OnTap Magazine

MASH OUT Every issue we ask our readers a burning question. This month we wanted people to delve into the vaults... DANIE ODENDAAL Owner of Bearded Brew My first brewing experience was back in 1999 as a trainee at SAB on a 50 000-litre brewhouse! During my commercial career I brewed on everything from fully manual to fully automated equipment from 500 litres up to 150 000 litres per batch. It was only around 2006 that I took up homebrewing. Compared to my commercial breweries’ fermenters at the time, I would have to brew 3500 home brews to fill one standard high gravity fermenter! That’s almost 10 years to fill one fermenter if I was brewing once every day. IMKE PAPE Head brewer at Brauhaus Afrika My very first brew day was in the fall of 2010. We were still waiting for my brew house to be transferred into our new building. Together with brew master friend Heiko Feuring I brewed on his 30L homemade system in my garden. We created my now famous Dunkel for the first time. Everything was new and exciting for me and the beer came out delicious. I will never forget that feeling of accomplishment and pride to have crafted such a beauty. The Dunkel is still my favourite!! JOYCE DENSON Brewer at Darling Brew Mine was all-grain on a 50-litre Braumeister at the brewery. I remember I couldn’t reach the gravity target and looking back I think it was a combination of mash temperatures and that the grains were not milled properly. In general it was learning experience and these are some of the things I now pay much more attention to when brewing. THEO DE BEER Former owner of Anvil Alehouse My first brew was over 30 years ago with Moritz Kallmeyer, founder of Draymans Brewery in Pretoria. Unfortunately the details are lost in time. All I can recall is that it was an all-grain brew on a small 20-litre homebrew system…and that a lot beer was consumed in the process! PG GROENEWALD Owner of Mountain Brewing Co. The first proper brew I did was in 2014 – it was one of the kits where you just basically add water and it turned out to be awesome beer. Later that year I started all-grain and I thought ‘how difficult can it be?!’ We didn’t have a mill so I bought pre-milled grain from a homebrew store, along with all the hops and yeast. I actually bought five all-grain kits, and over five days I brewed five 20-litre batches but none of them fermented. That was when I first realised that this brewing thing is hard! Looking back I think it was because the yeast packets were old but at the time I started reading several hours a day to try and work out what had gone wrong and that studying is what set me along this path. OLAF MORGENROTH Head Brewer at Franschhoek Beer Co. The first batch of beer I made was in 2010 at Stellenbosch University. It was an IPA and at the time I had no idea what an IPA was, let alone how it tasted! After the brew was finished, and after quick Wikipedia search on “IPA”, I drove to all the bottle stores in Stellenbosch trying to find one to give me an idea of what our beer should taste like. Eventually I found a Devil’s Peak King’s Blockhouse. I was hooked and decided to pursue a career in brewing after that. I can’t remember how the beer came out or if it was to style. I think I was just happy with the fact that I had made beer for the first time. MARIUS BOTHA Owner and brewer at Hazeldean Brewing Co. I brewed my first beer about 10 years ago with two friends. It was a Mangrove Jack’s extract kit. The finished product was a disaster, but the experience was magical. It was a bit of flying by the seat of our pants stuff, repeatedly forgetting, or altering steps on the fly, but we didn’t care. We were enjoying sipping on craft beers and imagining how much more superior our finished product would be. Ten years later, thank goodness I’m still learning all the way! CAN YOU REMEMBER YOUR FIRST EVER BREW? 64 | Autumn 2022 | ontapmag.co.za