August 2011
24 posts
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eBooze: It (mostly) works!
It’s a beautiful day today in Cape Town, but I was stuck inside all day working. I felt like a beer with my lunch, but there was none in the fridge. Quelle disastre. Luckily, there was a solution to this all-too-common problem.
I had heard of this new online service that was launched on Tuesday called eBooze (www.ebooze.co.za - link) that promises to deliver drinks to your door within an...
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“Breakfast style corn flakes should never be confused with flaked corn for...”
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Township brews: Khayelitsha utwala →
On my tour of SAB, I met a guy called Jeff. Jeff is a pretty cool guy. He’s from Portland, Oregon and has been studying indoor air quality in Khayelitsha (Cape Town’s biggest and SA’s second-biggest township, if you’re not familiar with it) with an environmental unit at the University of Cape Town. He also really loves beer. Portland is right at the heart of the...
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Late nights ahead
For those of you who don’t know, I’m finishing off my Honours in Media and English at the University of Cape Town. I have a lot of work ahead of me in the next few weeks. Obviously Suip is part of that work - better content just means later nights.
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Review: Camelthorn Helles
A little while back at the last Real Beer festival at the Old Biscuit Mill, I tried a Camelthorn beer and really enjoyed it. Being a bit ignorant, I asked the bartender, “So, where are you guys from?”
“Namibia,” was his reply. A bit dumbstruck, and a little tipsy, I sheepishly walked away clutching my weiss. I thought Namibia was all Windhoek Lager, but man, was I...
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Newlands, the epicentre of SA's beer history
Following my reflection on my relationship with SAB a while back, I decided to go on one of SAB’s little-publicised brewery tours.
Let me get one thing out of the way first: SAB Newlands is a massive compound. There is no way to describe the volume and efficiency of brewing that goes on here other than saying it is colossal. Its system of assembly lines and pipes and valves is somewhere...
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Places: Barristers, Newlands
I think I’m a little bit in love with Newlands Village. It has great boutiques, sommeliers, South Africa’s best DVD rental store, and Cassis, a French-style patisserie that makes delicious tarts, moreish macaroons and good tea and coffee. Whenever I feel a little bit down, which is unfortunately not such an unusual occurrence, I like to walk here to clear my head. The junction of...
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Exultations at the existence of SA beer...
Somewhat shamefully, I am a bit of a budding academic. I periodically fantasise about submitting papers and letters about South African literature to various newspapers and journals. Due to the length of time it takes to get anything reviewed and published, I rarely take the effort and time to do it, although I am working on a few pieces right now, including a thesis on Jonny Steinberg, author...
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Review: African Moon Amber Ale
A little while back, my housemate James took a long weekend off to go to our hometown of Durban to visit his family, go to a friend’s wedding and generally just take a breather. While he was stumbling around somewhere in the Midlands, he found some beers by African Moon Brewing. He very kindly brought back their Amber Ale for us to try out in Cape Town.
Now, I’d never heard of...
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Cold Lager Beer a Result of Accidental Yeast... →
Crazy shit, y’all.
So, it turns out the yeast that permitted the brewing of lager beer, i.e. cold-fermented beer that can be stored for long periods, “was found to exist on beech trees in Patagonia [in Argentina and Chile], and may have made the 7,000-mile trip to Bavaria [in Germany] in wood, or in the guts of mice or flies”. Before the yeast’s epic journey, probably made...
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Hansa Pilsener's New Threads
Hansa Pilsener got a rebrand! And it looks great, I think. Here are the new quarts:
The quart labels have, well, a lot less things on them now. Gone is the abundance of text around the red banding. The type itself has gone full Modernist, and it looks very slick with the reduced copy. It isn’t as legible as the old design, but I think it looks a real sight better.
The colour palette...
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Did You Know SAB makes the world's best-selling...
It’s called Snow, and it’s China’s number one beer. The Chinese drank 16.5 billion pints of Snow last year, making it about twice as popular as Bud Light, the brand from which it took the dubious mantle of being the world’s number one best-selling beer in 2008.
Snow’s been around for 15 years, beating competitors that have been in China for 110 years....
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Review: Robson's Durban Pale Ale
Good ol’ Robsons, eh? Winners of a bajillion awards every year, including SA’s Champion Beer or whatever with their West Coast Ale in 2009, it’s no wonder that Shongweni Brewery’s Robson’s range (website here) contains some of South Africa’s best loved craft beers. It’s also because they are, by all accounts, uniformly delicious.
I’ve always liked...
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Photos: We Love Real Beer Fest, 20 March 2011
When I feel like making myself feel bad about myself, I try to take photos. Like brewing beer, I feel like photography has become a skill that is under-appreciated. To take a good photo with film, which I’ve been trying to do for three years, is quite a difficult thing, especially if you’re used to the convenience of digital cameras. I’m not a good photographer by any stretch of...
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More SAB Takeover News: Foster's puts pressure on... →
So, in case you didn’t know, SABMiller is bidding to take over Foster’s, which, in case you didn’t know, is probably Australia’s most famous megabrewery. (They don’t make very good beer, it has to be said, but they have made tons of money worldwide.) It’s an epic tussle, with either party giving each other very little edgeways.
Here, the New York Times offers...
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Review: Mitchell's Milk & Honey Ale
Saturday was a real no-gooder. After a long night out at Mercury, which included far too much dancing and far too many conversations with Congolese car guards, I woke up at midday feeling rather, well, tired. My housemate woke up an hour later with swift complaints about how late we had slept in. Half of Saturday was wasted to sleep, so we had to make the best of what turned out to be a lovely...
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Me and SAB's Mutually Intrusive Relationship
Let me tell you a story. It’s a story about me and SAB.
Well, and James, I guess. I live with a guy called James. James and I have known each other for eighteen years. Because of a deep, innate sense of understanding that is only formed between two men when they have known each other since they were four, we always have a plastic SAB case full of Hansa Pilsener quarts in our pantry....
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?
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By Way of Introduction
Hi! My name is Nick Mulgrew. I’m twenty-one years old, and I live in Cape Town, South Africa. And I really, really like beer. Like, a lot.
This is me at the Big Pineapple, a ridiculous fibreglass monument to pineapple farming on the old frontier of the Eastern Cape, just outside Bathurst. Looking back, it wasn’t one of my finer moments. That magenta blazer wasn’t really...
