{UAH} THE BEER YOU CAN EAT

Beer you can eat: Africa's homebrew becomes big business

Written by: La'Kitgum on 8th October 2013

Brewed for millennia in villages across Africa, the opaque beer now known as Chibuku is an international hit in 10 countries — and counting.

By Oakland Ross, The Star, October 08, 2013

The brewing of traditional African beer, fermented mostly from sorghum or millet, was once local but is increasingly big business. This is Zambian Breweries' Chibuku brewery in Kitwe.

It has long served as the ceremonial ambrosia of a timeless Africa, prepared with painstaking care by rural women, toiling over smoking wood fires and steaming earthen pots.

No social occasion or religious ritual was complete without it — no wedding or funeral, no prayer for rain, no tribute to the gods.

But that was then.

Nowadays, a busy African consumer can pick up a couple of cartons of the stuff at the local liquor store on the way home from work. It comes in colourful cardboard containers and costs roughly $1 a litre.

Or, to put it another way: "It's bho-o neChibuku."

That's advertising talk in Shona, the main African language spoken in Zimbabwe. It means, "It's OK with Chibuku."

The slogans might be different in other parts of southern or eastern Africa, but the beverage itself and the loyalty of its consumers are broadly simila

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Gwokto La'Kitgum

"Even a small dog can piss on a tall Building", Jim Hightower

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