Richard Campbell (134:48)
The leather top. Yeah. And see, I've got it. We're have to cut the stitches off of this to figure this out. You're going to find out how much time bottle. Yeah. So for. It's a first for me. I've never seen anything quite like this. But I also realized as I was digging into this, like this is the first time talking about whiskey from South Africa. In fact the first African whiskey I've talked about at all. And so we always kind of, you know, when I did The Canadian. I talked a bit about the history of whiskey in Canada. Same for Japanese and so forth. So I felt I had to do the same treatment. It was only fair. Which just means a little more writing and a little more storytelling because I want to start with the terror. I think the Torora is important and definitely one of the reasons why it's pretty challenging to make whiskey in a place like South Africa. Africa. First time we've talked about Africa at all. So I mean, right off the bat, hey, you know, we. We talk about Neolithic peoples and things in Northern England. This is the cradle of civilization. Here we've got evidence of Homo sapiens in and around South Africa for something like a hundred thousand years. And so many different migration events and different peoples arriving. The early people, when they talk about South Africa, the Khoisan are the earliest peoples, although the Bantu, which are more contemporary, show up around 300 AD. And they also come with agriculture and a lot of practices that you would recognize there, along with things like sorghum, which came out of Central Africa and was brought down and grew just fine in South Africa as well. Of course, eventually the Europeans show up and it was the Portuguese who got there first. Around the 14th century. The Dutch East Sidze Company set up a settlement in the Western Cape in 1652, which made the British annoyed. So the British fought back and they gained control in that area in 1795, leading to a series of conflicts that culminate in the Anglo borough War of 1899-1902. The fallout of that ultimately results in what's known as the Union of South Africa, combining the four major states of South Africa, the Cape Natalia, Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Now we get into more contemporary stuff. Post World War II, the When Africana and Africanism sort of leads to apartheid, which we all are familiar with from the 80s and the 90s. The African National Congress had been around a long time, going all the way back to 1912, where they always prot. They were always focused on the fact that black South Africans were excluded from political power. This turned violent on occasion and in fact one of those occasions resulted in the arrest of Nelson Mehldal in 1962, who was then held in various prisons until 1990 when De Klerk released him and began the end of apartheid and ultimately leading to the multi racial elections of 1994. Mandela winning, of course, writing a new constitution. And we get to the current history, which of course has not been that simple either. It's been 30 years and they're having all of their own struggles environmentally, the ecology. This is a subtropical part of the world. It stretches from the most northern parts of South Africa are about 22 degrees north. Remember that the Tropic of Capricorn is at 23.4. The Tropic, Capricorn being the line that is the southernmost angle of the sun when it's directly overhead on the December solstice. That's what measures the tropics. And anything above that tropic is considered tropical and below subtropical and so forth down the line. So what this results in is a chunk of land spanning from about 22 to 35. And so in the Southwest you have what we consider a Mediterranean client climate and more subtropical. Up in the Northeast you do have quite temperate conditions inland mostly because of the earth altitude well over 1500 meters in many spots along the Drakensbergs and the lake like it's about a populace of 63 million people. The original crop of that area of course was sorghum, which came a couple of thousand years ago. Although wheat did eventually make its way down there. Remember wheat was growing just fine in northern Africa in 5000 BC. That was what made part of what made the Egyptian empire so massive. But getting across the equator is pretty difficult. So we don't really see wheat until the Dutch bring it in 1652. Corn was brought by the Portuguese explorers from the Americas in 1655 and Barley also grown there, but not near as much. The area where I was spending most of my time in the Western Cape and around Cape Town is the big agricultural center. There's about two and a half million farming households, although two million of those are subsistence farmers. So farmers that were the vast majority of their food is purely for feeding the family. Not that many. The proportion of commercial farming to subsistence farming is different. This is what we. One of the terms, one of the measures we use when we talk about a developing nation is how much subsistent farming there still is. And if there is farming, and there has been for thousands of years, there is alcohol and there are plenty of domestic alcohols in South Africa. One of the originals would be Ambakwathi, which is a originally a sorghum based beer, although quickly switched over to maize as it became more prevalent. Today you can buy commercial versions of this which are primarily a corn based beer, maize beer, more in the European stuff. The Whitblitz is a kind of brandy. Again, a big wine growing region in the Cape area. And so you have leftovers for making wine. You're going to make Brandy. And so then plenty of that mempoer is another kind of brandy made from other fruits like peach and apricot more in the north. And then most people know of a drink. If you know anything about African drink, especially South African, is