SUIP!

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 different labels, aren’t very widely known or widely available. Although I had tried and reviewed one of their beers before (link), the full spectrum of their liquid exploits had eluded me for some time. So, when the opportunity arose to try out ten of their eleven beers at Banana Jam Café not too long ago, I took to it with enthusiasm.

Since there are a lot of beers, I’m not going to try review them all; rather, I’ll provide some rough tasting notes for each beer under each Quill’s brand, as well as notes of approval or disapproval.

Some preliminary notes, however: even though Porcupine Quill attempts to brew a large range of beer types, they are mostly brewed using flower hops, giving many of their beers a samey bitterness profile; floral and prickly acidic. It works well with some styles that they brew, and not so much with others. Attempts to taste the whole range like I did tend to descend into a pit of undistinguishable and strange bitterness; not bad, but it makes it tough to discern different flavour profiles between each beer towards the tail end. (The alcohol content is potent too, so watch out if you’re trying to session!)

But anyway (ratings out of 5 stars):

Quill’s, the flagship range of 5 beers. Most variety of styles and quality.

Karoo Red (5.5% a.b.v.): A light body of sour fruit overrided by sharp, almost prickly hoppiness. Finishes clean and tart. **1/2

Namaqua Blonde (4.5% a.b.v.): Light citrusy body with hints of mango and melon, follows through sharp with citrus zest; ends with slight burnt roast. Different, but entirely pleasant. ***

Blackdog Bitter (6% a.b.v.): Lacy. Molasses on the nose with some milk chocolate and burnt coffee; follows with sharp sweetness and burnt coffee on palate. Light-medium body. Best of the range. ***1/2

Flat Tail Ale (8% a.b.v.): Vanilla on nose; follows through with overbearing, thistle-prickly hops. Light body, light palate; packed with alcohol. **

Didn’t taste because of unavailability: Kalahari Gold (4.5% a.b.v.).

Dam Wolf, an “extreme beer” range of three beers. High alcohol content links all three.

Yellow Eyes (8% a.b.v.): Cloudy yellow-orange with minimal white head. Rose and indistinguishably acids on nose; follows very acidic (whole flower Challenger hops) with little mouthfeel on palate. Lemon zest and acid at the back of the throat. Finishes quite cleanly at first, then big kick of alcohol – almost unpleasant. A lot of bite, not much flavour; a shame, because I’ve had this before and it was much better. **

Howl & Cry (9% a.b.v.): Strong ale that pours ruby-orange. Hops on nose; hops on palate with touches of sour plum and tart fig. Very alcoholic, but has flavour to back it up. ***

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (9% a.b.v.): Light hoppy nose; alcohol and flower hops (again) on palate, rounded off by sour berries. Finishes with light, but very complex burnt roast. Lots of different kinds of malt here. An interesting one. ***

African Moon

Impala Light (5% a.b.v.): Light in every way, except for its alcohol content: light hops, light roast, light malt; too few nuances with too much alcohol, verging on insipid. *1/2

Amber Ale (6% a.b.v.): Pours coppery. Caramel on nose; sharp, clean hops rounded off with light toffee and extremely slight smokiness on palate. Unexpectedly rich, but finishes clean. Although I didn’t enjoy it when I last had it, this time it was lovely. ***1/2

Blackbuck Bitter (7.5% a.b.v.): Red berries and light roast on nose; sweet and lightly roasty on palate; finishes clean and sour. One of the few PC beers to manage the prickliness of the hops well. ***

Recommendations of the lot: Quill’s Blackdog Bitter, African Moon Amber Ale and Dam Wolf Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. A good beer out of each range; a nice symmetry there.

The final word on Porcupine Quill, then? For better or worse, a range of beers unlike anywhere else in South Africa. Definitely search them out if you’re in the area of Botha’s Hill, especially you’re a hop head.

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If you’d like to get hold of beers from Quills, Dam Wolf or African Moon, head on over to League of Beers and have them delivered straight to your door!

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 exudes passable breadiness and admittedly not a whole lot of nuance, the Valley Weiss is sunshine: opaque, light and refreshing. Perhaps it’s not the beers, undeniably decent as they are, that are the standouts right now at Valley, but rather the uncluttered and well thought-out floorspace. From the ingenious keg washer to the most beautiful mash tun I’ve ever seen, Valley is any hobby brewer’s dream playroom.

