February 2012
23 posts
8 tags
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...
12 tags
8 tags
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...
8 tags
5 tags
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...
7 tags
"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,...
11 tags
7 tags
12 tags
14 tags
7 tags
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...
15 tags
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...
10 tags
14 tags
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...
8 tags
4 tags
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...
2 tags
3 tags
4 tags
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...
4 tags
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...
2 tags
January 2012
16 posts
5 tags
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...
