Charles Glass Master Brewer
Well, he probably was in the 19th century but not any more.
I know beer is a beverage close to a man’s heart and you would rather insult his religion than his drinking habits but I am going to have my say - particularly apropos the previous article.
IMHO, Castle Lager is a travesty of a lager. It’s not for nothing that the SAB brewery here in Durban is below the African Explosive and Chemical Industries settling ponds. The stuff bears as much resemblance to beer as today’s ice cream bears to real ice cream. It’s jam packed with a delicious assortment of chemicals - finings, clarifiers, foaming agents, antifoaming agents, flavourants, colourants, extenders. I read somewhere that there are in the region of 25 noisome additives in Castle Lager.
Charles Glass would choke on his beer.
The stuff’s like Coke - tastes delicious and acts like it’s refreshing you but it never will. The more you drink of this concoction, the more you want to drink. Have a glass of water - ten times better. Actually Castle Lager - despite the acres of condensation and lip smacking and mandible wiping in commercials - tastes awful. Unlike other beers it even tastes awful at -20 degrees C. Let it warm up to anything above absolute zero and it tastes like an incontinent bat has been using your glass for target practice. The lip smacking after a Castle should be to get the taste OUT of your mouth.
The other beers are of a similarly depressing disposition - Amstel, Black Label et al. I was once told by an SAB ex-brewer that Black Label is the original Castle.
There are two beers that marginally stick their collective heads above the event horizon - Milk Stout and Peroni. The former is about what it says it is - a milk stout. The latter is quite a decent continental lager providing SAB don’t bugger it up.
Like cheese, various local entrepreneurs have had a bash. Mitchells, Nottingham Road for instance, but they are not English beers and have a taste all their own. I stopped at a microbrewery somewhere in Mpumalanga some years ago and salivating for kilometres down the road after the first sign to the place.
The beer was so bad, I left most of it on the counter. Never done that before.
Also, like the cheese, there is now a brewer that brews decent beer, and, nogal, it’s up the drag.
Robson’s in Shongweni brews a small variety of ales and all of high quality. Trouble is, they’re pricey at around R16 a bottle but like decent cheese, a small amount goes a long way.