Llewellyn Janse van Rensburg - an actuary, a gadget man and a yeast man, but mostly a beer man.
How I got started
I was very fortunate to spend seven weeks in Oxford (UK) in 1992. I fell in love with English Ales - Oh, the taste and variety.
Back in South Africa, I missed those flavourful beers that you can drink pint after pint after pint. We were still in the old Apartheid South Africa with all the sanctions, and consequently very few imported beers were around. And those that were, were very expensive at the time.
In 1994 my life changed. I met a lovely English lady in a pub near Johannesburg in 1994. It wasn't long before we started talking about English Ale. "Why don't you brew your own? A lot of people do that in the UK." It sounded too good to be true. But the process sounded familiar to brewing ginger ale, and I have brewed many a batch of that as a youngster. I was hooked.
It took me three weeks to locate a supplier of beer kits in Johannesburg. For R250 ($40) I rigged out my brewery: a 25 litre plastic bucket, a funnel, big plastic spoon, thermometer, hydrometer, 200 bottle caps, a gadget for capping bottles, an instruction booklet and some ingredients.
I paid a liquor store the deposit on two crates of empty "quarts" (750ml bottles). They couldn't believe their eyes. Normally their clients buy full bottles and then return the empties for money. Not the other way round...
On the 13th of August 1994, I brewed my first beer. I mixed the batch, fermented for a week, bottled and waited three weeks, just like the instructions said. Yuck! "Drain cleaner that foams" is what my wife called it. It only looked like beer and very faintly tasted like beer.
What was wrong? The ingredients. The liquid malt came from the confectionery business - it was used in the making of chocolate bars. The hop oil only made the beer bitter - it had no hop smell or taste. The biggest problem was the dried yeast. It said brewers yeast in the packet. But I think it was only good to brew Sorghum beer (a cheap, cloudy, fermented, wholesome, porridge-like slush which is drunk by a large number of people in Africa. It is not beer, as we generally know it)
I brewed a few batches more, each tasting slightly better than the previous batch.
During my search for better ingredients, I stumbled onto the name of a very serious homebrewer, Moritz Kallmeyer. What a luck! (Moritz has since become a very serious craft brewer with his own brewery, Drayman's Brewery. He supplies a number of pubs in the Pretoria/Johannesburg region).
Moritz took me for a full day practical lesson on brewing a full grain beer with proper beer ingredients. Real crushed malted barley, fresh Golding hops, fresh Whitbread brewers yeast, using a full boil, forced cooling, etc.... What a difference. It turned out to be one of the nicest beers I had ever tasted.
I immediately acquired all the right stuff to become a full grain brewer. On the 3rd of February 1995 I brewed my first full grain beer, "Luigi's Bitter", 1034 OG. I was lost for words. I had made a beer very close to those I had longed for. I was a brewer!
The next big realisation came when I read an article saying that you can out-brew your favourite microbrewery. I experimented with yeast culturing and have come to the realisation that yeast is the most important ingredient in making beer. After all it is yeast that makes the beer. We only prepare the food for them. I am now a yeast man, with 13 yeast cultures on slants.
I am a founder member of the Wort Hog Brewers, a club of active home brewers.
For the last six years, I have been brewing approximately once every two months.
In 1999, two of my beers won first prize in their respective categories. The achievement won me the title of Wort Hog Brewers Brewer of the year 1999 (see my beers for more info)