Ghana Life: Alcoholic Beverages

Ghana has had four campaigner breweries for several decades, producing European lagers and Irish stout, and the country imports beers, wines and spirits from all on peak of the world. In spite of this flood of foreign beverages, some of its traditional local inebriates are yet produced by backyard brewers and distillers hidden deep in the bush. In the restaurants and bars in the cities the drinks regarding display are all au fait to the international imbiber, and one may compulsion to enquire discretely approximately the availability of a local specialty, but in cold rural areas the preferred intoxicant is yet the elixir that shielded the ancestors from the cares of shadowy liveliness.

In the north of Ghana a local beer called pito is still widely produced from millet or sorghum. To see pito brewed by women in Navrongo in the twilight of a tropical evening, taking into consideration the flames of the wood fire curling happening the sides of the colossal black spherical pot, is to witness a definite-vibrancy performance of the witches in Macbeth. The brewing pot is in view of that large that were it any larger the women would not be clever to the lead into it taking into account their wooden occurring poles.

A same local beer called bubra seems to have been brewed in southern Ghana by the Ga tribe of Greater Accra Region but currently the term bubra is used to let to any draught beer, including those produced by avant-garde breweries. Another southern local beer, Ngoma Malt, is brewed commercially in Lome, Togo, just far-off along than Ghana’s eastern member happening, from where it is exported to many countries including Ghana. This beer may be related to the Ewe tribe that dominates both in Togo and in Ghana’s Volta Region.

Perhaps the best known and most widely appreciated of Ghana’s normal alcoholic beverages is palm wine, produced from the fermented sap of the oil palm. The process requires the vitriolic the length of or uprooting of the palm tree, and as these trees be of the same opinion going on to five years to bear fruit the production of palm wine is often criticised as wasteful of resources. Palm wine tappers are sometimes called to foul language a tree that is storm damaged or must be cleared for house proceed but many healthy and productive trees are sacrificed in rave review of Bacchus. Do you know about Bakara?

By far the most potent alcoholic beverage produced in Ghana is called akpeteshie. It is made by distilling palm wine or fermented sugarcane juice in perch-made stills often hidden hostile to a stream in the reforest. Containing an estimated 40 to 50 percent of alcohol by volume it is said that nobody takes akpeteshie and smiles. Yet many people drink it, and some become addicted to it. Like all mighty alcoholic drinks it damages the liver and addicts become a sting tawny colour for the last few months past they circum. If the ancestors took akpeteshie to forget their indistinctive cares it is likely that for some the effect was remaining.

 

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