How sustainable water use inspired a brewer's honey gins, liqueurs, and beers
Cape Town, South Africa, September 12, 2022 - At the height of the Western Cape's 2018 water crisis emerged Matawi Mead, which makes alcoholic beverages from fermented honey, and seeks to conscientise consumers about alternative alcohols to traditional water-intensive ones.
The province's water dams at the time were near exhausted, pushing Khanya Mncwabe, co-founder and CEO, to take the plunge in debuting Matawi to the market, whose name means branches in Swahili.
Its range of alcoholic beverages, including beer, a liqueur and gins, uses water only during brewing. Mncwabe says this translates to less than 10% of the water used to produce alcohol, whose key ingredients include wine grapes, corn, wheat, rye, barley, sugarcane, and potatoes, which require months of irrigation.
"For us, in launching Matawi, we recognised the environmental benefits of it. I think a lot of us were sort of continuing to live as if its business as usual… but it's very clearly not business as usual," Mncwabe told Business Insider South Africa.
Popularly known as 'the nectar of the gods' mead is cultivated and consumed in various forms and has been produced through ancient times across, Europe, Africa, and Asia. In Ethiopia, called Tej, it is traditionally mixed with shiny-leaf buckthorn, and the Finnish, who call it Sima, made it sweet and effervescent with muted alcohol content.
In South Africa, it has a deep history among the Khoisan and Xhosa people, mainly in the Eastern Cape, who call it iQhilika, which is also the style of brewing mead used to produce Matawi's drinks, Mncwabe says.
The self-proclaimed, "competent and confident backyard brewer", who hails from KwaZulu-Natal, started brewing umqombothi with her mother, who was regarded as the family's designated brewer.
From her, she learnt indigenous methods, which were not biochemical but were critical in her understanding of how to modulate for variables such as how the weather, and add-ons like raisins, affected the beer taste.
Matawi spent two years experimenting with different honey and landed on organic variants, including Western Cape fynbos. In line with its ethos, it sources from small-scale producers.
"We've really spent the time to build up Matawi's understanding that it's about partnering with cooperatives, making sure that they are capacitated... and [we] aim to pay a fair market price, so we know we're appealing to a conscious consumer," Mncwabe said.
The Matawi Mead range was created to "play" with people's brains and tastes, she says.
"[Our] Braggot, which is a blend of a crafted ale and mead, [is] made in a sour style. It's really bitter, it's really sour, and that was just allowing the fermentation process to really consume all the sugar in the honey," she said.
Its gin, which has less of an English style and more of a crafty South African one, incorporates various local botanicals, such as buchu. While its liqueur, a "tipsy honey" drink, is a dessert drink backwashed with honey botanicals.
While Matawi's prospects for growth in the domestic market are exciting for Mncwabe, her eyes are set on expanding beyond the borders of South Africa. This week, the company presented its business proposal to the Small Enterprise Development Agency, hoping that the agency will support the distribution component of the business' expansion.
The company will also be partaking in an investment preparation programme with the chamber of commerce in the Cape, focused on getting into the UK and EU markets.
Source: Business Insider