January 2012
16 posts
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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...
