Brewers are buoyant about rejuvenating the fledgling Western Cape beer route to rival its iconic wine counterpart as a bumper hops crop is expected alongside recovering agritourism.
Like everything else in the economy, the beer route was devastated by Covid-19 liquor-sales bans.
Mirroring the luxurious vineyards synonymous with the Cape, rows of hanging hops vines line parts the countryside in George in the southern Cape, where the SA Breweries (SAB) owns 409ha of land on seven farms and a research plantation.
“We’ve been very badly affected by drought, but things started to come right in 2021,” said SAB hops farm manager Lauren Steytler. “We hope to see another turnaround again this year.
“We have the southern star, southern dawn and southern promise varieties, used in all the Castle lager and Black labels brewed all across the world,” she said.
Hops, essential for the bittering and aroma of beer, is a versatile crop with essential oils that can be used in the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries. There has also been reported interest from tea companies that use hops to create a hops tea.
The light green, strawberry-sized, conical hops, a member of the cannabis family, hold golden pollen harvested only in eight weeks in March and April. Hops farming injects about R90m a year into the economy and sustains about 1,500 jobs.
Steytler said it is not cheap to grow hops. She estimates the annual cost of a hop operation at about R135,000 a hectare. “It’s labour-intensive too”, she said, and it can employ hundreds more if nurtured.
SA produced 739-tonnes of hops in 2021, and the favourable weather is expected to bump up 2022’s harvest, which translates into larger volumes for local brewers and for export.
Surging interest and demand in craft brewing in SA, which has led to a boom for local hops growers, has also inspired the development of 75 brewery tours in the Western Cape known as the brew routes.
In collaboration with micro and craft brewers, restaurant and tavern owners, event venues and other small and medium enterprises local businesses are fighting back against the impact of the bans by creating tours that encourage locals and tourists to visit local brewers, farmers and stockists to boost agritourism.
“Showcasing the beautiful natural surroundings of the Cape coupled with the local production of quality craft beers using locally sourced ingredients will undoubtedly attract further investment, not for only the beer industry, but will help revive local tourism,” said Beer Association of SA (Basa) CEO Patricia Pillay.
“The beer industry has a major impact on SA’s economic recovery,” said Pillay.
The sparsely populated west coast relies heavily on tourism. According to aggregated anonymised telemetry data from analytics and data firm Lightstone, Easter tourist volume in 2021 was much the same as pre-Covid numbers. But the all-important flower season in August and September was down 5% while Christmas tourism volume was 13% down.
Though the brew routes concept was devised and conceptualised before the outbreak of Covid-19, it was launched officially only during the Beer Tourism Week in September 2021 because of government pandemic restrictions.
“We used to have a beer route all the way from Worcester before Covid-19, [but] unfortunately many of those companies closed because of Covid-19,” Ryno Reyneke of The Makers Brew in Barrydale told Business Day.
Reyneke, who brews four bespoke craft beers using only local hops in the small Karoo town, was one of the few lucky enough to survive lockdown bans that forced 30% of local breweries to shut their doors permanently with 165,000 jobs lost.
“I am very fortunate that I managed to hang in there and that I am still operating,” said Reyneke.
Collaborating with participants of the beer value chain, SAB, which sources almost 100% of all its raw materials locally, launched the brew routes online map with six curated beer routes that showcase more than 150 world-class breweries around the country.
The tours are expected to open up the burgeoning beer industry value chain to consumers. Basa said that coupling it with an educational aspect on local farmers and their product would attract ordinary beer lovers and investors to the sector.
Western Cape finance and economic opportunities minister David Maynier, said 6.6% of the population were employed in the tourism and hospitality industries, a figure that is expected to rise with the boom of the beer routes.
An SAB farm manager in the Garden Route district, Neljanine Arendse, said the local hops and barley farms, the malting and breweries were getting a slice of the cake created by the beer hub, with mostly locals employed at the operations.
“Harvest time is the biggest time of the year,” said Arendse.
“Everything is just going really fast on the farm and everyone tries to get a job on the farms that work 24 hours for a period of six weeks and there is an opportunity to make money,” she added.
The liquor bans had a devastating effect on the overall alcohol industry, with 14.7% of projected sales volumes for 2020/2021 having been lost, representing a total of 1.26bn litres.
The beer industry which supports over 450,000 livelihoods, and also includes more than 200 smaller craft brewers, has had zero financial relief from the government despite being forced to close down for 161 days since March 2021.
Within the current tax legislation, small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) are not sufficiently recognised or provided with relief in relation to excise duties to encourage growth and job creation in this sector.
The bans also served as a major boost to the illicit liquor trade, which grew to be worth more than R20.5bn in 2020.
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