🇷🇼 Rwandan Cuisine

Urwagwa

Banana Beer

Prep Time 3 days

Servings 8

Difficulty Hard

A traditional fermented beverage made from ripe bananas and sorghum flour, yielding a mildly alcoholic, tangy, and slightly sweet drink.

Ingredients

1 Peel very ripe bananas and mash thoroughly in a large vessel using clean hands until completely pulped.
2 Mix in sorghum flour to provide fermentation yeast, adding small amounts of water to achieve a porridge-like consistency.
3 Cover the vessel with banana leaves and leave to ferment in a warm place for two to three days.
4 Strain the fermented liquid through grass filters into clean gourds, discarding the pulp. The beer is ready when it develops a pleasant tang.

Did You Know?

Urwagwa is so culturally important that the Kinyarwanda proverb says "A man without banana beer has no friends at his door."