Adams is serious about his work, however. While he begins to experiment and test the capabilities of his 300 litre system, he can rest assured he has solid foundations.

Valley Brewery London Ale is currently on rotation at Banana Jam Café, and is also available straight from the brewery in Fish Eagle Park itself. But until you get there, enjoy these photographs of an impressive-looking start-up.

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If you’d like to get hold of Valley Brewery’s beers, head on over to League of Beers and have them delivered straight to your door!

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 those evenings muttering expletives under my breath about Anton Bresler and his magnificently dodgy mullet. In the build-up to last Saturday’s game against the Lions, however, I wondered if there might be a beer suitable to quenching the unavoidable dispair of watching Dale Chadwick go off of his feet at the ruck three times in ten minutes. The fact that I might also be able to recommend an alternative to Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day made this challenge even sweeter.

So, during my visit to CQ Tops last Friday night, I picked up a couple beers with suitably Natalian/Guinness-esque colour palettes, as well as a quart of Castle Milk Stout, in order to test their soothing potentials.

First up was a beer I’d never tried before: Young’s Double Chocolate Stout. Apart from a tantalizing name, the joyous purple and gold of its label possesses an allure as yet unattained by many South African beers.

The Young’s label is part of Wells and Young’s Brewing Company, a wonderfully intricate independent brewery from Bedfordshire in England. The result of a number of mergers, buy-outs and other wranglings, Wells and Young’s is the UK’s largest independent brewery. It matches modern brewing efficiency with traditionalist excellence, brewing dependable, high-quality beers that are sold widely.

Although the Bombardier and McEwan’s brands (bought from Heineken last year) are perhaps the company’s most widely-known beers, its large portfolio of cask ales is the subject of most beer drinkers’ plaudits. The Double Chocolate Stout is one of Wells and Young’s most celebrated beers, being rated in the 98th percentile of all beers on Ratebeer.com. This sort of reputation is probably why it has been imported into South Africa in the first place, but although Ratebeer is an excellent barometer of beer quality, some bottled beers don’t make the trip down from the UK very well.

Happily, this bottle of Double Chocolate Stout was virginal in its freshness. Milk chocolatey on the nose, it follows with burnt roast, burnt coffee and cacao on the palate. It feels luxurious on the mouth, and gives one a remarkable feeling of satisfaction. Deep and rich, but not overcomplicated.

It looks a treat too, pouring inky black with a tan lingerie-like lacing: a brilliant beer, but perhaps too sexy for rugby. By far the best of all the Young’s beers I’ve tried to date, I yearn to have this on tap.

Following the Double Chocolate Stout would be an unenviable task for any beer, but Darling’s Black Mist stood up to it very well, mostly likely due to a rare ability to deliver richness and bite while retaining lightness on mouth and gut.

I’ve repeated sung Black Mist’s praises before. Pouring a dark ruby-brown, it’s hoppy, bittersweet and lightly unctuous with light notes of aniseed, caramel and roast. The only ale out of the trio, it’s more conducive to daytime drinking due to its soft carbonation, lighter mouthfeel and its slightly lower alcoholic content at 5% a.b.v. (It’s also lighter than one of my favourite sunny day drinks, the Darling Bone Crusher.) It’s not a particularly complicated beer – following Darling’s tendency to create above-average beers that can still appeal to the conservative drinker – but that increases its value as a steady-sipping beer for sports.

As the game reached its latter stages, my housemates and I broke out the quarts of Castle Milk Stout, an inexpensive staple for most South African beer lovers. At 6% a.b.v., it’s the strongest beer of the trio, as well as the beer with the heaviest roast backbone. It’s definitely a beer suited for later in the evening: full on the mouth with silky carbonation, it noticeably sits on the stomach. Its profile of heavy-roasted malt, coffee and lactose-y milk chocolate can round off a sweet victory, or take the edges off another defeat.

Happily, on this occasion, the stout made a decent victory more sweet. All three black beers bring something different to the table: Black Mist, quirky and easy-drinking; Double Chocolate Stout, sweet and indulgent; Milk Stout, dependable and satisfying. Depending on the time of the game and your budget, choose accordingly.

