SETTING THE BAR HIGH
From a KZN-made dark lager that took almost a decade to perfect to a honey-infused agave spirit with roots in the Karoo, these two ventures are serving up sundowners fit to sip and savour.
Sarah Kennan moves with confidence behind the bar, slicing oranges, chopping limes and grabbing chilled mixers from the fridge. She prepares two cocktails for us to sip on while we chat (tough job, this): the Blanco is served with Fitch & Leedes bitter lemon and squeezed lime, while the Honey Reposado is poured over ice, topped up with Theonista ginger beer and finished off with a squeeze of orange.
As a twenty-something, Sarah was known as the ‘girl who always brings a bottle of tequila to the party’. Today, she’s the owner and founder of Leonista, a spirit similar to tequila or mescal but made from 100 percent Karoo agave.
Sarah studied in Australia, specialising in marketing and accounting at business school. But when she started working, she struggled to feel fulfilled. ‘Every time I started working for a company or doing things that I’d studied at university, I would lose interest within a month. I didn’t feel creative. I felt that my abilities weren’t being tapped into. I knew I needed to start something for myself, but I didn’t know what it would be.’
Sarah relocated to Cape Town where she met someone who knew how to distil alcohol, and decided to try her hand at making tequila. ‘We’d make it in his garage for fun,’ she says. But she soon found that she really got into it. ‘I was
making it for AfrikaBurn, and people loved it so much that I thought I should look into it a bit more. And the only way I was going to learn how to do it properly was if I went to Mexico.’
Sarah spent six weeks there, visiting agave farms, touring distilleries and learning the ins and outs of making tequila (the name ‘tequila’ is unique to the region: real tequila is made in a town called Tequila, 65km northwest of Guadalajara; if it’s made anywhere else in Mexico, it’s called mescal).
Sarah makes three spirits: Blanco, an unaged, smooth and smokey agave spirit; Reposado, a mellow, sweeter spirit aged in American oak barrels; and Honey Reposado, which is infused with honey. The bottles feature the Leonista lion depicted in the Mexican sugar skull design. ‘The lion is a strong image of Africa – we wanted our brand to be recognisably African even though it’s inspired by Mexico,’ says Sarah. The name Leonista is a mix of Spanish, Latin and a bit of English, and, like her product, ‘a mix of cultures rolled into one’.
In fact, the agave plant is itself representative of the two cultures intermingling. ‘Legend has it that a bolt of lightning hit an agave plant causing it to explode’, Sarah explains. ‘Its juices started to ferment in the hot sun, and when the Aztecs tasted it, it’s said they felt connected to their ancestors and gods. Then the Spanish colonisers used the plants as weights in their ships and as food for the animals. They’d sail from Mexico to India, stopping off in South Africa, or sometimes they’d suffer a shipwreck and the plants would float onto the beaches. So the plants found themselves here.’
The agave that Sarah uses to create the spirit is sourced from the Karoo. ‘Building this brand means more revenue for the Karoo and more infrastructure. I wanted to replicate what I saw in Mexico in South Africa to create the same revenue stream. It supports the
‘I wanted to replicate what I saw in Mexico in South Africa to create the same revenue stream.’
farmers and creates jobs.’
Getting to where she is now has been quite an uphill battle, says Sarah. ‘I’m new to the alcohol industry and it’s run by a lot of big players, so learning about it and getting into it was a challenge.’
Starting your own business has a lot of dog days, she points out. ‘I spent many nights working till midnight on just a spreadsheet; often it’s more of a struggle than it should be because you can’t afford to get the help you need.’ Her advice? ‘Do something you’d do almost for free. It can’t just be to make money or build a successful brand; there has to be something deeper so you have something to hold onto in those dark days. For me, that’s creating some sort of positive influence in the Karoo.’
Along with trying to pave the way for a greater agave spirit culture in SA, she wants to encourage a new way of drinking it. ‘It’s no longer just a shooter that you knock back and hate – you should savour it and appreciate the flavours!’