Local Brew

The description of the trip to Sipi Falls would not be complete without including a postscript regarding the “local brew” experience. Our group purchased basically a vat of this concoction called “local brew” and held a bonfire with the Crow’s Nest staff to sample it. We were in a rather indignant mood, having just waited 4 hours after ordering dinner for our food to arrive. Seeing the mysterious local brew made us forget about dinner and gather around staring. It was a plastic bucket nearly filled with a substance that on first glance, was very reminiscent of vomit. The fact sounds so unpalatable that I hate to use it as a mental picture for you, but it really was an accurate description of this liquid. It was tan with some chunks of material floating in it. There were a number of multicolored long plastic straws in the bucket, which from our local group’s demonstration, you were meant to dip up and down in the bucket as you sipped it.

At first I swore to myself that I was not going to even sample the brew, but when teammates assured me that the taste was fairly inoffensive, I gave in and tried a bit. Hearing about an alcoholic beverage referred to as the ‘local brew’, I tend to picture an extremely alcoholic liquor that might cause severe burns your esophagus on the way down. This local brew only tasted sort of like warm beer. The other flavor was of strong yeast, giving the impression of drinking liquid bread. After everyone had tried the brew, we left it to the local group, who were pleased to help us drink it. We sang local songs, heard folk tales about why the chicken scratches the ground and why the eagle eats chicks (because the chicken lost the eagle’s needle, and the eagle couldn’t mend her clothes when she wanted to go for a holiday). We danced by the bonfire, and debated the relevance of cultural imperialism to the practice of female genital mutilation. It was worth every penny of the ten dollars we paid for our twenty liters of local brew.