African Beers Hailed : This Tusker’s for You: It Tastes Great

The toasting sun and sandy breezes of Chad can create a powerful thirst. So when the work week ends, folks in N’Djamena crowd the mud-walled taverns along what is known as the Avenue de la Soif--the avenue of thirst.

There they slake that thirst with tall green bottles of Gala, a local beer savored by both foreigners and Chadians that has been brewed without interruption through two decades of civil wars.

John Blane, the U.S. ambassador to Chad, says Gala’s taste rivals any beer in the world and is “simply the best in all of Africa.”

The ambassador’s assertion might earn him an argument in East Africa, where tourists in pressed khakis swill the local Tusker beer on the terrace of Nairobi’s Norfolk Hotel. On some Sunday afternoons, even Kenya’s vice president, Mwai Kibaki, can be found nursing a Tusker from the tap at the Muthaiga Golf Club.

Light Taste But Potent

A British diplomat in West Africa, however, argues the case for Club beer in Liberia, although his first experience was not auspicious.

“It tasted so much like my favorite English light beers that I was drinking them one after another,” he remembered. “But when I tried to stand up, I couldn’t.”

Africa’s high-quality, flavorful and inexpensive beer has long been one of the continent’s success stories, as well as one of its best-kept secrets. Most of Africa’s countries have gleaming, efficient and usually profitable breweries that turn out beers with names such as Flag, Stork, “33,” Gazelle, Lion, Star, Mocaf, Castel and White Cap.

On a continent where factories are scarce, black Africa’s breweries are among the largest private enterprises and stand as models for the future of industry here. They also brew big revenue for financially strapped governments. Gala’s annual tax bill in Chad, for example, accounts for 10% of the government budget.

Advertising Soft-Pedaled

Producing beer in developing countries also has its own set of rules.

“We don’t advertise heavily,” Ian Warden of Kenya Breweries said. “When you’re nation-building, you cannot afford to have people spending all their money on luxuries.”

Accordingly, the Tusker advertising slogan is “Baada ya kazi ,” Swahili for “After work.”

Africa’s beers most resemble European brews in taste, but Africans drink much less beer than either Europeans or Americans. And, at taverns such as Le Desert on the Avenue of Thirst, Gala is, often as not, served at room temperature--that is, warm.

That’s the preference of most African beer drinkers, a taste acquired in rural areas where bottled beverages are available but refrigerators are not.

“There’s really nothing like a warm brew to make me happy when I’m relaxing,” said Ndirangu Muiruri, 54, a weekend beer drinker in Nairobi.

Although Europeans introduced Africa to conventional beer, Africans have been brewing their own suds for centuries, using fruit, honey and sugar--and the hot sun for fermentation. Still served in many rural African homes, the concoction often is poured from a tea kettle.

“Before the colonialists came, each tribe had its own drink,” said K. Dieter Ulbricht, a German who has been brewing Tusker beer in Kenya for 30 years. “It wasn’t very healthy. But the African already had a taste for fermented liquid. Then we came with ‘our tribe’s’ beer and they fell for it.”

Africa’s breweries have survived and thrived in spite of many obstacles: poor road systems, the necessity of bringing ingredients from thousands of miles away, heavy import duties, shortages of spare parts, unsteady local economies and acquisitive local politicians.

The odds against producing a good beer in Africa are nowhere higher than in Chad. It is one of the most beleaguered countries in the world: Foreign and domestic armies have shot up the place, droughts regularly mock the land and the economy has risen and fallen--but mostly fallen--with the world cotton market.

Prospers Despite War

Yet the European-owned Brasseries du Logone has been brewing Gala since 1965. It is “the only significant Chadian enterprise whose operations have remained untroubled throughout the years of civil war,” an independent economic analysis of the country recently concluded.

“Two things have always sold well and easily in Africa, locally made cloth and locally made beer,” Mathieu Paesmans, a Belgian at the brewery, said. “You can sell as much beer as you want here.”

Gala is brewed on a eucalyptus-shaded savannah in southwestern Chad near Mondou. The hops, barley and other ingredients are imported from Europe, reaching landlocked Chad sometimes after a yearlong journey by ship, train and truck.

Gala emerges from the factory in 22-ounce bottles, nearly twice the size of an American beer, and its European taste should really be no surprise; the brewery is jointly owned by the Anglo-Dutch food company Unilever and Heineken, with Heineken in charge of the brewing.

