A beer pioneer, South Africa's first Black female brewery owner trains a new generation
'When you are brewing you must constantly check your mixture,' Nxusani-Mawela instructs them. 'We are looking for a balance between the sugar and the grains.'
The 41-year-old Nxusani-Mawela is an international beer judge and taster, and is believed to be the first Black woman in South Africa to own a craft brewery, a breakthrough in a world largely dominated by men and big corporations. Her desire is to open South Africa's multibillion-dollar beer-brewing industry to more Black people and more women.
At her microbrewery in Johannesburg, she's teaching 13 young Black graduates — most of them women — the art of beer making.
The science behind brewing
The students at the Brewsters Academy have chemical engineering, biotechnology or analytical chemistry degrees and diplomas, but are eager to get themselves an extra qualification for a possible career in brewing.
Wearing hairnets and armed with barley grains and water, the scientists spend the next six hours on the day's lesson, learning how to malt, mill, mash, lauter, boil, ferment and filter to make the perfect pale ale.
'My favorite part is the mashing,' said Lerato Banda, a 30-year-old chemical engineering student at the University of South Africa who has dreams of owning her own beer or beverage line. She's referring to the process of mixing crushed grains with hot water to release sugars, which will later ferment. 'It's where the beer and everything starts.'
Nxusani-Mawela's classes began in early June. Students will spend six months exploring beer varieties, both international and African, before another six months on work placement.
Beer is for everyone
Nxusani-Mawela's Tolokazi brewery is in the Johannesburg suburb of Wynberg, wedged between the poor Black township of Alexandra on one side and the glitzy financial district of Sandton — known as Africa's richest square mile — on the other.
She hails from the rural town of Butterworth, some 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) away, and first came across the idea of a career in beer at a university open day in Johannesburg. She started brewing as an amateur in 2007. She has a microbiology degree and sees beer making as a good option for those with a science background.
'I sort of fell in love with the combination of the business side with the science, with the craftsmanship and the artistic element of brewing,' she said.
For the mother of two boys, beer brewing is also ripe for a shakeup.
'I wanted to make sure that being the first Black female to own a brewery in South Africa, that I'm not the first and the last,' she said. 'Brewsters Academy for me is about transforming the industry ... What I want to see is that in five, 10 years from now that it should be a norm to have Black people in the industry, it should be a norm to have females in the industry.'
South Africa's beer industry supports more than 200,000 jobs and contributes $5.2 billion to South Africa's gross domestic product, according to the most current Oxford Economics research in 'Beer's Global Economic Footprint.' While South Africa's brewing sector remains male-dominated, like most places, efforts are underway to include more women.
One young woman at the classes, 24-year-old Lehlohonolo Makhethe, noted women were historically responsible for brewing beer in some African cultures, and she sees learning the skill as reclaiming a traditional role.
'How it got male dominated, I don't know,' Makhethe said. 'I'd rather say we are going back to our roots as women to doing what we started.'
With an African flavor
While Nxusani-Mawela teaches all kinds of styles, she also is on a mission to keep alive traditional African beer for the next generation. Her Wild African Soul beer, a collaboration with craft beer company Soul Barrel Brewing, was the 2025 African Beer Cup champion. It's a blend of African Umqombothi beer — a creamy brew incorporating maize and sorghum malt — with a fruity, fizzy Belgian Saison beer.
'Umqombothi is our African way, and everybody should know how to make it, but we don't,' she said. 'I believe that the beer styles that we make need to reflect having an element of our past being brought into the future.'
She's used all sorts of uniquely African flavors in her Tolokazi line, including the marula fruit and the rooibos bush that's native to South Africa and better-known for being used in a popular caffeine-free tea.
'Who could have thought of rooibos beer?' said Lethabo Seipei Kekae after trying the beer for the first time at a beer festival. 'It's so smooth. Even if you are not a beer drinker, you can drink it.'
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'It's about design, make, test, learning, loop,' Collins said. He indicated cases of bottles and powders, 'all the building blocks, reagents and things.' Humans keep the machines topped up. These machines, Jerwood explained, dispense molecules created from raw atoms, molecules that AI systems have already tested and explored in virtual spaces. The candidate drugs drip onto trays of cells, and the system evaluates their effects. It's new, and there are kinks to be worked out. Some parts of the automated process still need humans to move them along, Collins said, and Recursion is figuring out how to streamline the flow of information to and from the AI. But when it works, scientists will have the results of thousands of tests glowing on their screens. The automated system has been up and running for about a year, so it wasn't involved in making the candidates currently in clinical trials. But it is helping to make future drugs. As I examined the machines in their pristine chambers, I wondered about what it means, now, to be the kind of human who loves to think about molecules, loves to make them, whose joy comes from understanding how they work. I asked Collins this. He thought back to the moment when he first crystallized a protein by hand, first saw a drug molecule clasped against it. 'I was hooked for life,' he said. Those traditional tools still have their place. But perhaps it is not here, where the focus is getting something to the clinic as fast as possible, something that works. 'We're all trying to think about patients,' Collins said. Jerwood gave her answer: 'I am so hungry for something new all the time.' Standing there, above the automated lab, she imagined the regions of chemistry where no one has yet gone, structures and reactions that lie on the far side of unknown processes. The sun was just pulling itself over the horizon. 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In the lab video, the camera glides through a black hallway, then through an anteroom, past a wall of glass. The glass can be dimmed, if the work going on behind it is confidential. Behind the wall are machines loaded with trays of reagents and cells, with arms that swivel as they move components around. Humans are rarely needed. Animation: Balarama Heller Sooner or later, in some form, AI tools will be standard in drug discovery, suspects Derek Lowe, the medicinal chemist and blogger. He calls himself a short-term pessimist, long-term optimist about these things. It's happened again and again in the industry: New strategies arrive, ride a wave of hype, crash and burn. Then some of them, in some form, rise again and quietly become part of what's normal. Already, big pharmaceutical companies—the behemoths of drug discovery—are starting their own AI-related research groups. Recursion, meanwhile, is exploring the use of AI not only to dream up and test new molecules but also to find trial participants, speeding along those last, costliest steps to market. The transformation isn't going to be without casualties. 'These techniques, both the automation part and the software, are going to make more and more things slide into that 'humans don't do that kind of grunt work' category,' Lowe says. Large numbers of jobs held by human chemists will wink out of existence. Those 'who know how to use the machines are going to replace the ones who don't,' Lowe says. Even Peter Ray no longer feels it's accurate to describe him as a medicinal chemist. 'I'm something else,' he muses. 'I don't know what to call it, to be honest.' In the months since the blind date in London, Recursion has announced two drug candidates entering clinical trials, the MALT1 inhibitor and a molecule for lung cancer. A drug for a digestive disease is already in trials. Insilico is in the process of trying to advance to a phase III trial for its idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis drug, with Carol Satler on the phone to doctors. The cards are being turned over, one by one. Ray goes running sometimes, through his neighborhood near Dundee, Scotland, and thinks of his mother. Gibson reflected on the long game he sees Recursion playing. The way it's tinged with urgency. Yes, they want to change the world. And personally, he thinks it's been too long in coming. 'There's a lot of people here who have lost a loved one or multiple loved ones to a specific disease,' he said. 'They're pissed off. They're here because they want to get revenge on the lack of opportunity that that family member, or friend, or child, had.' The meter is ticking, numbering the days, as drugs move through trials and everyone waits to see what happens. Time is the thing we are all running out of. Some of us faster than others. Let us know what you think about this article. 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