Beer Styles

What kinds of beer do people drink in Johannesburg and Soweto? Three categories exist side by side. The pale lager from the big breweries is the everyday staple and corresponds to the international pale lager style. Then there are dark stouts, such as Castle's Milk Stout and the Soweto Brewing Company's Orlando Stout. And there's Umqombothi, the sorghum beer, which shares nothing with these styles but the word beer.

Lager in the international style is light, clear, and cleanly fermented. The style profile describes a range set by style guidelines, not a single brand. Castle Lager fits into this category, though its exact specifications shouldn't be equated with the guideline figures.

Stout originally just meant strong. The word evolved from London's Stout Porter, and Ireland made it famous without having invented it. In South Africa, dark beers made with lactose or roasted malt have their own tradition, one that in Soweto intertwines with the history of the shebeens.

Umqombothi has no style guideline. The BJCP catalog recognizes no category for sorghum-maize beer brewed in a pot, so there's no profile with numbers to match. The closest comparable style would be a tart, cloudy grain beer, one you're more likely to spoon than sip. It's cloudy, sour, thick, and usually low in alcohol, around 3 to 4 percent according to available sources.

Chibuku sits somewhere in between. It's an industrial drink based on a home-brewed beer, sold in cartons in large quantities. The contrast with a bottle of Castle says a lot about the city's history: two worlds, one word.