Koi Mmusi is happy to hear that the millet she grows is being used to make beer. She’s a brewer herself, although the beer she makes is very different from the Pale Ale inside the can she’s inspecting. Along with her husband, Mmusi takes care of a small farm in the far north of Botswana. It is tough farming country. Rainfall is low. The climate is harsh. You don’t have to spend long in this part of Botswana to notice that the soil isn’t really soil at all, but acre after acre of dry sand.
But the sporadic rainfall and the difficult planting conditions aren’t the only problems for farmers here—and they’re certainly not the largest. If they manage to beat the climatic odds and actually get their crops to grow, they’re still faced with unwelcome visitors who can undo months of hard work with a gentle stroll across the wrong patch of land: elephants.
Anna Songhurst, one of the world’s leading experts on elephants, has dedicated her life’s work to studying interactions between elephants and humans.
“It can be devastating,” she says. “It can be so serious that an elephant can come in and destroy a whole field in one night and leave the family without food.”
As part of her groundbreaking doctoral research, Songhurst identified “elephant corridors”—specific routes that the pachyderms take in the dry season, when moving from arid land to the permanent waters of the Okavango Delta.
This region of Botswana is referred to as the Panhandle, in reference to the shape the Okavango River takes as it runs through the semi-arid surroundings. The river feeds the Okavango Delta, a huge inland wetland home to over 400 bird species and a wide range of other wildlife—including a massive population of elephants. The elephants follow timeworn paths to reach the Delta’s abundance, but as their territory is squeezed ever smaller by human development, they encroach on farmland, causing conflict between the 15,000 elephants and 15,000 people who call this region home. Reducing this conflict is at the core of Songhurst’s work, but it is an ongoing battle.
Her research has led to some notable outcomes. Most remarkably, Botswana’s government changed its policies on how and where it allocates farms, ensuring that people are no longer allotted fields within the recognized corridors. In addition, Songhurst and her husband Graham McCulloch created a nongovernmental organization that focuses on reducing conflict between people and elephants in the region. Called Ecoexist, the organization has effected true change in the lives of the region’s farmers. But one thing Songhurst couldn’t have predicted was that her research would eventually lead to the launch of northern Botswana’s first microbrewery.
It all began with millet.
“Millet is the staple crop in this region,” says McCulloch. “It’s the most climate-resilient crop, it does well in nutrient-poor soil, and farmers can practice open pollination, so they’re not reliant on the government supplying seeds, which in such a remote area can happen very late in the season, or sometimes not at all.”
Ecoexist works with a cooperative of farmers in the Panhandle whose main crop is millet. A key part of the organization’s work involves training local farmers to adopt elephant-aware practices in order to forge a better relationship between pachyderms and people.
Despite the recognition of the elephant corridors, the animals still approach farms, sometimes in search of food. A typical response would be to beat drums or, for those with the hardware, to shoot at the elephants in an attempt to drive them off. This can have catastrophic consequences if 11,000 pounds of startled elephant runs not away from the noise but towards its perpetrators.
“Millet is the staple crop in this region. It’s the most climate-resilient crop, it does well in nutrient-poor soil, and farmers can practice open pollination, so they’re not reliant on the government supplying seeds, which in such a remote area can happen very late in the season, or sometimes not at all.”
Ecoexist encourages gentler methods, which we can see when we call on Kadizora Dimbo, a man whose farm is regularly visited by elephants. His outer perimeter is edged with fabric that’s been doused in chilies, which elephants are not fans of. Strings of rusted beer cans blow in the wind, the noise they make serving as a deterrent for sound-sensitive elephant ears—one that is much gentler than the banging of a drum. He also shows us the beehives he’s erected to ward off unwanted visitors, who balk at the sound of buzzing bees.
Image courtesy of Okavango Craft Brewery
Dimbo is a somber and serious man. His deeply lined face speaks to the many years he has spent battling against the weather, the soil, and the elephants. As well as millet, he grows maraka, a gourd whose flesh is ubiquitous in local cooking and whose skins are hollowed out to use as drinking vessels for the traditional millet beer, Mberera. “The dry-land farming gives me many sleepless nights during the season,” he says, referring to the climatic challenges of farming in sand with no irrigation. But a couple hundred yards away, edging the Delta itself, he has a small area set up for horticulture. The swatch of bright green where he grows tomatoes, salad greens, herbs, and chilies is a welcome if rather incongruous sight amidst all the sand and dust.
