Drink Local Beer

I love beer.

One of my absolute favorite things to do when I travel is to drink some of the local beer. Sometimes it's absolutely wonderful, like Maui Brewing Company's 'Uala Pale Ale which is made with local sweet potatoes, if you care, or Fuller's London Porter, which is about the most perfect beer ever made. Sometimes it can be disappointing, like most beers we had in Munich (not kidding) and every French beer ever made. If you are French, don't be offended. You make cheese like no other place on Earth; don't be upset that you can't make equally good beer. Want to make me happy? Give me French cheese and English beer on any given day and I'll be a very happy man. Just stay away from the French beer.

When we visited Africa in 2015, I explored African beer really for the first time. Castle on our South African Airways flight from New York to Johannesburg. Zambezi at our hotel in Zimbabwe. Tafel in Namibia while puttering around in a tender boat on the Chobe River looking for elephants and avoiding (please dear God, avoiding) hippos. They all tasted pretty much the same, brewed in the German-style lager mode. Substitute one for the other and you might not really be able to taste the difference. Well, maybe Zambezi was a little better...

Millet in raw (bottom right), germinated (top) and ground (bottom left) form.

Beer-wise, this year's Africa trip started out not much different than in 2015. We enjoyed Tusker beer in Kenya and Kilimanjaro and Safari beer in Tanzania. All three were probably a little bit better than the beers we had two and a half years ago, although I'd need to taste test Zambezi against these three because I have fond memories of that beer in Zimbabwe. For this post, it doesn't really matter.

For the purposes of full disclosure, I should note that I also had some Serengeti beer this year in Tanzania. It has a cheetah on the label which is really cool but I couldn't include it in the previous paragraph because I don't think I could legitimately say I enjoyed it. Pass on the Serengeti, please when in Tanzania. More Kilimanjaro and Safari.

But then all of a sudden, my beer experience in Africa took a left turn and got a whole lot more interesting. Like banana and millet beer interesting.

Sound nasty? Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

Banana - millet beer anyone? YES PLEASE!!!

Before we visited Tanzania's Lake Manyara National Park, we stopped at Mto wa Mbu Village, a showcase of traditional different practices of some of the various tribes that historically have made up what is now the nation of Tanzania. You can learn about how rice is farmed as an introduced crop into the area; or watch wood carvers using ebony wood to make unique black and white sculptures; or step into a traditional stick and mud house that is actually inhabited to see how people still live in these structures today; or, yes, if you really want to, you can take a swig or two of the banana beer made by the Chagga people, a bantu speaking tribe who traditionally made their homes on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru.

I would like to try some banana beer very much, please! Even though I don't particularly like bananas, unless, as I've documented in this blog, they are from Ecuador. Then I'm all in!

On our last stop at Mto wa Mbu, we got our opportunity via the single, not entirely sparkling clean blue plastic cup shown above. The tasting would be communal, meaning I'd need to get up close and personal with four people whom I had never met two weeks before. Hey, I'm sure it's OK. I mean there's alcohol involved, right? It's a sterilizer, right? Sure!

The liquid in the blue cup smelled beer-y, meaning sort of like some kind of grain and it resembled the head of a dark beer like a stout or porter but maybe with a little more, shall we say, texture. It was also bubbling oh so faintly, suggesting the fermentation and alcohol production was still ongoing.

Before we got a taste, we'd need some education about the production process. Sounds good! I'm all ears!

Taking a big swig of banana beer.

Before there is beer, there are bananas. They are harvested prior to being fully ripe because once they have ripened on the tree, they are a target for baboons. I'm pretty positive I've never had beer where a risk to the beer's production was baboons. This stuff is why we travel, folks! 

After the bananas are picked, they still need to be fully ripe before use so they are matured on site maybe three to five days (in a baboon-proof enclosure one supposes) at which time they are peeled, thrown in a pot with some water and cooked for eight hours. After cooking, the red-colored concoction, with bananas still intact, is placed in a warm room to ferment until the bucket of liquid is bubbling. There was no mention of adding yeast, although I'm not sure how fermentation occurs without it. I guess it's possible that wild yeasts drop into the bucket during the process. Not unheard of but I'm thinking yeast is added at some point.

Once the bananas are cooked, the millet is prepared. Millet is a grain that grows especially well in arid climates with poor soil. Or in other words, in East Africa. The millet is washed and kept warm and moist for three days until it begins to germinate, or sprout. When it does, it will look like the picture above. I understand this process is pretty much like germinating barley when making beer, although the barley would traditionally form the basis of the beer that the bananas apparently occupy in this recipe. Barley forms the taste backbone of most beers.

Once the millet is ready, it is ground into powder and cooked into a porridge and then mixed with the filtered banana liquid to make the final product. Voila! A kind of beer is born. We were told that the result is a 1.5% to 2% alcoholic product which is actually nutritious. How many times have beer drinkers told themselves that beer has nutritional value? But hey, these people are authorities so it must be true. We were also told that the beer is cheap and popular. I bet it is!

Despite my facial expression, I'm thinking this actually tastes like beer.

What got passed around in the blue cup was a good amount of the banana liquid topped with a millet-based cap. We were told to blow away the head of the beer to get at the hooch below. Apparently, drinking the foam on top fills you up and affects your ability to drink as much of the beer as you choose to, although I'm sure with the limited amount of beer made available to us that afternoon, that wouldn't really be an issue. I tried to follow directions here but didn't succeed; I got millet as well as bananas.

Taste-wise, I guess I could get used to drinking this stuff. Heck, if it was the only beer ever available to me, I'd definitely be on board all the time. I'd describe the taste as very smoky with faint banana notes, although I've certainly gotten more banana flavor from some Belgian beers that have no bananas in them than I did from this blue cup. The head, which I couldn't seem to blow away fast enough to avoid drinking, added what I would describe as a grainy flavor; it honestly made the product taste more like beer. I think, despite the warning about getting filled up, I'd drink this part of the beer if this were a regular drink for me. The smoke lingered for a while on my palate but that was the only flavor I was left with after taking my couple of sips.

We drank the beer warm, which makes total sense given the fact that about an hour earlier we were standing in a mud and stick dwelling with no electricity. Beer is, in fact, traditionally served warm in this part of the world. If you order a Kilimanjaro or Tusker at a restaurant, you may be asked if you want it cold. I'm not sure if the temperature of the beer affected the taste positively or negatively but I'd imagine this is not a beverage that is thirst quenching and going to be imbibed rapidly if ice cold.

Prior to this year, the most unusual beer I've ever had while traveling was sahti, a rye beer flavored with juniper berries and filtered through straw which is traditionally brewed in Finland. The banana beer we had at Mto wa Mbu was probably more unusual and I'd probably rather drink sahti any day of the week. But if nothing else were available to me, I'd be all in for a happy hour of banana millet beer. After all, it's nutritious, right? Cheers!

Done! We didn't make much of a dent in this cup but it was worth the experience.