Growing up in the rural town of Butterworth in South Africa, Apiwe Nxusani-Mawela was drawn to having a career in beer following a university open day in Johannesburg.
In 2007, she started brewing as an amateur. Today, with a microbiology degree, she is breaking barriers in a male-dominated field, being the first Black woman in South Africa to own a craft brewery.
But she doesn’t want to do this alone; she wants to see other Blacks and women in an industry that contributes $5.2 billion to South Africa’s gross domestic product. Thus, at her microbrewery in Johannesburg, she’s teaching young Black graduates the art of beer making, with most of these students being women.
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Numbering 13 in total, the students at her Brewsters Academy have chemical engineering, biotechnology or analytical chemistry degrees and diplomas and are looking to have a career in brewing. Nxusani-Mawela believes that people with a science background can do well in beer brewing.
“I sort of fell in love with the combination of the business side with the science, with the craftsmanship and the artistic element of brewing,” she said to AP.
Her classes started in June. For the first six months, students will learn beer varieties, both international and African, before spending another six months on work placement.
“I wanted to make sure that being the first Black female to own a brewery in South Africa, that I’m not the first and the last,” Nxusani-Mawela said to AP. “Brewsters Academy for me is about transforming the industry … What I want to see is that in five, 10 years from now that it should be a norm to have Black people in the industry, it should be a norm to have females in the industry.”
Nxusani-Mawela’s road to owning a brewery wasn’t easy. When COVID-19 was infecting hundreds across South Africa in 2020, the government instituted lockdown measures to contain the spread of the virus. Other measures the government took were to ban the sale of alcohol.
Although the intentions of the government were sincere and based on public health advice, they had unintended consequences. The ban on alcohol, which was in place for half a year, led to the collapse of many local breweries. One of the breweries affected was owned by Nxusani-Mawela. She had founded Brewsters Craft in 2015 after leaving her position as master craft brewer at South African Breweries.
“The journey of starting the brewery was not easy. Like a lot of people, I struggled to raise capital. I ended up applying for a loan at the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa (IDC). The process took over a year before they approved the application,” she told News24.
In 2018, Brewsters Craft opened its doors in Johannesburg and began manufacturing beverages for smaller craft beer brands. The company was showing signs it would be successful then the pandemic struck, and there was a ban on the sale of liquor in South Africa.
“For us in the alcohol and tobacco industry, we’re hit the most. It was a rollercoaster – emotionally, mentally, financially and physically,” Nxusani-Mawela told News24 in January 2021.
For Nxusani-Mawela, her headache was not only the shutdown of her brewery, which manufactures Tolokazi (a sorghum pilsner), but she had to repay a loan she took to expand her business operations.
Despite the challenges she faced, Nxusani-Mawela was still optimistic about finding success. She then received a LinkedIn invitation from the chief marketing officer of subscription service Beer52, headquartered in Edinburgh. Beer52 is a club that introduces drinkers across Europe to new beers from around the world.
According to Business Insider South Africa, as part of Beer52’s initiative of offering new liquor to Europeans, it subscribed to 200,000 cans of Tolokazi in January 2022, which was expected to reach 100,000 subscribers in the UK.
The Tolokazi cans for Beer52 were brewed in Croatia, but not without challenges, particularly with raw materials sourced mainly in South Africa.
Nxusani-Mawela also began producing Tolokazi under a contract manufacturing arrangement with OC Brewery in Kya Sand, just on the outskirts of Johannesburg.
