Judas Peak Blonde Ale

In 1607 the skipper of the British ship Consent found his vessel becalmed in what is now Hout Bay and sent his pilot, John Chapman, to a row ashore in the hope of finding provisions. Chapman’s Peak is named after this lowly ship’s pilot, John Chapman. Under the large peaks which loomed overhead and the dark waters of the bay, John moored his tiny craft and named the bay as “Chapman’s Chance” and the name stuck, becoming official on all East India charts. In early 1900’s, Sir Nicholas Fredrick de Waal, first administrator of the Cape Province, ordered the construction of a road linking Hout Bay to Noordhoek, with two possible routes under consideration in 1910. The first route over the low nek between Chapman’s and Noordhoek Peaks was second to the more spectacular route along the vertical sea cliffs. Even surveying this route was a treaturous task with its steep, rotten and unstable cliffs and ravines that the surveying party was often crawling on all fours on this perpendicular terrain. The task was deemed “mission impossible” however, De Waal would not take no for an answer. He employed convicted labour to construct this road “hewn out of the stone face of Sheer Mountain” where countless fell to their deaths, witnessed by the hungry stare of Judas Peak, looming opposite.