Today, 01 November 2019, entries for the African Beer Cup in 2020 opened to all brewers around Africa. In its second year, the event was created by Lucy Corne and Shawn Duthie with the aim of creating a competition for the African continent that is similar to the Great American Beer Festival (GABF), which attracts beer lovers from all over the world.
The inaugural competition saw the majority of beers entered coming from South African micro and big breweries. Duthie hopes they will get more interest this year from brewers all over Africa. We asked him what he was most excited about for the 2020 edition: “I’m excited to see what new breweries from around Africa will enter. We were ecstatic to have beers from 11 African countries in 2019 and the quality of the beers was superb. Hopefully we can double the number of countries this year and I think a lot of these beers will challenge South African beers in regard to quality and innovation.”
There are 34 beer style categories for brewers to enter their beer, but the highest accolade a beer can achieve is being crowned Best Beer in Africa! Last year’s award went to The Stormy Smoked Porter from Drifter Brewing Company.
We asked Corne what her vision was for African Beer Cup and what the 2020 competition would bring: “One thing for the future we would really love is getting traditional [African] beers involved in the competition. It would have to be on a completely different judging scale because of the shelf life. We don’t know if it’s going to happen in 2020, but it is something we would like to work towards.”
The one unique aspect about this competition is that each beer is judged twice by a different panel of professional judges, which helps eliminate the chance of subjective judging. Corne goes on to say, “We will have a few international judges joining us in 2020. Beyond that we hope for more international judges getting involved and bringing their expertise, both to evaluate the African beer and also to help impart their experience to local judges.”
For more information on the competition and how to get your beer entered, head on over to their website.
http://africanbeercup.com/