Great pictures from Michael and Doria’s Travel Tales. This article is a great description, with pictures, of the brewing process of a local millet beer. Please take time and look at the rest of this blog!
Homebrew, Bobo Style
In Segou we visited a Bobo family who run a small brewery in their home, making millet beer in small quantities that they sell from a shed in their compound. While Mali is predominantly Muslim, and thus not alcohol-friendly, there are a number of peoples within the country who have maintained their traditional religions. Our guide Oumar referred to the Bobo people as “hard-core animists”. Whatever that means, they certainly were into their beer, and I got quite a few pictures of their backyard brewing venture
Here the millet kernels are soaked in warm water in the sun until they sprout. This, as any self-respecting homebrewer knows, is the first step of the process known as malting. Grains are malted by encouraging them to germinate, or sprout, and then drying them out again before the process goes to far. This increases the sugar known as maltose in the grain.
[...] from people who have linked to this blog takes me to amazing places. Today I followed a link from a post in my Mali Blog which took me to a Home Brewing discussion where they were discussing African beers and brewing [...]
Socio, thanks for linking to me – your blog has become a daily must-read for me. Drop me an email, I’d love to chat with you sometime!
Michael