Want Good Beer? U-gan-da Homebrew

Our blog is called “A Drinking Couple with a Traveling Problem,” because Katie and I have really gotten into beer and we enjoy going out and trying new ones.  We have our favorites, and ones we dislike (IPAs and Pale Ales!), but the search for a new cool brew is always a fun venture.  The craft beer revolution took the U.S. by storm, and because of it, we’ve become a bit of beer snobs…

Unfortunately, the craft beer revolution has not hit Uganda, which can be a huge problem when you want a good beer.  The beer in Uganda is mainly pale lagers like a Budweiser or Rolling Rock.  The biggest ones here are Nile Special (passable), Club (horrible), Bell (even worse), Tusker (from Kenya and ok), and Castle Lite (from South Africa, and pretty disgusting).  There are also some beers made from sorghum, a wheat replacement, called Eagle (the dark one is ok but has a funny taste), one that is pretty decent called Moonberg (the only issue is that you can’t get it very often), and a decent dark beer called Castle Milk Stout (again from South Africa).  The one thing that all of these beers have in common though is that they are ridiculously cheap (say 3,000 shillings which is under $1), and for the most part, they come in half-liter bottles.  So you are drinking not really good beer, but end up drinking a lot of it since it's so cheap.  There is one microbrewery here, called Yasigi, and while they do have a stout, wheat, IPA, amber, and lager, they are all poor imitations of what they should taste like.

A selection of beers you can get here along with a homebrew and a local type of beer which tasted nasty and had dirt and other stuff in it.

To fix our drinking problem, I started to be a homebrewer!  I wasn’t really sure how to start, but luckily the Foreign Service is full of homebrewers, and I was lucky to have a group of them already going in Kampala.  I’ve been to a lot of breweries and done a fair amount of tours, but for some reason still had no idea how beer is made.  The guys who were already here helped walk me through the process and explained how each step works.  From there, I was able to make my first brew, a Coffee Stout, which unfortunately had a funny aftertaste to it (most likely from going through our large crate shipment from home).  I was a little discouraged but figured I’d give it another shot with a Vanilla Bourbon Stout.  A little ambitious for only my second beer, but it actually turned out really well and my homebrewing continued from there!

Rascal with her namesake brew.

To date, I have made 8 beers and have experimented with adding my own little touches to set kits.  The next step that I am moving to shortly is called all grain brewing.  The simple way to homebrew is to use extract, which is basically malt condensed down into a powder or liquid form.  With all grain brewing, you use the actual malt grain and need say 12+ pounds of the grain rather than 3+ pounds of extract.  All grain brewing takes a little longer but is overall cheaper, and some say tastes better than extract.  You also end up with 12+ pounds of spent grain that can be fed to chickens (or other farm animals) or used for cooking recipes like a pizza dough (tastes pretty good actually).

I’ve become comfortable enough with brewing that two of the other brewers and I are going to put on a brewing class for new people coming to Kampala that are interested in brewing.  I plan to keep brewing while I am here in Kampala, and hopefully into Baku, provided they do not have a good selection of beers that we like as well. 

Maple syrup, bacon, and beer, what's not to like?

Beers I Have Brewed

• Learning Experience Stout – Coffee Stout (Had a funny aftertaste)
• Vanilla Bourbon Rascal – Stout with vanilla and bourbon (I named the first beers after the cats around our house)
• Chocolate Oat-Munch – Coffee Stout with Hershey’s chocolate syrup (Taught me that chocolate syrup is not good to use to get a chocolate flavor, and how yeast works.  It tasted ok but the yeast ate the sugars in the syrup and it became over-carbonated.)
• Spaz’s Dunkelweizen – Made this for the big Oktoberfest Wine and Cheese
• Mama’s Harvest – Oktoberfest beer (I used an ale yeast instead of a larger yeast so a faux-Oktoberfest and had it for our big Halloween Wine and Cheese)
• Sticky Pig – Maple Bacon Stout (Quite tasty actually and brewed for the Annual Chizziz and Beer Fest)
• Morning Monkey – Coffee Stout
• Yankee Doodle’s Grand Cru – Belgian Ale
• Poobah – Belgian Chocolate Stout
• Grand Poobah – Belgian Chocolate and Peanut Butter Stout