|BACKGROUND|

In February of 2018, it was hard not to get caught up in the hype. The Black Panther hype, that is. It was one of the highest grossing films of the year and is still the highest grossing Marvel film to date. I guess it was a pretty alright film.

Admittedly, I was no different. Despite being melanin-challenged compared to the stars of the film, I still felt like I wanted in on the party. So, I started wracking my brain on a simple enough idea: how do I make a Black Panther beer?

My experience with the majority of African topics is… well, quite limited. Aside from a plethora of musicians that I discovered while taking an African Drum & Dance class in college (meaning your boy can rock a mean dundun or djembe), I’ve only had a smattering of cultural experiences, even via pop culture or food. This provided a bit of a challenge.

Through a few friends who have lived or worked in various parts of Africa, I’ve managed to glean some information here and there, but things like “they have a fermented beverage made of plantains” was kinda… uninspiring. Or, at least, not going to live up to the glitz and glam of BP by showing the internet how I made a banana beer. And then I fell down the rabbit hole of African meads, sometimes known as t’ej, meis, and/or iQhilika.

My first real exposure to African mead was from the bar I work at managing to get some Makana Meadery stuff on draft. We deal a lot with imports, so being able to get a keg of African mead, chock full of flavors like rooibos tea and savannah wildflowers, was awesome. Not that the US doesn’t have their fair share of word class meaderies like Schramm’s, but… a large majority of the current offerings are so far removed from what I’d consider mead that it’s a bit sad. In the sense that they’re making fermented honey water – a mead is a mead is a mead, I suppose.

However, African meads, like the t’ej that I ended up honing in further on, has some very interesting properties to it. Specifically, its use of gesho in the process. While gesho is referred to as “African hops”, sometimes, that’s not wholly accurate. It’s in a completely different family and everything from the leaves to the roots get used across the board, rather than just the flower. Heck, even the fact that it’s not even a bine plant makes it different. But the way that it’s used in the brew process is both similar and different to hops. While it can be used to impart an earthy/floral/herbal bitter component to t’ej, gesho (usually in root or stem form) is used to actually inoculate the honey/water combination to push it through the fermentation process without pitching any sort of additional yeast, similar to how some Norwegian farmhouse breweries have their little kveik sticks. It’s both a flavorant and the vehicle for yeast for fermentation.

This is the part where I confess that I technically didn’t make a t’ej – I made a t’ella. The difference here is that t’ella is a (predominately Etheopian) take on a kvass, of sorts. Usually relying on whatever’s around, from barley, wheat, corn, and teff to leftover bread, it’s less mead and more beer. Typically, it’ll get hit with some spices or maybe some fruit, but it gets a similar treatment to t’ej in how it’s typically spontaneously innoculated with yeast from plants, although t’ella is seemingly more buckthorn than gesho. Either way, t’ej is more mead and t’ella is more beer. I did start off with the intention to make a t’ej and, by some loose terms, I’d say this is maybe more of an African braggot than anything. I’m just gonna call it a t’ej because it’s at least the most common term out of all the others I’ve already thrown around. Plus, at it’s core, my real focus of this recipe was that I wanted to use gesho and honey in a beer.

Since I had at least nailed down some idea of what to use with ingredients, I tried to broaden my search, which essentially meant googling “African beer” and I stumbled upon this pretty interesting read from Beer & Brewing about traditional African brewing. Ultimately, this gave me a lot more to work with as far as a palette went, seeing as I was still vehemently against a plantain/honey t’ej. Seeing that ingredients like millet, buckwheat, and sorghum as usual suspects made my life a whole lost easier, since I not only know how to use them, but where to source them. Some of the other ingredients I decided to opt towards were a bit less common in modern brewing: teff and cassava. Teff’s a cool, relatively up-and-coming grain from Africa that’s gluten-free and commonly used in bread-making. Cassava (a.k.a. yuca or manioc in most Spanish speaking countries) is a slightly fibrous tuber plant that’s a nice sub for potatoes if you want to make fries. That was honestly the easy ingredient to find, since I could pop down the road to my local bodega and grab some. Everything else… got a little tougher.

The malted buckwheat and millet was simple enough as I just ordered what I needed from Gluten-Free Homebrew. Having used them before, it was great, as usual. The sorghum, I ended up going with Brewer’s Best from my LHBS because it was cheaper than anywhere else online. But the actual, cool African ingredients, I was starting to get stuck. Either they were stupid expensive, in way more bulk than I’d need, a combination of the two, and all-around just pretty difficult to track down from a source that didn’t skeeve me out. I was about ready to make the 3 hour drive to DC just to get stuff and then, I found Brundo Market.

