A Botswana Craft Brewery took two medals and the coveted African Celebration Award at the 2022 African Beer Cup, Africa’s biggest beer competition. Okavango Craft Brewery, based in Maun, won bronze for their Old Bull Stout and silver for their Panhandle Pale Ale. The stout also went on to win the African Celebration Award, which goes to the highest scoring beer that champions traditional African ingredients.
This proudly-Botswana brewery is spearheading a programme that supports local farmers in the Okavango Delta by buying from them the surplus millet, which is then malted at the brewery and used across their beer range.
“Winning the African celebration award is a big thumbs up from our fellow brewers that our work with small-scale millet farmers in the Okavango Delta should continue,” says Murray Stephenson, head brewer at Okavango Craft Brewery.
“Our journey towards reducing human animal conflict in Botswana and beyond is well on its way, and we look forward to continued support from the African beer industry.”
This was the third year of the competition and the first time that international judges were invited to join. Judges from 16 different countries evaluated the 251 entries over three days.
“We want to elevate the competition to be in line with other international competitions,” says African Beer Cup founder Lucy Corne.
“And inviting extremely experienced, highly respected beer industry experts from around the world is crucial for our competition. It’s the first time any beer competition in Africa has welcomed such highly esteemed judges.”
The Okavango Craft Brewery is the first craft brewery in northern Botswana and is rather unique in that it incorporates conservation by collaborating closely with local NGO Ecoexist, which supports communities living on the edges of wildlife areas and share space and resources with crop-raiding elephants. For over nine years, the NGO has championed “elephant-aware farming,” which entails various preventative methods such as using chilli pepper smoke and solar powered electric fences as deterrents to protect property and crops, improving yields using conservation agriculture and learning how to keep open and farm away from key, regularly trodden elephant corridors. With agricultural success, there’s now a crop surplus in the millet fields.
Described as a climate-smart crop requiring less rainfall, the brewery buys the millet at a premium to reward farmers for their efforts to coexist with elephants. The millet is then carefully malted and worked into every recipe, from IPAs to Lagers, Stouts and even non-alcoholic beer.
Under the umbrella of “brewing for conservation” the Okavango Craft Brewery puts purpose at the core of their business. Their longer term vision is not only to continue to grow the volumes of their ‘elephant-aware beer’ but also to work closely with other breweries to start incorporating sustainable malted millet into their recipes.
Source: BITC Facebook page
