‘A lot of young people said it was for old people’

Last week, Shine Registry* hosted a “virtual business shower” for Kweza Craft Brewery, which is female led and the first craft brewery in Rwanda. It was a Zoom call, set up for a maximum of 100 participants, and hundreds of others got shut out.

One hundred is not a big number, but this was the first time a Shine shower attracted as large a crowd. It is a reminder of a halo that still hangs around (craft) beer, that there is much interest in the topic of women and beer, and a realization that there’s more to beer than the European tradition that American brewing was built on.

(* Shine Registry hosts profiles of businesses and their founders with wedding registry-style lists of the stuff that they need. Founders ask for support while they are starting their businesses and give their communities an opportunity to show that support in meaningful and substantive ways.)

The presentation has been archived and runs about an hour. Worth your time. The words craft and innovation jump to life when Chiedza Mufunde speaks. She’s so, well, passionate that when she uses the word passion I’m OK with it.

And, given that this is Wednesday, the day I aim to post words related to place I particularly recommend you listen to Apiwe Nxusani-Mawela, starting at the 7 minutes mark, then continuing throughout the discussion.

Apiwe Nxusani-Mawela

She has her own Wikipedia page and a resume she could take to the doorstep of any brewery in the world and expect to get hired. She is central to a story about Umqombothi, the traditional sorghum beer Lucy Corne wrote about for Good Beer Hunting. She is a take action type who sees no reason to wait to be invited to the table.

She is a trained microbiologist who learned to brew beer when she worked eight years for South African Brewers (SABMiller). When she was growing up she paid little attention to beer. “Everybody in Africa knows as a young woman you grow up with a mother and grandmother’s brewing traditional beer . . . It is something you have to grow into.”

Not everybody was interested. “A lot of young people said it was for old people,” she said, admitting she was one of them.

After she got her job with SAB, she returned home to brew a beer with her father. “I realized I didn’t know how this beer is made. For me that didn’t feel right,” she said. “I didn’t understand how as a young black African I can master the art of brewing clear beers, but I have no clue how traditional African beer was made.”

Now she talks about “the importance of linking it back, to our roots and celebrating who we are.”

Give her a listen.