Banana Trees

Yes, your read the title correctly, in Tanzania they make beer out of bananas.

Bananas are the main crop of Tanzania and they use them in just about everything.   Not only to they eat them plain,

A Vat of Brewing Banana Beer

they eat them fried and turn them into flour which they use for cooking.  My favorite banana dish probably was the banana soup.   The strangest might be the banana beer.  Apparently, if you cook green bananas, the sugars will convert to alcohol.  They add a little sorghum and some other things and create the most common drink in Tanzania, banana beer.

In order to thank us for our hard work, we celebrated with the villagers with a vat of banana beer.  We were all handed a traditional drinking class, a gourd on a stick, filled to the brim with this strange substance.  It has a strange smell and isn’t strained so has sorghum floating on top of it.  Not exactly the most appetizing thing in the world, but it seemed necessary to experience every part of the new culture.  If you could get past the texture, it did not taste bad and drinking from the gourd was kind of fun.  However, I quickly decided it would be a more pleasant afternoon for everyone to give my beer up to one of the villagers who absolutely loved it.

Before: Excited to Try the Traditional Beer

After: Not Exactly Tasty