Aegir Project: Be it, don't dream it

It would take about a year for the Aegir Project to open its doors, which Rory had accounted for knowing how much red tape there would be to wade through. What he hadn’t foreseen was for some investors in the brewery to fall through, resulting in operations starting out on a shoestring budget. “It was the best thing that could have happened to me,” says Rory, in hindsight. “But yeah, we started with nothing and just bootstrapped everything. We welded up the tanks in the brewery, and then we opened a little 10 seater tap room next to the brewery. Threw a whole bunch of fold-out tables under the milkwoods [trees] in the courtyard outside, and then we’d open up.”

Initially Aegir Project sold everything it made on tap, on site; a gruelling but effective and rewarding approach. “In South Africa, we’ve got beers from big breweries which are fully pasteurised, have all the preservatives, they’re rock solid, so you can leave a keg out the back alley at 50 degrees, then run it through a chiller to serve and the beer is going to be fine. Obviously, our beer is not quite that durable. We started out with a bit of distribution, and our beers just weren’t very good out in the public. So we immediately pulled them all back in and focused everything on getting customers to us, which is great for beer integrity but it comes with a whole set of its own hidden challenges.”

Rory conceded that the biggest of which was simply manning the bar. He himself was on the front line, personally serving beers all weekend, every weekend, for the first two years of the brewery’s life. “I would have people coming in and being like, ‘Oh, can I do the tasting board? I just don’t want to have any pale ales or IPAs’. I found myself begging people to try something other than a lager, I was almost like ‘I’ll pay you money to drink this beer’, but that was just because people had had bad experiences of these styles in the early days of craft beer. 

“So, I pretty much forced every single person to listen to me blag on about the beers. And when you’re standing in front of people, talking, you kind of get more of a response out of people. I started noticing people move away from mainstream beer into the pale ale realm, then back into dark beers, and now and then into IPA. Now our pale ales and IPA outsell our lager quite consistently, which is amazing.”

From these humble beginnings, Aegir Project has grown slowly and organically. Rory wouldn’t change a thing, but also assures me that the brewery hasn’t yet reached its final form. “If those investors had come on board, I would have been pushed to grow at a rate that would have made this a business not a passion project,” says Rory who, when asked if Aegir Project today is the brewery he envisioned when first starting out says it’s “exactly where I wanted it to be”. In today’s world, with all its overlapping hardships demanding constant compromise, this strikes me as both remarkable and affirming. 

Aegir Project has by no means reached its final form. “Growth isn’t really in my vocabulary right now,” says Rory. “I’m just sort of focusing on just keeping the beer quality increasing, and have invested quite heavily in the last few years in getting the right equipment for us – all the Anton Paars, we just got a new Wild Goose canning line.” He also has a general feeling for the direction he wants to take things in the future, citing sours, wild ferments and a barrel program as a definite aspiration. He says South Africa is still a long way away from being ready for these styles, but Rory also has a track record of convincing drinkers to give things a try. If he can get South African drinkers excited about cask, I’m sure he’ll persuade them to try styles primed for enjoyment by the wine-drinking palate. 

“Since I’ve been back in South Africa, we’ve thrown every beer we’ve made on cask” says Rory. “It’s my favourite way to drink beer, if I’m honest. You just get such a nice expression of what the beer should be. It’s a tricky sell here in South Africa, because everyone thinks cask is warm and flat, so it’s taken a while, but every Thursday we tap a cask, and run it through a chiller so it’s more suitable to our climate. Now we’re starting to see some people get excited about it, and will order it whenever they see we have it on. We’re quite well known for our hazy, hoppy IPAs, so we tend to have that on cask quite a lot.” 

I guess a little bit of Scotland lives in Cape Town.