OnTap Magazine

ontapmag.co.za | Autumn 2021 | 17 “I t makes me sad when you visit a brewery and there is no brewing going on. A brewery must be alive with sounds and smells.” I remember Charlie Murray telling me this as his reasoning for wanting to start School of Hops in early 2019. Charlie is a familiar face on the Cape Town craft beer scene. He was part of the team that launched Hout Bay’s Urban Brewing Company in 2015 and while he is still involved at Urban, he found himself seeking a new venture. So when Long Beach Brewery came up for grabs he stepped in and bought the premises. “It was the location and the licence that I wanted,” says Charlie, who opted to take the venue without any of the tanks or brewing vessels. Instead of setting up a sizable system for production, Charlie bought two 50-litre setups – an imported Braumeister and a locally made Demacraft – and set about building up a taproom where the aroma of mashing grains and simmering hops would always linger in the background. BEER SCHOOL IS IN It’s a bit of a craft beer cliché to say that there’s always something new on tap, but in this case, it is no exaggeration. Charlie brews three or four times a week and there are also constantly rotating brews from the School of Hops alumni on tap. “I wanted to have a place where homebrewers felt comfortable,” Charlie tells me. “They might not want to buy all the equipment to have at home or maybe they don’t have a space to set up a homebrew kit, so they can come here and brew.” The experience costs R650 and once fermentation is complete, alumni get to take home a 12-pack of their beer. The rest goes on tap, often to be drunk by the School of Hops graduates and their friends. Long Beach doesn’t just offer sanctuary for homebrewers though. In 2019 Charlie was joined by Tim Bugler, one of the founding members of the Brewers Co-op. Tim was looking for a home for his 400-litre system, originally built for VonB (anyone remember them?) and later used by Little Wolf. Tim also moved his 50-litre Demacraft in and having left the Co-op in mid-2020, he now brews his Beerworks brand from Long Beach’s premises in Noordhoek. The Beerworks brews are available on tap at Long Beach, alongside the brewery’s flagships and the very limited edition School of Hops beers. And recently another range has joined the taps – one that has proven extremely popular. DIY DOG It started in early 2020, when Corona was still best known as a beer and the word ‘prohibition’ was only ever used in conversations about 1930s America. Tim had been toying with the idea of brewing his way through the BJCP (Beer Judge Certification Program) guidelines, trying his hand at every single style. Somehow – and neither Tim nor Charlie can recall quite how – that morphed into a project to reproduce the entire BrewDog catalogue. It was 2016 when Scottish craft brewery BrewDog first released every single one of their recipes, encouraging people to try and recreate their brews at home – an initiative they called DIY “Learn how to brew in the comfort of someone else’s brewery” – that’s the tagline of Noordhoek-based School of Hops. The five-hour all-grain course costs R650 and includes a brewday lunch, a dozen bottles of your creation to take home – plus bragging rights when you pop into Long Beach and see the rest on tap. Check out schoolofhops.co.za for more. Dog. Each year the catalogue has been updated, and now contains an incredible 415 recipes for everything from simple pale ales to a mango and peach milkshake IPA, and even a South African stout (featuring rooibos). So on 11 February 2020, Tim and Charlie mashed in on their very first BrewDog clone: Punk IPA. Since then, they have brewed two batches a week, firing up the kettles every single Wednesday throughout the year. I join them for DIY Dog brew #100 – Hop Fiction APA. Charlie has generously added my name to the brew sheet as assistant brewer although I’m the first to admit that I don’t do much to help. I’m really here to chat; to find out how the brews have been received and how the project is going. “If I can say one thing that has kept me interested in brewing it is this project,” says Charlie. “It has opened my eyes to a lot of new styles and I have really learned a lot – am still learning a lot.” There have of course been hits and misses. For Charlie, the standouts have been Tokyo Rising, a whisky cask-aged imperial stout, and BrewDog’s flagship Punk IPA, which they have brewed numerous times due to popular demand. SCHOOL’S IN A new keg goes on and it’s gone in a couple of hours The Punk IPA clone has been a big hit with Charlie's customers, who keep demanding a fresh batch Tim (left) and Charlie mash in on DIY Dog batch #100