OnTap Magazine

22 | Summer 2024 | ontapmag.co.za with an in-house practicum, and more decadent food than I anticipated at a varsity brewing competition. Along the edges of the large courtyard, the various co-sponsors – including the Beer Association of South Africa (BASA), SAB, Heineken, Fermentis, and the Craft Brewers Association of South Africa (CBASA) – display their brand-laden banners. In the back, taps and fridges offering Heineken and SAB beer brands are free and available (post-noon) to all attendees. The weekend schedule is rigorous. Friday morning includes two different in-depth beer tasting sessions led by experts, as well as a presentation on career paths in the beer industry. That afternoon, the competition judges are escorted to a separate auditorium for an off-flavour advanced sensory calibration session while the university teams take turns presenting both themselves and the beers they have entered. On Saturday morning, a group of experienced judges have their work cut out for them as they sample the 84 beers submitted under the six style categories: Lager, Sour, Summer, IPA, Wild African Ale, and Aged. Event organizer, Olga de Smidt, lays out the context for these style selections: the lagers and the IPAs are easier styles for the students to practice their basic brewing skills on, and the sour category was added thanks to a “sour craze” a few years back. Those three styles are now a constant. “But then we tried to include at least two innovative styles because the idea is to push the students to just go mad…That's how you get new styles or something insane that you would never have thought to put into beer.” Exemplifying these ‘think-outside-the- box’ styles are the low alcohol beer category (Summer), which requires students to brew a beer that is lower in alcohol, but crucially that does not compromise on flavour. The second is the African Wild Ale. This is the third year that the competition has included the African Wild Ale category. The idea is to move students away from relying on commercially available ingredients and instead incorporate local ingredients. Not being able to use commercial yeast is particularly challenging and really forces the students to dig in on the subject and come up with alternate sources of this central ingredient. This is where, Olga tells me conspiratorially, you really start to see the creative thinking come alive. Saturday morning, while judges continue to judge, students attend a series of presentations providing more examples of careers in “beer,” including talks by an employee of each Heineken and SAB, a former participant of the programme who has gone on to work with South Africa’s first hop farm, and a craft brewery owner. That afternoon every team has a booth set-up around the atrium courtyard and the competing beers are available for participants to taste. Music plays in the background as the over-130 attendees mill about the room, sipping beers and listening to wide-eyed students regale them with the stories behind their beers. I overhear the occasional judge provide encouraging feedback, while SAB and Heineken reps also make their rounds. The winners will be announced over dinner that evening and the atmosphere is a mixture of excitement and anticipation. “THERE’S A FUTURE IN BEER” “In what department is your university’s brewing programme housed?” I ask the many students I speak to that Saturday afternoon. The answers: Microbiology, Chemistry, Food Science and Technology, Biotechnology, Applied Science, Chemical Engineering, and the like. Some of the students are third- or fourth-year honours students, some are graduate students, a few are working on a PhD. Suffice it to say, this is a studious bunch, and as I am about to learn, in it for far more than beer drinking. I notice something else right away, looking around that atrium: the students seem evenly split male-female. Bongisiwe Zozo from Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) is a chemistry student in the Food Science and Technology department, which hosts the brewing programme. They needed someone with a chemistry background, so she got involved, although she admits that she was initially less interested in beer and more in learning about fermentation. That interest has since evolved, and when asked about her team’s beers, she explains with enthusiasm: “We wanted to celebrate our mothers who brew umqombothi at home, as well as the women who are already in the industry, brewing beers.” The team named most of their beers after prominent women or African Queens, such as their “Queen Modjadji IPA,” for the queen in Limpopo who would summon rain for her people, and drought for her enemies. This speaks to a tension you often encounter which is that most people know that it was the women across this Judges evaluating competitiom beers. Olga de Smidt: Competition Director from CUT