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The rapid development of the craft gin industry, which in three years has expanded from a handful of brands to 135 gins produced by 65 companies, can be credited to hard-fought battles against repressive liquor legislation.
This follows in the footsteps of the local craft beer sector.
Gin is liquor which derives its predominant flavour mainly from juniper berries, but there are hundreds of other supplementary flavours, including local inputs fynbos and rooibos.
The body of the drink is made up of alcohol from either barley, grapes, sugar cane, oranges or hops.
The concentration of craft gin brands in the Western Cape – 63% according to stats collected by South Africa’s craft gin club The Gin Box – might also be because of officials’ experience with licensing issues related to the wine industry in the province.
Roger Jorgensen, who owns Jorgensen’s Distillery in Wellington and is known in the burgeoning industry as the “Godfather” of craft gin, paved the way for what is on its way to becoming a R1 billion a year industry.
Jorgensen said he and the late Sidney Back of Backsberg Wines waged war against “the national booze mafia” that had a hand in drafting legislation in the 1960s which outlawed anyone from distilling more than five litres of alcohol.
“We campaigned to allow private people to distil on the constitutional basis that your business is allowed to distil but not mine.”
Jorgensen and Back were successful. Jorgensen received the first private distilling licence permitted since they were revoked in the 1960s.
He started distilling his own gin in the 1990s. It involves distilling a clear grain spirit – such as vodka – and infusing it with juniper berries. Inverroche, just outside Stilbaai, followed in 2011, adding fynbos infusions to the mix to create its own unique secondary flavours.
But before 2015 there were “less than a handful” of craft gins being distilled in the country, said Jean Buckham who founded The Gin Box. In the past three years the industry has “exploded”, increasing South African gin production by about 1.75 million litres a year, according to 2014/15 figures from the SA Wine Industry Information and Systems, set against 2016/17 figures provided by the SA Liquor Brand Owners’ Association.
The value of 2017’s 1.75 million litre increase from 5.75 million litres in 2015 is about R300 million, with the value of total gin production at R1.3 billion.
Although the statistics don’t differentiate between craft gin and that made by big companies such as KWV, Jorgensen believes the craft gin manufacturers are “taking spend away from top-end [brands] produced by the big companies” and the increase in gin production is attributed to the exponential growth of small distillers.
The concentration of craft gins in the Western Cape is something Jorgenson attributed to Cape Town’s “hipster movement”, with people “getting arty and experimental”, the plethora of fynbos that can be used to create different flavours to add to the required juniper, as well as a tradition of distilling emanating from centuries of winemaking.
He said when the law allowed small-scale distilling after 1994, farmers across the province dusted off their old stills.
“There was a lot of equipment and expertise based in the wine industry,” he said, where farmers used to make their own brandy from their grapes.
Leigh Lisk, who co-owns the Hope on Hopkins Distillery in Cape Town, where he manufactures his own gins and distils under contract for other brands, said the wine industry means the Western Cape authorities are familiar with licensing alcohol manufacturers, making the process smoother.
“Traditionally, guys have gone through the Paarl and Stellenbosch office,” said Lisk. “Liquor licences get held up elsewhere because they don’t know what they are doing.”
Shanna-Rae Wilby, distiller and co-owner of Time Anchor Distillers in Maboneng, Johannesburg, bears out this experience.
Wilby, who started in 2015, said Time Anchor Distillers was the first craft distiller in Joburg and when it applied for an excise number from the SA Revenue Service, officials in Gauteng had to go down to Cape Town for training.
“It wasn’t easy,” said Wilby.
“We didn’t understand the paperwork and when we asked them, they said they did not know either. It’s definitely a new challenge in Gauteng because we don’t have the wineries.”
