May 2012
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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
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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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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...