The imperative of facilitating growth within the country’s craft beer market could catalyse social and environmental sustainability, highlights Johannesburg-based craft brewery Tolokazi Beer.

The company says that the advent of craft breweries has played a defining role in magnifying the call to apply brewing best practices on a broader level.

This includes determining how to use water more efficiently, generating less wastewater and solid waste and decreasing total energy consumption, thereby ensuring that all beer ingredients and chemical processes remain nature-orientated.

Tolokazi Beer founder and CEO Apiwe Nxusani-Mawela also highlights the significance of non-Western brewing techniques – which include the regular use of crushed maize, maize malt, marula, sorghum, yeast and water – as a way of a developing a unique selling point in the domestic and international craft beer market.

“Local and international consumers should get excited at the prospect of using traditional ingredients. I think that, as a country, we should start marketing our own beer styles to ensure that global consumers become aware of our unique value proposition,” she explains.

However, she also notes the importance of ensuring that these techniques are malleable to current consumer habits and tastes, adding that there is a concerted effort within the company to understand these aspects, particularly among young people and those living in townships.

Nxusani-Mawela has noted the maturation of the country’s craft beer market, despite sizable competition from commercial beer companies, contending that there is increased visibility of craft breweries throughout all nine provinces.

This visibility helps to increase the status and credibility of the sector and thereby facilitates its ability to compete adequately with larger commercial competitors.

“As the craft beer industry grows in other parts of the country, and away from the main economic hubs of Johannesburg and Cape Town, there is also an opportunity to gradually tap into the potential of domestic and international tourism.”

Concerns

Nxusani-Mawela notes that the regulatory landscape governing South Africa’s craft beer market is constraining growth, adding that, often, this segment of the brewery sector is ignored by government funding institutions and other government-funded development schemes.

Moreover, the sizable commercial brewers have dominated the brewery market for an extended period and have been able to control the market through their ubiquitous advertising and pervasive marketing strategies, which have been largely successful in persuading and influencing retailers and consumers.

Specifically, she notes that, because of their bigger budgets, commercial brewers can do more than craft brewers to penetrate retail spaces.

However, Nxusani-Mawela says that the ability of the younger and upwardly mobile generation of brewers to travel around the world bodes well for the craft sector as more people could return to the country with novel insights that relate to the untapped potential of local craft brewing market.

Further, the younger generation’s supposed adventurous spirit may translate to a willingness to try less conventional options, such as new and craft beers.

Social Upliftment

Tolokazi’s values are underpinned by a duty to facilitate community development and Nxusani-Mawela highlights the need to uplift various stakeholders in the craft brewing value chain, especially farmers who provide the necessary brewing ingredients.

As a qualified microbiologist and the first black woman in South Africa to have founded a microbrewery, Nxusani-Mawela stresses the importance of ensuring that the next generation of brewmasters and microbiologists actualise their aspirations in this sector.

Through her Brewsters Academy, she trains and educates young, aspirant, black female and male brewers on understanding Western and non-Western brewing techniques.

“I believe that the time has come for us to stand up and start owning our space in the brewery sector and I want Tolokazi to champion African heritage in the craft beer industry,” she concludes.