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Banana Beer, P. W.h
"If a larger or smaller quantity of millet (boiled) is added to it and the mixture is left standing in large earthen pots for two or three days and stirred from time to time, it becomes a beer which, according to the quantity of millet added, is more or less intoxicating."
This is a fragment rather than a formula: it continues from a preceding entry on expressed banana juice, and the "it" being fermented is that juice. Read as an ethnographic note, not a tested procedure, and treat every quantity as unstated.
- What "it" isThe fragment carries over from the preceding entry, so the thing being fermented is whatever that entry describes; on the face of this passage alone the millet is added to nothing at all.
- The millet is the hingeBoiled grain supplies starch, nutrients and a carrier for wild yeast; in the traditional East African versions the grain is usually malted (sprouted then dried) so that its enzymes convert the starch. Plain boiled millet contributes far less fermentable sugar, so most of the alcohol here comes from the banana sugar itself.
- Quantities are genuinely absent"A larger or smaller quantity" is the whole specification, and the text says outright that strength varies with it. There is no honest conversion to give; anyone working from this is guessing.
- VesselsThe text says only 'large earthen pots'. If unglazed, such pots are porous and may carry resident microflora, which is often held to be part of how the traditional drink works. A modern equivalent would be a food-grade plastic or glass fermenter, loosely covered to let carbon dioxide out.
- Two or three days means warmThat timetable assumes warm ambient temperature of the sort found in the tropics. At cool room temperature the same mixture would ferment considerably more slowly.
- What you would actually getPresumably a cloudy, sour, low-alcohol drink; the text itself makes strength depend on the quantity of millet. It would have no keeping qualities and would sour quickly, so it would be strained and drunk soon after.
- Uncontrolled fermentationThere is no pitched yeast, no acidification step and no cleaning instruction. Open-pot wild fermentation can readily produce mould and acetic spoilage; discard anything with surface fuzz or a solvent smell rather than trying to rescue it.
Banana beer is brewed across the Great Lakes region and East Africa, where sweet cooking bananas are pressed for juice and fermented with a cereal, most often finger millet or sorghum: urwagwa in Rwanda and Burundi, mbege among the Chagga of Kilimanjaro, kasiksi in parts of Central Africa. The grain is generally malted, and the drink is traditionally communal, made in quantity for a specific occasion and drunk while still actively fermenting.