Turns out, there’s pretty much an entire Ethopian store on the internet, complete with its own small section on brewing supplies. Pretty neat. Prices were solid (shipping sucked, though) and they had gesho, teff, and asharo, which I didn’t even know I wanted, but I did. Asharo is an Ethiopian roasted barley, mine was somewhere probably in the range of a pale chocolate in regards to color, but it’s got this crazy kinda spice flavor to it? I don’t know how to really describe it, but my natural reaction was “fuck yeah, throw a pound in, why not?”, meaning that I now was also no longer making something that was gluten-free, but that only disappointed one of my friends. After picking up 4 pounds of raw honey at my local grocery store, I had everything I needed to make something that I’m sure no Ethiopian person would recognize as being actual t’ella. As long as it’s drinkable, I’d call it a win.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 6 gallons

Mash Temp: 157 F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: 92% (estimated)

Original Gravity: 1.074 // 18.0 P

Final Gravity: 1.018 // 4.6 P

Estimated ABV: 7.4%

IBUs: 0 IBU

Color: 23.0 SRM | 45.4 EBC

Recipe

Fermentables

4# Raw Honey | 27%

3.3# White Sorghum Syrup| 22%

2# French Roasted Millet | 13%

2# Buckwheat Malt | 13%

2# Cassava/Yuca, grated | 13%

1# Asharo (Ethiopean Roasted Barley) | 6%

1# Teff (ground) | 6%

Hops

none

Yeast

1L starter of Voss Kveik (Fermented at 85F)

Spices and Stuff

4 oz. Milne Blackberry Powder @ 15 min.

4 oz. Milne Blueberry Powder @ 15 min.

8 oz. Gesho Entchet (crushed) @ 15 min.

Water Shit

2 mL 88% Lactic Acid

2 tsp CaCl

|BREW LOG|

One of the main issues of the brew, aside from ingredients and their sourcing was partly what yeast strain to use. In my head, I thought that a saison yeast was appropriate, but I didn’t just want to make another saison or have the whole batch get overly dry. Instead, I opted for an avenue that I hadn’t yet explored: kveiky boys. Due to my typical issues with being lackadaisical, and my LHBS pretty much only carrying White Labs, I struggled to find a way to acquire any strain of kveik yeast that didn’t involve paying $15 for a pitch or arrive past the brewday I’d need it. Low and behold, I managed to harvest some Voss from a can of Never Going Home IPA from Platform, as they’d just done an unfiltered IPA with the strain in their rotating IPA series. I’d say that $3.25 is a great price for a penny-pincher. Made up a simple 1L starter, dumped in the dreggies, and off to the races.

Starting the brewday off right, I had to grate up all that sweet cassava to get it into the mash. If you’ve never grated something that is particularly starchy and chock full of fiber, it’s a pretty fun thing to do. The rest of the grains, barring the teff flour, all went through the mill with ease, although the buckwheat groats are still hard, even though I wasn’t chewing up a blender blade this time. Just to make sure that I had enough diastatic power, despite all the malted grains, I added in some extra amylase powder during the mash. After heating up 3 gallons of water, I did a single infusion mash, coming in a bit over my target temp of 156F, instead at 157F. That’s a bit higher than I typically prefer to mash, but I also knew I was adding in almost 8 pounds of fermentables during the boil and I also wasn’t 100% sure that the Voss yeast didn’t have any sort of diastatic properties itself, similar to how the 3711/French Saison yeast strain (and a few others) actually does. The mash smelled amazing. I can’t tell you exactly what they do with asharo besides roasting it on clay, but it’s an awesome malt. After an hour, I batch sparged with 5.5 gallons of 168F water, collecting everything into the kettle. I took a pre-boil gravity, not sure exactly how to calculate what I was exactly supposed to get from the teff and cassava, but making some rough estimations with Brewer’s Friend, I figured that my reading of 1.022 was actually pretty good.

I waited until the wort was up to a rolling boil before I started adding in all the honey and sorghum. I didn’t want to completely overwhelm the pot and stall the boil, so I gave about 5 minutes between each round of adding a pound of sugary goodness.

Now, the majority information about using gesho that I could find online was dealing with how to use it in t’ej, meaning that I had no idea specifically how to use it in beer. Not a problem, I had another resource – one of my friends that I’ve known since pre-school used to brew at Dogfish Head and they use gesho in Bitches Brew. Turns out, to my dismay, he’d only personally brewed it like once and was pretty shaky about how they had really used it at the brewery. Back to square one. Ultimately, I decided to treat it the way I would hops, by adding it in the boil, but would do it as a later addition, since I had no way of knowing how much bitterness it would impart. At the same time I added the gesho, I also added in two packets of Milne fruit powder. These were “leftover” samples from the beer I did last year using fruit powder, just this time I actually had them on hand to add to the boil as I wanted, rather than into the carboy after the fact. I mean, Black Panther, blackberry… darker the berry, sweeter the juice? Since I also had blueberry, I did opt to toss that in as well, as I thought the flavors would compliment well. I gave everything about 5 minutes to really mix in before tossing in the whirlfloc and then riding out the rest of the boil.