amarula, which is sort of a play on a Bailey's. It's a creamy liqueur kind of chocolate, but it's made with the marula fruit. The marula fruit famously ferments on the tree and there are great videos of elephants absolutely hammered having chewed up the override. Amarillo. Amarillo. So and if you ever see a bottle of amarillo, you'll see a big picture of an elephant on it because apparently it's the thing the elephants like to get drunk. Now actually tracing the history of whiskey in South Africa is a little trickier just because lots of people like to claim that they started it and none of it, many of it is, is not true. So again, where do you see whiskey distillers appear? On grain farms. And so even in those temperate regions where grains grew fairly well. So this is the area around Pretoria. There was a, a fellow named Alois Hugo Nebapas who built a distillery in his area. And the only reason we know about this one because he eventually got caught and had to get a license. And in 1881 he got his licenses license from the Transvaal government. This is before South Africa was South Africa and he had the rights to distill liquor from corn and other sources. That distillery is called Ed Erskabrekin and it opened in 1883. Apparently their product was not great, but the miners didn't care. They just wanted to cheap booze. Although he eventually hired a cognac maker, a guy named Rene Senhafigans, who came down and started improving their distillation processes, which was all well and fine until the Anglo Boer War of 1899, which essentially shut down booze production for the most part in South Africa. South the Gaffens actually fled back to France, although he did come back after the war was over in 1903. And he bought, was able to buy the stills from the Cabrican distillery at an, at a bankruptcy auction and then took those stills, moved to Stellenbosch, which is where the big one of the big wine growing regions in the Western Cape bought a farm and to this day they still make a brandy there called Santis Premier. Now on the other side, so that's up in Pretoria, back over in the Cape area where there's lots of growing on going on, there was Another distillery but built by Donald Robertson and Noel Buxton. This is in the 1960s. So much more current called. They called it the. Because it was Robertson and Buxton they called the R B distillery. They weren't having a lot of success either after spending 10 or so years on it. And the Stellenbosch Farmers Winery bought it up to experiment with different alcohols. They eventually started making a version of whiskey called the Three Ships. This is a very well known whiskey, although the original product product was primarily Scott Scottish whiskey. And then they added a little bit of their own spirit to it. That was the Three Ships because it was actually imported whiskey combining Scottish malt in their own spirit. But jump back because if you generally look at where the first distilleries in South Africa, you talk about the quote unquote first distillery in Africa. I don't think any of this is true but it's, you know, the documentation you'll find that James Sedge was Sedgwick. His sons opened a Distillery in 1886 and then Sedgwick was a captain who worked for the British east in these companies. He was well known for his tea clipper. He was one of famously one of the first to get the new season tea to the, to the England in his. The Clipper Undine. But he retired in Cape Town and opened an importing business for liquor and tobacco. His sons took it over in 1872 and they bought what was bought the buildings that made their distillery. It was likely already a brand new distillery. Again all this is sort of mud. And they are quick to claim they were the only commercial distillery in Africa. But you know, you can't actually find any evidence of any bottles that they made at that time. We don't really hear about the James Sedwick Distillery making whiskey until they actually move the production of three ships from R B over to them and grow the production out. They also make another well known South African whiskey called Baines which is actually a grain whiskey. It's made from corn. So more like a bourbon. I tried both of these while I was down there. I would call them mixer whiskies. Like they're. They're pretty basic. And that leads us to this one. But they. I wanted to be complete. We're talking. Can't talk about whiskey in South Africa. Talk about Three Ships and Baines both owned by the Sedgwick Distillery. But this is Draymond's and this is a little. This is a contemporary whiskey production. So this was. Is made by a guy named Moritz Kalmier who is a beer maker, so he started out in the 90s and a Draymond of course is someone who transports and delivers beer. And he, he started in the 90s making beer out of Pretoria region as well. Pretty common thing to do. And again they're, they're like 5000ft, 1600 meters in Pretoria. So high altitude, it creates a temperate environment, even though they are pretty, pretty far, close to the equator later. And his products are very successful. They make their money off of beer. They make a series of different craft beers that people really like. One of the most popular is called Jolly Monk, which used smoked malt. They've always used two row barley, which is very whiskey friendly. And Draymond's also got into the winery business, so they make wine as well. And they age all their wine in Bordeaux casks in that they buy from France, although they age their own wine from new. And that combination of being a brewer and a winemaker. In 2006 it makes sense to start making whiskey because he already knows how to get good barley. He does it for his wine, for his beer. And he buys barley malt grown in Swartland, not far from Pretoria, to classic two row barley. Although he does admit that he also imports peated male called from Scotland.