This evening the Sharks take on Queensland in Durban. It also being St. Patrick’s Day, I’ve now got twice as many reasons to stock up again – win or lose.

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 weekday craft tastings started becoming popular.

It’s turned out to be a valuable and surprisingly selfless investment. It allows at least nine beers and at least four different brewers to be represented on tap, with a handful more coming in glass. Banana Jam regularly rotate their taps, serving special small-batch brews from established names and homebrewers alike. It’s a small-scale vision of what dedicated craft bars in South Africa should look like.

This past Friday was one of those occasions when a small-batch was brought in, when the seemingly unassuming and simply-branded Mango Ale was put on the reserve tap. Brewed by Ryno Reyneke of the Southyeasters Homebrewing Club*, only 20 litres of the ale was made available at 4pm. I may have been the first customer to order it – I can’t be sure – and so eager was I to try it that I was erroneously charged R30 for a pint, instead of the R29 to which it was later adjusted. 

Not that it mattered much. It was just R1 after all, and this was the first batch of a one-of-a-kind brew.

Pouring a hazy, opaque orange with a light, white and slowly dissipating head, the Mango Ale carried tones fittingly reminiscent of fresh mango juice (sans head). With light whiffs of the eponymous fruit on the nose, you would expect the Mango Ale to follow through sweetly. But you’d be wrong: it packs a snappily sour punch and a sharp, lip-smackingly hoppy finish that lingers for ages. It’s definitely not mangoriffic, and it’s definitely not a fruit beer.** It’s subtle and satisfying at first, but dryness and a lemonesque acidity begins to develop on the palate after half a glass.

Without food to cut through this accumulation on the palate, I probably wouldn’t want to session this. It’s not a cooling or refreshing beer, but rather invigorating. Almost too invigorating, in fact. I sat fidgeting in my chair after I finished my pint, sweating from something other than the oppressive heat. As I left Banana Jam to return home, I let out a soft “oh dear” once I got on the road. I was light-headed and wriggly. I got home and paced around the house, sipping a pint of water. I wanted to play football or go snowboarding. I felt energetic.

It was an odd experience, and I couldn’t tell if it came from me or the beer. The Mango Ale sold out by 6pm, so I won’t be able to have a second tasting unless it’s brewed again. In any case, it was distinct, lip-smacking and gratifyingly odd. I love small-batch brews. The Mango Ale gave me another reason why I should.

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_{* Well, at least I think it was a man by the name of Ryno Reyneke. Nobody was able to tell me for sure by the time this post was written, but by doing some general Interneting, I think I got it right. Please let me know if I didn’t.}

_{** I must qualify that by saying that I don’t know how the Mango Ale was actually brewed – it may very well be a fruit beer technically, i.e. flavoured with fruit instead of brewed with fruit, but my judgement was that it tasted more like the latter than the former.}

‘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 endless varieties of small-batch brewed beer. Upon his return to SA, he found local commercial brews to be unpalatable in comparison, so he set up a small brewing operation in his factory’s garage in an attempt to provide himself and his friends with an alternative.

‘I was brewing more than we could drink though,’ he recalls, ‘so I thought, well, let’s sell the excess to the okes working in the factory. I was unlicensed, so there was no duty on it. We were practically giving it to them.’

‘But it turned out these okes were going to my secretary, getting labels from her, and – because the company was called the Boston Bag Company – wrote ‘Boston Breweries’ on the bottles and sold them to shebeens.’

And that’s how Boston Breweries started. Chris suddenly found himself spending four days a week in his factory’s garage in order to directly supply shebeens with his homebrew.

‘I reckoned, well, you’re unlicensed, I’m unlicensed – let’s make beer.’ The story comes easily. He’s proud of his brewery’s genesis.

What officially started as a garage operation with an output of 4 000 litres a month in 2000 is today an 80 000 litre-a-month microbrewery, brewing a dozen or so beers within its walls that are enjoyed throughout SA – and not only in shebeens. But you can tell Chris wasn’t counting on his little project getting so big: the factory floor is a haphazard maze of boilers, fermentation tanks and packaging lines. As such, he recently began applying the classic paradigm of New York City real estate to solve his space issues: grow taller, not broader. He’s cut the tops off his fermentation tanks in a bid to expand their capacity. It’s undeniably the work of a man obsessive about his craft.

