About The Beer: Burudika
/By Greg Carlson
Africa, as we’re sure you know, is home to 1.2 billion people who comprise 54 sovereign nations and speak at least 100 languages. So when we were approached by our friends at African Community Education (ACE) about brewing an Africa-inspired beer for their annual gala, we were at once honored to be given the opportunity and incredibly intimidated by the enormous variety of cultures, flavors, climates, and traditions we were now trying to sort into one cohesive beer.
Because there are a lot of possibilities there! Fortunately, because this is ACE we’re dealing with, we decided to defer to them as the experts and just ask them if their staff and students had any ideas - think of any beverages or foods or flavors that reminded them of home or that they were particularly fond of. And here’s what we got back:
Cool. This may not look like a great start, but there’s some helpful information there - ACE’s people aren’t beer nerds! That narrows things down. We can shelf the Yirgacheffe Doppelbock and Jollof IPA for another year - we’re keeping this one simple, clean, and accessible. That is, right in our fuckin’ wheelhouse.
Long story short, we decided to stick with some fairly conventional African flavors and brewed a maize lager with rooibos tea. The beer was in part inspired by traditional African beers like Umqombothi, which is a low-ABV beer made with maize and sorghum that has a much grittier consistency than what we would normally expect in a beer (kinda reminiscent of the ancient beers of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, I reckon). It was also in part inspired by the light lagers that are currently popular in modern African brewing.
Even when we’re brewing a beer inspired by a continent thousands of miles away, we still have to hashtag local, and we relied on a malted maize from Hadley’s Valley Malt as the signature ingredient. This was actually very important because when a brewery usually brews with maize they have to perform an additional mash step in order to convert the starches in the maize to sugar. But we have a typical American ale-style brewhouse here that lacks the capability to perform that step. Thankfully, Valley Malt’s malted maize allows us to simply incorporate the maize with the rest of our grist, mash as normal, and convert all those nice starches into sugar.
As for the rooibos, we wanted to be careful because a maize lager is a particularly delicate beer and rooibos is not a particularly delicate tea. It’s assertively woody and minty, and can get downright astringent if over-brewed. Fortunately, we’re accustomed to brewing with coffee, which runs some of those same risks. So we sourced a judicious amount of tea from our friends at Acoustic Java and, like we do with coffee, cold steeped it in the tank overnight before transferring the beer to the brite tank. This quick and cold addition lets us get the exact amount of flavor we want while avoiding any off-flavors from overextraction, which are terrible.
The end result is a pale, light-bodied lager with a distinct if subtle aroma of mint and herb from the rooibos, followed by flavors of slightly sweet pilsner malt and corn tortillas, and a dry and clean finish with no lingering bitterness.
It’s a nice beer! And we’re truly honored that ACE reached out and invited us to brew it and take part in their gala. Collaborating with our nonprofit partners is honestly one of our favorite things to do, and we hope to do it again in the future. Burudika!*
*It’s pronounced boo-roo-DEE-ka.
