OnTap Magazine

ontapmag.co.za | Summer 2024 | 45 Is it a lack of awareness, the conspiring of other alcohol industries, poor government, over-regulation – or all of the above? Well, I have not seen any evidence of a conspiracy. I mean, there is a saying in wine: “It takes a lot of great beer to make great wine!” Some wineries also want to open breweries on site, because it has the potential to widen their product offering. (And it helps that beer is not a seasonal product, so it could employ people all year round.) The more likely reason can be subscribed to the silos of government. Specifically, referring to the competing priorities of various bodies and institutions within central, regional, and local government. Liquor laws are centrally mandated, but regionally governed and have a clear list of required documents needed when submitting an application. Officials along any of these steps are generally unconcerned by the process of obtaining said documents in the various municipalities, or even why the documents might be important. By the time they see the application, they start to count down their window to process it, ignorant of how long the business has been waiting to get to the next step in the chain. Municipalities also don’t seem to be aware that delays in obtaining zoning documents delay the whole venture. That would be the same for SARS: once you have a license, your application starts and they have a window in which to reach a conclusion (which is often not met.) As I have explained above, by the time SARS gets your excise application, you might already be a year into the process, with some unrecoverable debt to boot. Over the course of my conversation with government while researching this article, one thing became clear: municipalities have not been asked to change the zoning definitions, nor are they aware of the rest of the process. How can we blame them when nationally there is no overarching strategy for zoning definitions and how beer fits in? Here are some shackles that could be removed if industry and government were to sit around a table to try and unlock the potential of craft beer as a rural employer. 1. Industry (associations or stakeholders) needs to ask for the addition of beer as a definition in zoningby-laws in the many individual municipalities throughout South Africa. This then requires engagement with government to ensure these definitions are in line with the needs of a viable craft brewery. 2. Liquor boards need to be engaged to ensure that they also understand how a craft brewery might use a license. It might be as an extension to a restaurant that already serves alcohol. There should be a logical approach applied to the speed at which licenses get issued. This is where top-down organisation probably wouldn’t be a bad thing. 3. SARS needs to be engaged to speed up the issuing of excise licenses, perhaps, similarly to VAT, by introducing various tiers based on the size and risk of the application. Bond registrations for restaurants that have 200-litre brewing systems and really only want to brew for on- site and takeaway consumption is assuming a much higher debt than is possible. 4. Educating government on the nuances of cheap alcohol vs premium products would go a long way in diffusing the situation. All beer should be commercially viable. Craft beer is a premium product that is sold in lower volumes, all while generating a higher ratio of employment. Putting obstacles in place purely because it is alcohol adds to the barrier of entry, ultimately leading to fewer premium products and the small businesses that make them. So, the answer to our initial question, as expected, is complicated. There is no silver bullet, but a combination of small changes to regulations and processes could not only create a booming craft beer trade, but also bring with it reliable employment in rural areas. This seems worth the effort. Many South African beers are made using locally grown hops? After WWI, South African Breweries sought to become less dependent on imported hops due to surging popularity of beer in South Africa, as well as supply issues and hop shortages. They started what is known colloquially as the SAB Hop Project in the 1930s and started growing hops against the odds in South Africa. The main challenge was growing a hop variety with good yield, but because hops require longer days, a series of cross- breeding experiments took place and off the back of that, eighty-odd years later, we have a number of locally grown varietals of hops being used in craft beer as well as beers like Castle Lager. WHAT IS DRIVING THIS RED TAPE? SO WHAT CAN WE DO? DIDYOU KNOW?