In addition to the five Boston-branded beers – of which the fresh, lightly malty Naked Mexican and the caramel-toned kick of the Hazard Ten Ale are most recommended – Barnard’s premises are also the birthplace of beers for both Jack Black Brewery and the increasingly-popular Darling Brewery. But the most exciting development at Boston is undoubtedly the creation of SA’s first commercially-brewed pumpkin ale. Traditionally a North American seasonal, pumpkin ale is a point of contention for new world beer connoisseurs, some of whom argue that they’re too cloying and gimmicky to be taken seriously.

Boston’s Van Hunk’s Pumpkin Ale doesn’t fall into that trap, however. Lightly pumpkin-pie sweet and satisfyingly bitter, its rich veins of nutmeg, coriander and cinnamon create a sprightly and aromatic ale that’s bound to appeal to enthusiasts and more tentative drinkers alike. Admittedly, it might not sell so well in shebeens, but it certainly sets the bar for more innovation from Cape Town’s resident plastics manufacturer-cum-chief brewer.

‘I just think it’s a cool beer,’ he says, shrugging again, equal parts resigned and content.

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This piece was originally written for GQ.co.za, and is viewable here.

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 is well-known for being the subject of one of the English language’s worst poems) is St. Andrews, the home of golf and a town more liberally bestowed with architectural beauty. Hell, Prince William went to university here - as did his now-wife, Catherine Middleton. (Admittedly, I’m only mentioning Kate Middleton to bring up memories of her sister’s perfectly symmetrical behind, of which my housemate is quite a fan.)

I traveled there with my family for a day trip on a day that turned out to be rather miserable. Although we’ve had an unseasonably mild Christmas in the UK, St. Andrews always seems to be windy. (It’s what makes its golf so menacingly difficult.) Luckily, there was a wonderful bottle store in the centre of town that I could seek refuge in.

Simply put, Luvians is the best bottle store I’ve had the pleasure to step into. Luvians works with 16 suppliers to bring a comprehensive selection of British and international beers to their well-stocked shelves. Expect to find local rarities, small batches and (almost) inexhaustible variety here. And if you’re overwhelmed (as I was), it’s good to know that their staff really know their beer, whiskeys, and - pleasingly - their cigars, too.

There’s also around a dozen good bars in St. Andrews. The Keys Bar on Market Street was a nice warm hole, but it unfortunately lacked cask ales, something which usually makes or breaks my perceptions of a British pub. The staff were lovely, however, and the banter between the local patrons was entertaining and welcoming. St. Andrews, though undeniably a tourist and student town, has a thriving and warm local community of football lovers and arguing families, and not just golfers and posh boys.

The dearth of ales in the Keys was mitigated not only by the locals, but also by the two local stouts recommended to me by Jamie, the helpful, knowledgeable and friendly bloke who helped me at Luvians. First was Black Isle’s Hibernator Oatmeal Stout. Spicy-toasted and a little porridgy, the roast on this organic stout lends both a satisfying creamy mouthfeel and a pleasingly unrefined finish to it, which would be pleasing enough if it didn’t also come alive with touches of dried dark fruit, burnt coffee and toffee. Despite its heaviness in flavour and 7.2% a.b.v., it’s an oddly refreshing beer, prickly and tongue-smackingly tasty. It’s a very good stout, and unlike anything available in South Africa.

Luckie Ale’s Russian Imperial Stout, made about 30 minutes from St. Andrews in Cupar, is even better. A relatively unknown beer, it pours an impenetrable black with a lacy brown head. Get stuck in: it requires a slow and savouring drinker to decipher it. Although I hear it differs noticeably from batch to batch, my bottle abounded with heavy-roasted oatmeal and cereal, as did the Black Isle Hibernator – but this was deeper, accompanied by strong coffee, a little chocolate (sweet, not cacoa-ish) and a nuttiness that developed the more I sipped at it. It’s well-rounded, soft on the mouth but deep on the palate. By the end of it, I needed a nap – and napped happily I did.

Needless to say, like Luvians Bottle Shop, both of these beers are highly recommended.