ON THE WATER
NEELS BLOM: How to combine beer and trout has passed us by in SA
‘It is irksome, but not surprising. Something has gone wrong since South Africans invented industrial brewing, though it does not require much analysis’
Beer is important. It is hardly necessary to argue its virtues, even to nondrinkers who would find it difficult to fault the economic value of matching a readily produced and distributed product with what comes naturally: a near-universal demand to slake one’s thirst with mildly alcoholic value-added water. There is going to be trouble over this, but it is spring and the past weekend’s braai-fire smoke lingers as a reminder of the nation’s glories come next weekend. If you’re an empiricist you will conclude that beer drinking, partying and their social consequences are what comes naturally to South Africans and that it is a good thing. This is not a facile assessment of our national character. Beer drinking has had a profound effect on the economy, South African Breweries’s naff Charles Glass Society campaign notwithstanding — certain perennial malcontents switched to Namibian beer and hipsters discovered the ever hopeful craft-brewed garage vat.Breweries and its many incarnations c...
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