Jul 14, 2020
Welcome to the Good Beer Hunting Collective podcast, the show where members of our team interview each other to get a behind-the-scenes look at some of our favorite articles. I’m Ashley Rodriguez, and I produce Good Beer Hunting's podcast.
One of the most exciting parts of being at Good Beer Hunting is working with new authors. It’s thrilling to see a new corner of the beer world, or a new perspective on something I thought I knew well, told through another lens. And it’s equally exciting to see others respond to the stories our first-time authors choose to tell.
In this episode, I’m chatting with Lucy Corne, a freelance beer writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. Lucy wrote an article as part of our Mother of Invention series, made in partnership with Guinness, about the reemergence of traditional beer styles in South Africa. In this piece, she details how craft brewing enthusiasts are reclaiming traditional brewing styles—like umqombothi, a sorghum-based, wild-fermented beer—and throughout this interview, we talk about how local beer identities are made and how information gets passed along. Because traditional sorghum beer is often brewed inside peoples’ homes, it can be difficult to trace its history—but there are lots of folks attempting to highlight its origins.
Lucy also runs a blog called The Brewmistress, where she’s chronicled the effects of COVID-19 on the South African craft beer scene, including the rise in homebrewing after a nationwide ban on the sale of alcohol and tobacco went into effect in late March. Her writing on the subject should resonate far and wide, given that, in this current moment, there’s no part of the beer world that hasn’t been touched by the coronavirus. Here’s Lucy.