Dimbo is testing out every recommended elephant deterrent one by one to determine which ones to adopt next season. While the sight of a fresh footprint in his young chile plants is proof that nothing can completely keep them away, he says he’s happy with the progress he’s made since signing up with Ecoexist.
Farmers who join the cooperative are required to sign a contract committing to elephant-friendly farming practices. In return, Ecoexist promises to purchase surplus millet at an above-market price.
“It’s a lot of extra work to instigate the elephant-aware farming practices, so there has to be an incentive,” says McCulloch.
Millet is mainly a subsistence crop. Some farmers will allocate a small amount for homebrewing, but the bulk of it is pounded into a porridge and served alongside meat and vegetables. It’s widely consumed but also widely cultivated, meaning there isn’t much of a market for the grain. So the Ecoexist team decided to create a market themselves.
During the brainstorming session to try and establish new uses for the staple crop, there were ideas that never made it off the drawing board. “Pop millet”—an alternative to popcorn—and breakfast cereal were suggested, but Songhurst and McCulloch were looking for something that would make more of a splash. Then, through one of the other founding partners of the millet venture, Loki Osborn, Songhurst, and McCulloch were introduced to Heine du Toit, a food scientist and amateur brewer based in Cape Town, South Africa. “It was Heine that suggested craft beer,” says McCulloch. “And it didn’t take him long to convince us that beer was the one.”
Research and development began in 2016, with du Toit brewing practice batches on a 100-liter (.85-barrel) system while malting millet in his suburban kitchen. Meanwhile in Botswana, McCulloch and Songhurst, along with Osborn and the final partner in the business, Francine Sheldon, set about finding premises and tackling the extensive bureaucracy that starting up a first-of-its-kind business in Botswana entails. At the time there was another microbrewery in the country—the now-defunct Big Sip, in the capital of Gaborone. But McCulloch and Songhurst’s brewery would be more than 500 miles north, in the sleepy settlement of Maun.
Maun is principally a tourist town, the gateway to the 5-million-acre Delta—a major safari destination. But most who land at the town’s diminutive airport head straight out to the lodges and camps of the Delta, often spending little more than a night in Maun itself. The roads are rutted and edged by sand, with many secondary streets harking back to the time before the tourist boom, when there wasn’t an inch of tar to be found in the whole town. Donkeys shelter in any sliver of shade they can find and herds of cattle plod lazily across main roads, creating the only traffic jams Maun ever sees. It’s hot, it’s dusty, and there’s not a lot to do. It is the perfect place to open a microbrewery.
Following four years of experimentation, recipe development, and red-tape wrangling, Okavango Craft Brewery was ready to launch. It was February 2020—just a month before the pandemic hit and Botswana endured a long, tough lockdown.
“The timing could not have been worse,” says Murray Stephenson, head brewer at Okavango. “The restrictions were constantly changing. We had alcohol bans, then we were allowed to sell but only off site. The plan had been to operate as a brewpub, but we couldn’t have customers on the premises.” But one positive that came from the many months of closures was that it gave Stephenson the chance to experiment with millet—both malting it and brewing with it.
Although he only moved to Maun in 2020, Stephenson is no newbie to southern Africa’s brewing scene. After starting homebrewing at university, he got a job as assistant brewer at Cape Town’s Woodstock Brewery and worked at two other breweries in his home city before relocating to northern Botswana.
Moving from a cosmopolitan city by the sea to an inland settlement lovingly referred to by locals as Dusty Donkey Town might seem an unusual choice for a 30-something surfer, but Stephenson says it was meant to be.
“I first visited Botswana when I was 10 years old on a family safari trip and I was really taken with it,” he says. “Ever since then I wanted to return and always had an idea about living here for a while. In fact, that whole trip was the reason I went on to study zoology at university. When I was offered the job at Okavango, with the link that the place has to conservation, well, it all just made sense.”
