Chicha

It's beer time! Beer time in Peru, that is!

I pride myself on being a beer-tasting completist when I travel. To me, that means wherever I go I have to sample some of the local suds. Wherever! And Peru was no exception. I absolutely had to have some Peruvian beer before I left the country. 

Now by this I don't mean the perfectly adequate and unremarkable Cusqueña lager style beer we found in every city and town we visited. That stuff was all well and good but I mean I wanted something older, something more Andean. LOCAL beer. Not just European style beer brewed locally. And for me, that meant one thing: chicha.

Rohday describing the finer points of chicha appreciation.

It makes sense to me that a society which revered corn above all other crops (and has cultivated more than 300 varieties) would end up making a beer out of the stuff. That's chicha (sometimes called chicha de jora). Today the brew is most likely made by drying out harvested corn in the sun on porches until the grain starts to germinate, then mash the stuff, cool it and ferment it and then serve it when it tastes good. Along the way some yeast is added in so there's some alcohol present. The predominant production scale of this stuff is mostly very very local. Like homemade. Indeed we saw corn laid out in a couple of layers on house porches in many spots as we drove around the sacred valley. 

It didn't always used to be that way. The traditional way of getting the fermentable sugars (which yeast converts to alcohol and carbon dioxide) out of the corn is not by waiting for it to germinate on the porch. Instead, traditional chicha was started by the brewer stuffing a few grains of the corn in his or her mouth and chewing to crush the kernels and get at the sugar. A little human saliva apparently starts the release of sugars in the corn. From there, the mash is spit out, flattened out and left until it's ready to be mashed. Sounds fun, right? Nothing like a little spit in your beer. :)

A closer look at the (very sanitary looking) cup of chicha beer.

Now, you can't find a glass of chicha by walking into your local bar or restaurant or hotel lobby. You have to know where to find it. Specifically, you have to look for a red bag on a stick. Seriously. That's how you find a chicheria. A red plastic bag on a stick. Once you see one and you know what it means, you start to see them everywhere. Home brewing in Peru is apparently a big thing because we saw many many red bags on sticks.

The chicheria we stopped at was in Ollantaytambo, the old Incan town where the rebel emperor Manco Inca held off the Spanish, one of the very few battles that the natives won against Pizarro's conquistadors. And by "stopped at" I really mean that our guide, Rohday, ducked into the place and emerged out onto the street we were gathered in with a cup of opaque yellow liquid. One cup, ten people. Looks like it's a sharing situation right there on the street in front of a massive old Incan wall. How perfect.

I'd describe the appearance of the beer as I would a wheat beer, although with perhaps a little more opacity and a deeper yellow color. The consistency of the brew matched that type of beer also; it was a heavy type of drink. Thicker than a commercially available lager type beer. The taste was actually good. Not good like I'd drink this if nothing else were available (like the banana and millet beer I had last year in Tanzania). I mean good. The predominant flavors I got were apple and pineapple, which I guess are a little strange flavors to get out of beer but I've had other beers in the past with these types of tastes that I like. The beer went down easy with a just a bit of a sour note at the end. I have no idea whether our chicha contained the brewer's spit. I'm hoping ours was brewed the more modern way. 

Here goes nothing. Hoping for an aftereffect free experience. 

For whatever reason, my chicha drinking experience ended up being unsatisfyingly short. I guess Rohday is responsible for the health and safety of our group and in his estimation, getting a bunch of people onto a bus after a one sol cup (that's about 30 cents; yes, for the whole cup) of chicha each wasn't that good an idea. He blamed it on the tendency for first time drinkers to experience diarrhea. Who knows if that's true but it's not like we are drinking something that's been heavily processed in a sanitary facility or anything so he might just be right. Rohday also claimed this stuff prevented prostate cancer; I'm less confident about that claim.

In drinking a few sips of chicha I felt connected back through the ages to the ancient Inca. The emperor Atahualpa served chicha to Hernando de Soto in the year 1531 when the Spanish first encountered (but before they betrayed and executed) the emperor. Five years later, the rebel emperor Manco Inca bound his noblemen to the cause of defeating the Spanish by sharing chicha from ceremonial jugs, sort of like our party did on the streets of Ollantaytambo. Except we didn't then go out and try to kill a bunch of Spaniards.

And just like that, our chicha experience was over. One more country down. One more beer experience down. I'm sure there are many many more to go. Can't wait for the next one.

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How We Did It
There's not much to say about this one. Look for the red bag on a stick and take a chance. Remember what Rohday said about the diarrhea. Good luck!

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