travel to Dundee in Scotland to spend Christmas...
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Review: Robson's East Coast Ale
I spent this past fortnight in my hometown of Durban unwinding, recharging and catching up with friends after a long and difficult past few months. While I was there I decided to revisit a few beers I used to enjoy at home before I moved down to Cape Town, mostly just to see if my good memories of them still held up now.
Shongweni Brewery’s Robson’s East Coast Ale was a beer I...