At this point, the basement smells just sweet and fruity, with a hint of spice and herbs. I was getting pretty excited about the beer. Even then, tasting the wort after chilling it down to 68F, it was ridiculously tasty. Given how the Voss strain worked in the IPA, I was very confident that the yeast was going to play nicely with the batch and yield something quite tropical and fun. With enough moving parts, I wasn’t quite sure how much fermentable sugar I would get out of the cassava, but the beer ended up coming in with an SG of 1.074. After racking into the carboy, I hit the wort with 60 seconds of oxygen and then pitched the starter. Before tucking the carboy away, though, I did connect it up to my InkBird/heat wrap combo, since kveik yeasts like it hot – as in like 90-100F hot. It seems, unfortunately, with how cool the basement was, that the beer only got up to 85F during fermentation, but that’s fine.

At bottling, I managed to get a yield of 5.5 gallons, meaning I needed 4.75 oz. (2/3 cup) of table sugar to make my usual priming solution, aiming for 2.4 vol/CO2 for carbonation. Checking the final gravity of the beer, the batch ended up coming in at 1.018 (1.020, adjusted). That was maybe slightly high, but I did mash at a pretty high temp. Either way, the beer was tasting pretty good, if not slightly sweet, and had a beautiful ruddy/rusty hue to it. My guess would be that Voss kveik doesn’t have any diastatic properties. After filling, capping, and labeling the 2+ cases of bottles, it was time to let the yeast do its thing once more and let the beer bottle condition.

|TASTING NOTES|

The beer pours a lightly hazy rust/auburn color and tosses up a fluffy white head that laces well down the glass. At room temp, the beer is clear, so I can only assume that the haziness is pectin haze, since I don’t remember adding any pectinase to combat the fruit powders in the boil. Medium level carbonation.

The nose of the beer is dried stonefruit, honey, noble hops, and cinnamon. There’s almost a slight tartness to the nose, but not the overly aggressive sour level. Almost a hint of grain, but it’s mostly hidden. Lotsa apricot and wildflower.

On the front of the palate, there’s definitely a slight sorghum tartness present, but it’s so well married with the honey and fruit that it’s not the overly harsh shitty GF beer flavor, but more of the English winegum candy type that you can get using sorghum correctly. The tropical esters from the kveik yeast play super well with the dark berry flavors from the powder and the luxurious sweetness of the honey. There’s also a really light caramel/nutty flavor, which is most likely from the French Roast Millet, since I’ve used that before. That being said, the beer is definitely sweet, but not more than what you’d find in a Belgian abbey style like a double. At the end, the cinnamon/spice hints from, what I can only assume is, the asharo perk up and you end up with an almost pie-like flavor between the honey, fruit, spice, and the grains. Super drinkable. There’s not much in the way of bitterness like hops would give, but there’s definitely something helping to temper out the sweetness. If I had to warrant a guess on a comparable number, this is maybe like 35 IBU equivalent, solely from the gesho.

The beer has a really luscious mouthfeel to it. While the sweetness if pretty hefty, the thicker, fuller mouthfeel also probably doubles down on that. It almost kinda coats the mouth like an imperial stout might, but it doesn’t quite have that slick or oily feeling, more just a slightly sticky/sugary one. Not wholly unpleasant, but it does end up lingering, not dissimilar to some sweeter meads, leading me to believe part of that component might be due to the honey. The carbonation level helps lift the heft of the beer a good amount, preventing it from becoming cloying.

Being aware that any number of these weird ingredients could’ve gone sideways in the batch, this is awesome. It’s drinkable, flavorful, and I’m pleased with how it turned out. Better yet, I learned a lot along the way as far as brewing with less typical ingredients and managed to expand my knowledge about international and traditional ingredients from another culture’s brewing. This is definitely something that I’d consider brewing again, especially if I needed to do something that was gluten-free, since that’s a reasonably easy transition. While I might not have been able to strike while the iron was hot 365 days ago and have beer for a Black Panther party, I can at least watch it on Netflix. I just gotta get in contact with my buddies who’ve been to Africa and see what they think about my interpretation.

The piece of art used for the label is Arkadia by Lina Iris Viktor, who is the same artist that accused Kendrick Lamar and SZA of stealing her art for the “All of the Stars” music video. It’s… a bit tongue in cheek to do it myself but… I’m not making any money off this.