MOONSHINE TO THE RESCUE!

JOHANNESBURG: A craze for homebrewing has swept across South Africa since the government banned the sale of alcohol to help hospitals and keep order during the coronavirus lockdown - good news for Frank van Wensveen, who owns a home beer brewing supply shop. South Africa, which has one of the highest rates of alcohol consumption per capita in the world, imposed a lockdown on 27 March and banned alcohol in a bid to ease hospital workloads, help the public stick to social distancing rules and prevent a rise in domestic violence. South Africans have improvised, brewing their own beer and umqombothi, a traditional African beer made from sorghum, as well as distilling mampoer, a potent Afrikaner fruit-based moonshine. “The market has absolutely gone crazy,” said van Wensveen, standing in his Johannesburg store before empty shelves. “When the liquor ban was initially announced, people were coming to the shop in a panic and essentially buying everything in sight.”

Since the government reopened e-commerce earlier this month, online orders have ballooned, with sales up 15-fold from pre-pandemic levels, he said. Google searches on homemade beer recipes have spiked in South Africa, according to Google trend data, and a run on pineapples for beerbrewing forced supermarket giant Shoprite (SHPJ.J) to limit their sale to five per customer. Predictably, illegal liquor sales and smuggling of the contraband across South Africa’s land borders has also been on the rise.