Storming the castle

I will not say how and when I came to understand the logic of amber-economics and neither will I divulge the name of the individual who so graciously introduced me to the illicitness of underage lager drinking, but I will say that beer makes the world go round.

And that if you’re unlucky enough to find yourself in a country which doesn’t make, sell or drink beer, then that place, godforsaken as it must be, will definitely have another selection of home-brewed something that is made from something, that skops you like nothing else. And as the locals laugh at your leering smile and your teetering perambulation, you will wonder why this unusual drink is not bottled and sold in South Africa.

But of course later on, while crying for your mother, at a rural clinic where aspirin is the only familiar medicine and stomach pumping may involve a vacuum cleaner, you will realise that beer is always a better option.

Indeed having recently summoned Whyte & Mackay’s master distiller, the inimitable Richard Paterson, to Durban in the middle of the Whisky Live Festival in Cape Town and Johannesburg and having had the privilege of tasting Whyte & Mackay’s superb range of premium whiskies, including the Jura and the Dalmore and having had the distinct and singular honour of experiencing the Dalmore 62-year-old (of which there were only ever 12 bottles produced and which sells for about $51000.00 (USD) per bottle or $2040 (USD) per 30ml tot) it occurred to me that whisky is not so much about drinking as it is about the appreciation of an age-old art.

And the same goes for beer.

From the earliest days the monastic brewers sought to infuse their secret recipes with their carefully selected local ingredients to produce a richly refreshing brew which warmed the heart and nourished the soul as it went down. And being the God-fearing clerics that they were they sought to ensure that each monastery had its own special brew.

Along the way many a king sought to hijack the wealth of the church and as a result the means to produce both spirits and beer moved away from the church and into the private space. As such the demands of life created the opportunity for the development of specific products and thus production houses (or breweries).

Over the last 200 years these have become increasingly consolidated such that at present there are a handful of global beer giants. In South Africa the need to imitate the Belgians, Germans and British led the apartheid government to blithely endorse the agglomeration of SA breweries into a position of market dominance and now having enslaved the vast majority of the population into the consumption of its beer, SABMiller has moved on to add big brand beers from around the world to its portfolio.

Now without going into detail about the beers consumed in South Africa and without bemoaning the absence of a decent wheat beer, I will say that all of the common beers we drink are complete rubbish. Indeed it is a joke to compare our stout to any other stout, let alone Guinness or for that matter our thin and gassy lagers to any other lagers except for the American beers. And as that seems to be our forte it is ridiculous to assume that the sheer size of SABMiller in South Africa has anything to do with the quality of its products.

SAB’s Pilsner Urquell is strangely different from SAB’s Hansa Pilsner, which itself is no cousin of SAB’s Grolsch Premium Pilsner, and the disparity in quality between Amstel and any of the SABMiller “premium” lagers is so stark that any Amstel drinker will take a while to choose a substitute in the absence of the Dutch wonder.

But am I just being stupid, after all at just R8 for a 750ml bottle of Castle, Black Label or Hansa surely we should just be happy and drink the lager as it flows? After all at this price beer from local bottle stores is cheaper than soft drinks from petrol stations. And this dynamic of being able to put an inferior product (in comparison to the other SABMiller products) in the hands of a beer-drinking public at less than the “lighties’ creme soda” surely does nothing to reduce the level of alcoholism in South Africa.

From the 1996 to 2010 the price of milk has more than doubled while the price of beer has not. Unquestionably beer remains the one purchase that all South Africans and our visitors are able to afford come boom, recession or market failure.

And this and only this is the reason for the extent of beer consumption in South Africa. We have taken a beer-drinking culture and made it unfashionable and then we have replaced it with both synthetic and plastic values and imported ideas of what constitutes “fresh, young and cool” and convinced a population which predisposes to drinking beer that this new type of beer in a bottle, as opposed to our more traditional beers, is the better and thus more fashionable option.

This against the cultural background of the superimposition of the massa’s socio-cultural tastes and values has led us to have a predominantly European style of beer that pervades our society and has become synonymous with every single major endeavour in South Africa. And I suppose we will argue that the dop system is responsible, we will argue that the easy-drinking beers are more functional than the traditional beers, after all can you imagine lugging a 20-litre drum of iJuba with you to a braai or are a few cases of Castle a better bet? The iJuba will put everyone on the floor faster but the Castle is more likely to help you get laid after all no fashion-conscious brand-digger shags for iJuba, does she? Well not on the first date at any rate.

But is this state of near monopoly, with just the Namibians and a few independents offering alternates, a permanent reality? I don’t think so. In fact I would say that if a company sold three times as much volume beer as SAB does in South Africa — via its Castle Lager, Carling Black Label Lager and Hansa Pilsner brands — then that company would be able to compete in the local market and beat the R8 price at the local bottle store.

Surely the premium beers in South Africa are undersubscribed in comparison to the Castle giant such that their price is not just reflective of the technikon thinking which dictates that “premium means it must be more expensive” but also indicative of the fact that lower volumes mean higher break-even prices.

So it would that if a brewer from a country that had for instance 100 million borderline-alcoholic, hardened beer drinkers in their home country, as opposed to our 5 million such people, that that brewer would be able to enter the South African market and compete with the SABMiller giants. The trick would be to just bring their biggest volume beer as is, with no rebranding, no reformulation, no rebottling, no bullshit and just dump 5 million quarts of that mass-volume beer on the South African market at under R5 per quart, every single day.

And soon the reality of the facts that in the absence of a cheap version of Tennent’s Super T Strong Lager (which is the beer of choice of bergies in the UK and Australia) cheap beer skops you more and that whatever the cheap and nasty beer is, that it’s no different from SAB’s 3 house lagers, and such the price alone will dictate that our consumers drink deeply from the imported beer.

No-one precludes this foreign brewer from bringing their premium beers provided that they don’t try to compete with the pretentious bullshit doled out by SAB’s marketing people. We don’t want to see “beers that set you free”, “beers that make you cool”, “beers that compensate for the lack of personality and charisma in your life” or “beers that make you attractive to every brand-digger”.

What we want to see is a case of quarts for R50. And though SAB can do that, until such time as another global giant enters the market they will have no incentive to do so. However having said that I would advise this new foreign brewer to base their bottling plant for the whole of Africa (bearing in mind that the majority of central, east, north and west Africa is Muslim and therefore not into beer) in Zimbabwe, where labour is cheap and non-unionised, where the government is for sale and where getting products into South Africa is easy.

Who would be such a potential market-conquering brewer? Perhaps in time as the Chinese beers grow in popularity throughout Asia and as rice and sorghum become palatable to the Euro-beer market, this could be a Chinese brewer. But as it stands now, in my humble opinion, there’s only one contender and that is the UB Group of India.

And though Kingfisher may be their flagship brand, I think they should dig deeper to find a brand of beer, which may be unfashionable, but which is sought by the majority of beer drinkers in India. Don’t worry about taste, we don’t like the taste of the beer we currently drink. Just pour on phuza and we South Africans will be there.