South Africa

Business Maverick, South Africa

Casualties of Cola: ORIGINS

Casualties of Cola: ORIGINS

Like almost everything in modern-day South Africa, it all began in the mines. By DAILY MAVERICK CHRONICLE.

SABMiller’s official story, honed by sepia-tinted apartheid-era advertising campaigns, credits master brewer Charles Glass with the creation of Castle Lager during the Johannesburg gold rush. In the mid-1880s, Glass founded the Castle Brewery, which in 1895 would become South African Breweries, and two years later the first industrialised company to list on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Head offices, however, were in London, and the company also listed on the London Stock Exchange—South African Breweries, it turned out, were South African in name only. The company, always a binge shopper, bought everything: rival breweries, bottling plants, soft drink companies, major retailers, while establishing the Southern Sun Hotel Corporation. By the 1960s, the minute percentage of the South African beer market that SAB didn’t own was likely not worth the effort.

But if apartheid proved lucrative—and it most certainly did—what came next was a veritable bonanza.

Read the full feature here.

Photo: Bartender serves a beer produced by brewing company SAB Miller at a bar in Cape Town, September 16, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Hutchings

Gallery

Please peer review 3 community comments before your comment can be posted

X

This article is free to read.

Sign up for free or sign in to continue reading.

Unlike our competitors, we don’t force you to pay to read the news but we do need your email address to make your experience better.


Nearly there! Create a password to finish signing up with us:

Please enter your password or get a sign in link if you’ve forgotten

Open Sesame! Thanks for signing up.

We would like our readers to start paying for Daily Maverick...

…but we are not going to force you to. Over 10 million users come to us each month for the news. We have not put it behind a paywall because the truth should not be a luxury.

Instead we ask our readers who can afford to contribute, even a small amount each month, to do so.

If you appreciate it and want to see us keep going then please consider contributing whatever you can.

Support Daily Maverick→
Payment options

Become a Maverick Insider

This could have been a paywall

On another site this would have been a paywall. Maverick Insider keeps our content free for all.

Become an Insider

Every seed of hope will one day sprout.

South African citizens throughout the country are standing up for our human rights. Stay informed, connected and inspired by our weekly FREE Maverick Citizen newsletter.