OnTap Magazine

OT: You’ve been a familiar face on the South African beer scene for a while - how did you get into brewing? MS: Like many in the industry I started out homebrewing. I found a very outdated homebrewing book on a friend's bookshelf and set out to recreate some craft beers I had been gifted from overseas. I got so into it that I decided to take it more seriously and was lucky enough to meet Andre from Woodstock Brewery at the time that he was looking for brewers. OT: How did the move to Okavango Craft Brewery come about? MS: I was working at Patiala in Cape Town and was looking for a new challenge when I was approached about the position at OCB. I first visited Botswana on a family holiday at the age of 10 and was really taken with the country. Ever since then I wanted to return and always had an idea in the back of my mind about living here. That trip was actually the reason I went on to study Zoology and with the link the brewery has to conservation, when I was offered the job it all just made sense. OT: What are the biggest challenges running a brewery in northern Botswana? MS: There are lots! The biggest is probably that you can’t source anything locally except for millet and water. One of the other main issues is transport. We are buying everything at the same cost as a South African microbrewery but then the landing costs add on a sizable amount. Plus, everything takes two weeks longer than in SA! OT: Have you experimented at all with traditional millet beers? MS: Last year we were in the Panhandle and were invited to join a celebration that featured Mothuto - a traditional, opaque beer made with millet. We drank a fair amount of it and afterwards I filled a two-litre growler which I brought back to the brewery and worked on isolating and propagating the yeast strains found in the beer. I brewed a batch of golden ale and added the Mothuto, then left it to do its thing. The beer spent 18 months in a barrel and was later blended with marula fruit. We’ll be releasing about 150 litres of it in 750ml bottles later this year. OT: You won two medals at this year’s African Beer Cup, as well as the BASA African Celebration Award, which goes to a beer that is championing African ingredients. The beer that won, Old Bull Stout, uses millet - can you tell us more about that? MS: We actually use millet in all of our beers in varying proportions, from 20% right up to 100%. In fact, millet is the reason that the brewery exists. Two of the founders work in elephant conservation and focus on elephant-aware farming in a region where millet is a very viable crop. They needed an outlet for the grain, and eventually they came up with the idea of a craft brewery. We buy the millet and malt it in small batches to use across the OCB range. OT: What’s next for OCB? MS: We are currently working on upping our malting programme so that we can make better quality malt in larger batches. The goal is to create a range of malt varieties and sell malted millet to other breweries in southern Africa. We’re currently malting about 30kg of millet per week but the goal is to increase that significantly. We’ll also be planning plenty of events at our brewpub, which is now fully up and running. After a rocky start that coincided with the arrival of the Coronavirus pandemic, Okavango Craft Brewery is at last fully operating. Based in Maun, it is currently the only microbrewery in Botswana and what’s more, the fledgling brewery recently won a few awards at the African Beer Cup. We thought that was worth celebrating, so we chatted to head brewer Murray Stephenson to find out what else is happening up north. 18 | Spring 2022 | ontapmag.co.za