OnTap Magazine

LUCY CORNE EVENT RECAP CHEF SCHOOL TAKES TOP SPOT AT 2021 INTERVARSITY BREWING COMPETITION S tudents from the 1000 Hills Chef School in KZN won the top prize at the 2021 Intervarsity Brewing Competition. Their Elephant Balls IPA wowed the judging panels, winning both the IPA and overall categories. “In the build up to Intervarsity, we got very involved in the fun side of brewing. We would come in on our day off, laugh about brewing and bottling complications and give our beers ridiculous names,” says 1000 Chef School team member Martin Meyer. “The common joke was, ‘what if we actually win something?!’ Fast forward, and that joke hit home when we got called up for best IPA. What truly stunned us though was when we got best of show!” “It was a great honour to attend such an epic event alongside such excellent minds,” says teammateAshley Stapelfeldt. “We learnt a large amount of new info and had one of the best weekends of our lives! Shout out to SAB, BASA, AB-InBev, Foodbev SETA, and CUT for making such a memorable event.” This year marked the 14th annual Intervarsity Brewing Competition, a unique event initiated by South African Breweries. Any institute of higher learning can enter, with 12 universities and colleges submitting beer to this year’s competition. Team members practice on their university’s communal brew kit throughout the year, developing recipes and deciding which beers to enter in the competition. But the event is now much more than just a beer contest. It has grown into a full weekend event featuring brewery visits and a day-long conference. Now hosted annually at the Central University of Technology (CUT) in Bloemfontein, the competition ends with the all-important awards dinner, catered by students of the on-site hotel school. A FULL PROGRAMME Proceedings kicked off with a welcome from the Beer Association of South Africa (BASA) who used the opportunity to launch their Brew Routes site (brewroutes. co.za) to a new audience. BASA sponsored an afternoon trip to Bloem’s two microbreweries – Stellar and The Famous Brew & Still – where students, judges and speakers got to network over tasters of Bloem’s beers. The main event though, was the Saturday session, which started with a series of talks from industry experts, some speaking in person, others Zooming in from Germany or the USA. AB InBev’s Anton Erasmus kicked off the day with a Megan Gemmell celebrates with her students Ashley Stapelfeldt and Martin Meyer (photo courtesy of Dion van Huyssteen) 60 | Summer 2021 | ontapmag.co.za