OnTap Magazine

ontapmag.co.za | Autumn 2026 | 25 HOMEBRU I don’t need to tell you how cans are better than bottles in every way. And that is the big change. 10 years ago, the majority of craft brewers were bottling. Not only were bottles still seen as absolutely necessary for a premium image, but canning was not easily accessible. Today, cans have seen widespread adoption across the global beer industry, made possible by small- scale canning lines and effective education of beer drinkers. We Saffas have been a bit slower on adopting cans, but where we have, it’s made a world of difference. 06 Fans of Cans Since the early days of the craft beer revolution, one of the defining factors of these brewers was experimentation. As things got more competitive and boundaries were being pushed ever further, things got a bit weird. There were unpasteurized fruit bombs (which turned into literal bombs as they refermented in package), ever more ridiculous adjuncts (whale testicles, oysters, actual cash money anyone?), and viscous slop on the extreme of pastry sours. Naturally, the purists clutch their pearls, the devotees rush to queue up for the next Instagram post, and the rest of us sit happily in the middle, enjoying the greatest ever variety of styles and flavours to suit any open-minded drinker. 07 Beer Gets Weird A decade ago, hops like Mosaic, Mandarina Bavaria, Cashmere, and Azacca were just getting on the radar. We were into the push for hop growers to provide greater intensity and diversity of aromas and flavours to serve the growth of hop-forward styles. We now have around 300 commercially grown hop varieties worldwide. However, a shifting climate is affecting hop yields globally — with some traditional varieties looking set to disappear in the coming years — so growers are focusing on developing hops with greater resilience. The next 10 years will look very different, but you can be sure we will see many new interesting hops finding their way into our beers. 08 Hops Till You Drop In 2016, craft beer was a massive and still-growing market. But like all growth markets, eventually forces conspire to slow that growth, and every beer market has experienced this to some degree. Brewing is a tough business: capital- intensive, volatile input costs, a product that spoils easily, and poor margins. Market shocks from Covid and constrained consumer spending meant craft breweries have been pushed hard for a number of years now. The positive is that this has built more resilient breweries that have found a way to adapt and thrive. 09 Ups and Downs In South Africa, there are fewer breweries today than there were in 2016. That’s not the full picture, though. In 2016, quality was massively unreliable. At that stage, I was trying every new beer I could find, and dumping about half of them down the drain. These days, I rarely come across a beer with the kinds of packaging and brewing issues so common a decade ago. We have a small beer market, but the breweries that have found a way to make it work are brewing world-class beers, and to me that has been the greatest development in our industry over this time. 10 Quality over Quantity