From humble beginnings as a worker’s drink beer has become not only respectable, but hip, writes David Shapshak
Lazy, hazy sun-filled days, beaches and bare flesh: these are the images that summer and beer conjure up – and rugby, let’s not forget where we are.
But beer was once the little people’s drink, the common folk, who couldn’t afford wine. In Eastern Europe it was the workers’ drink, the proletariat’s last refuge from the system. And in the last few decades, the real-man’s drink – hooligan rugby players and supporters, sloshing louts spilling beer on each other.
Once the preserve of these rugged men, beer, like cigars, is now hip for women to drink. Its profile now makes it not only respectable, but desirable. It’s also gained a kind of social respectability, often seen at the best of functions with champagne and caviar.
All my beer-drinking adolescence (I went to a rugby-playing high school) I thought beer meant lager. South African Breweries’s monopoly has given us the fifth-biggest beer operation in the world, our only hope of combating crime (in the guise of the man who made it the fifth biggest, Meyer Kahn, now South African Police Service chief executive officer) and not much variety.
It would be simplistic and decadent to say the best thing about the dropping of sanctions was the freeing of channels to import beer, but I won’t be tempted. The foreign breweries must have leapt at the chance to sell their wares here, where naive South Africans willingly pay the exchange-rate ratios, the heavy import duties, and the local suppliers’ and retailers’ mark-ups on anything marked “imported”.
Have the word “imported” anywhere on a product and it’s destined to fly off the shelves. Or better still, leave it in its unreadable foreign language and it will move even quicker.
South Africans have suddenly been confronted with not just the few foreign beers available in the late Eighties (Mexico never seemed to have a problem with supplying us, for example) but with all the renowned world beers and an exhaustive range of lesser-known, collectors’ brands.
Topping the list of imports is the Irish stalwart, Guinness, and its not so heavy cousin, Kilkenny. I was coaxed into drinking it when I was living in London by brilliant adverts featuring Rutger Hauer. Guinness’s dark, rich, stout flavour took some getting used to, but it has gained something of a cult status among beer drinkers. “They give it to pregnant women and horses, you know,” every Irishman I’ve ever met has told me.
Kilkenny has cornered a large following in South Africa, combining the richness and froth of Guinness’s flavour with a much lighter, golden-coloured body. It also has some novelty value as the first “draft” beer from a can, using a “widget” or plastic ring which causes the beer to foam as the can is opened.
And, Achtung, the Bavarians have found us and the market for good Bavarian beer, which is arguably the best beer anyway, is flooded. They know how to make beer in Europe and the Belgian Duvel is the flagship of the rich, hopsy, creamy beers – although
it’s really an ale which has been repeatedly fermented.
Although most of Europe regards Heineken as cheap and unexceptional, as one of the first imports to South Africa it’s become quite a vaunted, well-drunk beer, even with its price tag – or perhaps because of it.
There’s also the celebrated Dutch Hoegaarden witbier (white beer) made from malt and wheat. And there’s Grolsch, a superior lager, also made in Holland.
The best of the British contribution is Newcastle Brown Ale, in its famous bottle, and Boddington’s (also with a widget).
Your sushi friends will know all about Kirin beer, served ice-cold as a counterpoint to the raw fish and wasabi. For Thai food, Gold Singha beer is both refreshing and a counterpoint to spicy food.
American beer – please don’t say Budweiser, which has nothing on its Czech namesake – has some lively characters, like Rolling Rock, the very pleasant Miller’s draft. If you’re going to drink Australian, it’ll have to be Fosters for now, mate.
Then there’s Windhoek Brewery’s fine beers, which are chiselling a niche for themselves on South African Breweries’s turf, with much mud-slinging between the two about whose brewing process isworse. Nonetheless, Windhoek Lager, Light, Export and Special, as well as Namibia’s Holsten, are all good beers compared with our local lads.
Not to be outdone by the import stampede, South African Breweries this month began brewing Hofbrau premium lager, the flagship beer of Munich’s famous Hofbrauhaus, the most prestigious of its pubs and the epicentre of the annual Oktoberfest. Brewed on licence from its Bavarian brewery, Hofbrau is something of a win for South African Breweries, as it’s considered the Roll Royce of German full-malt lager, brewed in accordance with the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot, or beer purity laws.
Perhaps the increased consumption of beer is due in part to the profusion of British and Irish pubs which have spring up under generic names around the country, and the sports bars sprouting everywhere. Beer drinkers now have grand ole halls like the Vikings to slosh in.
And all we had for decades was South African Breweries’s lager. A good conspiracy theorist would have a field day with this.
A good hedonist, on the other hand …