OnTap Magazine

The wall of Afro Caribbean Brewing Company is adorned with photos of well-known brewers and illustrious overseas beer personalities. Some just dropped in for a pint, but many of them stuck around for a brew. Greg and his crew have carried out collabs with a range of international brewers including Garrett Oliver (Brooklyn Brewery, USA), Spike Buckowski (Terrapin Beer Co., USA), Crystalla Ng (Red Dot Brewing, Singapore) and John Keeling (Fuller’s, UK). We thought the On Tap team should be next, so earlier this year we started conceptualising our own collab beer to be released with the summer edition of the magazine. The result is the beer you see on this issue’s cover: Carnaval na Boca. The idea was to create the perfect beer to sip at Christmas. Now, if you mention Christmas beer to the average beer lover worldwide, their thoughts will go to rich doppelbocks, spiced ales, big Belgian beers or warming imperial stouts. But who wants to sip a viscose 10% ABV malt bomb while you’re standing around the braai or cooling off in the pool? Literally no- one, so we needed a beer suited to the South African festive season. For inspiration we looked to another southern hemisphere country – Brazil. The Catharina Sour is one of my favourite beer styles. Inspired by the Berliner Weisse although slightly higher in alcohol, it’s a kettle-soured beer with the addition of tons of fresh fruit. Typically, these would be some of the unique tropical fruits that grow in abundance in the Santa Catarina provinceof southernBrazil.We tried to recreate that sense of celebrating local produce in our version. In retrospect, it wasn’t a style perfectly suited for a collab. Every collaboration brew has certain moments that are captured and shared on social media to prove that they happened: mashing in, adding hops, cleaning out the mash tun and having a few beers. But a kettle-soured beer is a longer process that creates, in the words of Jake Sandenbergh, “the world’s most boring brew day”. OnTappublisher AndrewThomas mashed in with Greg (and we have the photos to prove it) and then we skipped straight to having a few beers, for on day one there are no hops to add and only the shortest of boils just to sanitise the wort. I suppose we could have helped clean out the mash tun, but by that time we were happily installed in the beer garden coming up with a name for our brew. Later that day, Jake pitched a tub of lactobacillus into the kettle…and the wait began. The last message I received that day was from TJ who at 11pmwas “pretty much watching a temperature probe at this point” – perhaps not the glamour he imagined when he first moved from bar to brewery. The next day, the pH target was hit, the wort was boiled with a smattering of hops and later that evening, fermentation began. Ten days later the fruit was added: 30kg of guava as well as a few kilos of granadilla with the sense of local provenance the Catharina Sour prides itself on – the granadillas came from my own garden. The result is a beer that is assertively sour but with enough tropical fruit notes to stop that sourness overwhelming the palate. It’s crisp, it’s refreshing, it’s not too high in alcohol. It is the perfect beer for the South African summer. TIME FOR A COLLAB BREW 24 | Summer 2022 | ontapmag.co.za