Red Dune Live, Camelthorn Brewing Company, 330ml bottle, RRP R18
‘Frankly, it looks like blood.” My girlfriend was right. It did look like a tub of blood slowly boiling on my stovetop. That was, until the rooibos began to steep further — then it looked like a tub of darker blood, with hundreds of little leaves floating on top. Appetising it wasn’t.
One of the first things I wanted to make when I started homebrewing was a beer made solely with local ingredients and flavoured with rooibos. Rooibos and beer are good bedfellows. Rooibos’s fragrance and wholesome earthiness can bring a different dimension to a wide range of beer styles, from red ale to pale ale. And because rooibos isn’t particularly astringent or tannic, it doesn’t mess with the bitterness of beers to which it’s added. For my own beer, I decided to use 200g of loose-leaf rooibos in a 15-litre batch.
Initially, things looked ominous. Happily though, the beer ended up a pleasant orange. It tasted of earth and fresh-cut grass and granadilla and, well, rooibos. Delicious, in other words.
Because rooibos is an eternal local favourite — as well as increasingly in vogue with tea drinkers around the world — it’s unsurprising that local breweries have made stabs at rooibos-infused beers. One of the better ones, however, comes from Namibia.
Camelthorn Brewing Co was billed as Namibia’s first microbrewery when it opened in 2009. More recently it has fallen into financial strife, to the point where, this past January, Namibia Breweries bought Camelthorn out. What this means is yet to be seen, but it’s probably good news, chiefly because Camelthorn made some very good beers in its time.
The Red Dune, a limited edition still available in South Africa, pours light gold and entices with light rooibos, petrichor and tart citrus on the nose. More subtle rooibos comes through on the palate, enough to mask any appreciable malt or hop profiles, other than an underlying noble, earthy bitterness. It finishes dry and a touch sour — a soft-tangy tincture of two of southern Africa’s favourite drinks; one, happily, that is not like blood in any way.