Mail and Guardian 15 October 2010 -

The Blonde Zulu by Sean Christie

 

'You all know the rules here. If there are any photographs, hide the bloody Castle labels.'

Richard Chennells, the brewer of Zulu Blonde beer, lifts a cooler-box packed with enemy brands out of the fire engine red Jeep that carried us up the erosion runnels of Eshowe's Signal Hill.

 

We're up here to survey Zulu-land, to drink beer and talk about Zulu Blonde, but seeing as Richard's brew does not yet exist in bottled form (he says it will by March 2011) the brew-master finds himself in a predicament, or at least that would be so if his approach to business was over-determined, which it isn't.

 

'Zulu Blonde is all about bringing people to Eshowe, to show them how bloody amazing it is here, so in that sense the brand has done it's job today. Cheers,' he says, then grinningly adds, 'Charles!'

 

The landscape before us is one of beehive huts, patches of cane and gently smoking fires, but Richard assures us it's no pastoral idyll. Through his eyes the peace of the hills means the absence of agriculture, which he says has been strangled by the feudal inclinations of traditional rulers. He says the coffee table book he will buy is the one that profiles the country's major white elephants, many of which are to be found in Zulu-land.

 

'Just behind that hill a man is building the biggest bee hive hut you've ever seen, in the hopes that the tourists will come flooding his way. There are hundreds of these things around the place, all of which received tons of state money without being sustainable on any level. It's absurd,' he says.

Richard is in the process of building a beehive hut of his own, or to be more precise, a beer brand, with the same objective of bringing tourists to Eshowe in droves. What, I ask, makes his initiative different from the redundant 'cultural villages' that proliferate throughout the rural parts of the country?

Passion, a killer brand and a major international Beer award--this is Richard's short answer.

The long answer is much nicer.

'My father, Graham, used to be the mayor of Eshowe. In the early nineties he bought The George Hotel in Eshowe and brewed a beer in the backyard which he called Zulu Blonde. His major passion then, which he still pursues as a Rotarian, was community development, but this took a knock when he lost his fortune in the late nineties. His survival strategy then, his way of staying involved in Eshowe, was to continue to grow the hotel, even though the bank owned it. I came back from London where I'd been working as a banker in 2003, and bought The George back, and together we picked up the theme of turning Eshowe into a major tourist attraction,' he says.

 

Father and son decided the beer was key to building the business, and given that the brew was a little inconsistent Richard went off to study at the American Brewers Guild. Not long after he returned a remarkable thing happened.

 

'Zulu Blonde was voted best beer at the Wetherspoons Real Ale Festival in 2010. From doing batches of 150 litres a day in Eshowe I was suddenly in Burton on Trent, which is to beer drinkers what Graceland is to Elvis fans, brewing 50'000 litres in a day. A bunch of people thought the Zulu Blonde brand would do well but the home run as far as I'm concerned was the fact that it impressed the 'box tickers'. Think about the biggest wine nerd on the planet, he's nothing compared with a 'box ticker'. These guys wear tweed coats and swivel around this bloody beer, and basically the whole world hangs on their verdict. Thank god they loved what was in Zulu Blonde, because you must remember, a beer with a nice brand that tastes kak goes down the tubes quicker than a kak beer with an average brand.'

 

The George, when we finally get there, takes me off guard. It looks like any number of refurbished colonial hosteries scattered around Kwa-Zulu Natal, in which the hallways are hung with portraits of Zulu chiefs and colonial hunters in their pith helmets, except, on closer inspection, I see that the severe guerilla chief Maqoma has been given a long snaking green tongue. Accepted visual history is elsewhere tampered with, and it's not long before I meet the source of the mischief, none other than artist and sangoma Peter Engblom, back in his home town after having his heart broken in Clarens.

'Oh lots of mildly famous folk end up here,' Engblom explains. 'Kingsley Holgate's going to retire here soon. He used to be Eshowe's butcher.'

 

With Engblom's cerebral probings of Zulu-ness in the hallways and the virgin forest pressing in on all sides of the hotel (not to mention the fact that local guitar legend Guy Buttery plays gigs here), the entire compound feels out of time and place, a spaceship of far out ideas, with excellent beer on tap. I begin to think perhaps the Chennells' vision of resurrecting an entire town with a single beer is not just fanciful megalomania.

 

And yet I can't help but notice that the the brewery, which is contained in a small room near the hotel swimming pool, looks fairly inactive.

 

Richard umh's and ah's about this, and it becomes clear that Zulu Blonde, having now outgrown the capacity of the second had rig from whence it came, stands at something of a crossroads.

 

'When Zulu Blonde won that award it became Die Antwoord of beer, all these big players started phoning me up and saying “did you really sell 250'000 litres of your beer in such and such a time? We want to get involved.” The trick now is deciding which course to take.'

I get the sense that Richard would dearly like to see local distribution, especially throughout Kwazulu Natal, but that the interested parties are mainly foreign. SAB, as Big Brother to the local scene, is emphatically not one of the suitors.

 

'I met the CEO of SAB in London after I won the award, and asked him if he thought I was simply the flavour of the month. 'Try flavour of the week,' he said. I understand where he's coming from, because if you don't have somebody pushing your product at the end market, you're dreaming. Still, I left that office with more gees for taking Zulu Blonde forward than before,' he says.

 

This bullishness is not put on, Richard is an authentic confidence man with an unsurpassed fluency in the Jock vernacular of Natal boarding schools, and a precise sense for what it is about South Africa that appeals to westerners. He won over his American lecturer with an impromptu zulu dance, for example, and he pulled the first pint at the real ale festival wearing a makarapa and blowing a vuvuzela. It's the sort of confidence that could just achieve unprecedented success for a South African micro-brewed beer, but by the same token it could also burn away the possibilities for operating at the micro-level again, should Richard need to, because micro-brewers are a filial lot, and those perceived to be getting beyond themselves might not easily receive the favours, such as last minute supplies of scarce ingredients, upon which business depends.

Richard understands this, but it seems he has cast his die.

'By March 2011, come hell or high water, Zulu Blonde is going to be in stores throughout Natal, other parts of South Africa and the world. It's going to be bottled, with a long shelf life, and it's going to taste amazing. That's the end of the story for now, but trust me, we're just getting started.'