A large share of the 24 million bottles produced annually are loaded on trucks for the rattling three- or four-day journey to the country’s largest city, N’Djamena, population 500,000. In the dry season, the trucks take the short route, 365 miles on unpaved roads. In the wet season, the trucks must take the long route, a 450-mile trip that winds into and out of northern Cameroon.

European Brands, Too

Sold alongside the local beers of Africa are well-known European brands such as Guinness, Carlsberg, Amstel and Tuborg. But they also are made locally, under contract with those faraway companies. Few, if any, African countries import beer from farther away than their next-door neighbors.

But Kenya Breweries, in the first serious attempt to sell African brews in the United States, recently began exporting Tusker to Los Angeles and several other American cities. So far each shipment has sold out, and the brewery plans to export half a million six-packs to the United States this year.

Africa’s beers have a higher alcohol level and richer taste than most U.S.-produced beer. Mocaf, a dark amber brew from the Central African Republic, has 5.8% alcohol and may be the strongest in Africa. Most American beers range from 3.2% to 4% alcohol.

“Our drinkers like a strong flavor and a hefty scent,” a spokesman for Mocaf’s European-owned brewery said.

The Thirsty Waited

Mocaf suffered a brewer’s nightmare in 1980 when the brewery was unable to produce enough beer to satisfy a sharp, unpredicted increase in demand. Dozens of tavern owners, and their customers, waited for days in the sweltering sun outside the brewery for their allotments of the drink.

Since then, Mocaf has enlarged its capacity, and a French firm has opened a second brewery in Bangui, the capital, to brew Castel beer. Beer production in the country has continued to soar, increasing by 25% in 1985 and 50% in 1986.

Beer consumption in Africa is generally quite low, however. While West Germans each consume, on average, 29 gallons per year, Chadians drink one gallon per person, Kenyans three gallons and Cameroonians 13 gallons. Only residents of oil-rich Gabon, drinking 21 gallons of beer a person, approach their fellow quaffers in industrialized countries.

Africans drink less because they have less money and most live in rural areas that have few taverns. Also, some countries have large populations of Muslims who avoid alcohol for religious reasons.

Africans Nurse a Beer

Africans also drink more slowly.

“Americans drink to quench their thirst,” Ulbricht, the head brewer for Tusker, said. “Africans drink their beer more like wine, slowly, letting it sit over the course of an evening.”

The biggest competitor for most breweries in Africa is the traditional home-made bili bili .

“It’s hard to compete with them on price,” Paesmans, the brewer of Gala in Chad, said, “but our beer is more hygienic.”

Prices for bottled beer in Africa are low by Western standards. An 11-ounce bottle of Tusker, for example, costs about 40 cents. Gala’s imposing 22-ounce bottle sells for about $1. Mocaf in the Central African Republic sells for about 50 cents.

But in countries such as Chad, where the average annual income is $80, and even Kenya, with a $310 average, a difference of even a few cents means a lot. The version of Tusker exported to the United States is not a big seller in Kenya, for example, because it costs a nickel more than the brewery’s other brands.

Kenya Breweries is the largest private firm in Kenya, employing about 4,500 people at some of the country’s top salaries and paying about $125 million a year in taxes. Shares of the company, traded on the Kenya Stock Exchange, are popular with pension funds seeking safe investments.

Gored by Elephant

One of the oldest beer makers in sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya Breweries was founded in 1922 by two brothers who came to Kenya from Britain on a hunting safari and decided to stay. One brother was gored by an elephant in a hunting accident a year later, and the company named its flagship beer “Tusker” to commemorate the event.

Africa’s beers have won awards for technical brewing quality. Tusker, for example, has collected eight consecutive gold medals from the Beer Quality Institute in Brussels.

But taste is another matter. Why African beer seems to taste so good is something of a mystery, especially to foreign businessmen and advisers who travel the continent.

Some suggest that it’s the water. Others think it’s the weather. But perhaps it is just the novelty of drinking a refreshing beer in the middle of a continent still unspoiled by smokestacks, under a starry nighttime sky that still reaches all the way down to the horizon.

Christian Roche, a marketing man for the brewery in Chad, brought a few cases of Gala beer back to France not long ago so that his friends could sample the beer that he had praised for so long.

“It wasn’t as good as I remembered it,” Roche said recently. “I guess that’s because I wasn’t drinking it in Africa.”