It’s a pretty remote place to be brewing: Everything—from yeast and hops to labels and cans—is shipped in from South Africa. The closest microbrewery is at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, some 400 miles away—a long drive if you suddenly realize you’ve under-ordered on malt when brewday arrives.
“One of the biggest issues is transport. We’re buying at the same cost as a South African craft brewery but transport adds so much to the landing costs—plus about two weeks to the delivery time. Everything is slow here, and we can’t source anything locally except millet and water.”
“One of the biggest issues is transport,” says Stephenson. “We’re buying at the same cost as a South African craft brewery but transport adds so much to the landing costs—plus about two weeks to the delivery time. Everything is slow here, and we can’t source anything locally except millet and water.”
But despite its remote location, the brewpub wouldn’t be out of place in any North American town. The minimalist décor echoes that of taprooms worldwide; vast windows allow those at the bar to see what’s going on at the 500-liter brewhouse. But while the shiny stainless steel system looks like any other, Okavango Craft Brewery smells a little different. Sure, on brewdays that agreeable aroma of mashing malt fills the nose, but on the day I first visit, a different scent hangs in the air. It’s a nutty, biscuity-like aroma, like grandma’s freshly baked oatmeal cookies straight from the oven. It is the smell of millet being malted.
Thanks to some help from Chris van der Walt, founder of the first (but now-defunct) micro-malting plant in South Africa, the Okavango team malts a fresh batch of millet every week. It’s a pretty rudimentary setup that currently produces just 260 pounds of malted millet per month. I happen to visit on the last day of the malting cycle, so I’m around as assistant brewer Olerato Ratama retrieves a completed batch from what was once an industrial bread oven.
I steal a handful of the still-warm malt as he transfers it, tray by tray, first into a large plastic container where he checks the quality, and later into malt bags, where it is stored until brewday. Not as sweet nor as flavorful as barley malt, it is still tasty—nutty, slightly earthy with a touch of biscuit in the background.
Okavango uses millet in all of its beers, in proportions ranging from 20% right up to 100%. While its 100% millet Golden Ale failed to win a medal at the 2022 African Beer Cup, it did receive a respectable score from the panel of judges. Okavango’s core range performed well in the only pan-African beer competition, with Panhandle Pale Ale and Old Bull Stout both taking home medals in the 2022 contest.
Old Bull, a Dry Irish Stout with 30% millet in the grain bill, also won the 2022 BASA African Celebration Award, which goes to the highest-scoring beer that champions African ingredients.
“It was an honor for us to be chosen because it kind of rubber-stamped our mission and our vision of our company,” says du Toit. “It was an acknowledgment that the industry sees what we are trying to achieve and that we are, hopefully, on the right track.”
“What makes Okavango Brewing so exciting is that we are beginning to see truly unique African beers being showcased. There is nowhere else in the world that can replicate the ethos, the landscape, and the ingredients of this new, truly African beer style.”
Okavango’s beers are available at the brewery, a few cafes around town, and in some of the luxury safari lodges dotted about the Delta. But the market in Maun is small and the supply of millet far outstrips Okavango’s current output. The plan, though, is to scale up and use millet not just in its own beers but to sell on to other craft breweries around Africa—and beyond.
“We are in the process of expanding the malting process,” says du Toit. “We are upscaling the equipment with a view to upping production to around three tons per month.”
This embracing of African ingredients is something that is catching on across the continent, with an increasing number of small breweries utilizing traditional grains such as sorghum and fonio alongside malted barley. For many years, trends across the continent’s burgeoning beer scene have largely followed those being set elsewhere in the world, but this is changing. According to Troye May, beer tourism manager at the Beer Association of South Africa, Okavango is helping to lead the way.
“What makes Okavango Brewing so exciting is that we are beginning to see truly unique African beers being showcased,” he says. “There is nowhere else in the world that can replicate the ethos, the landscape, and the ingredients of this new, truly African beer style.”
And brewers around the continent are eager to get their hands on some of Okavango’s elephant-friendly millet malt. “I love the innovative things Murray and the team are doing with locally available ingredients,” says Nick Smith, owner of Soul Barrel Brewing near Cape Town, South Africa. Soul Barrel’s Live Culture, a wild-fermented beer that uses all local ingredients, won best in show at the 2022 African Beer Cup. For Smith, it’s important to use that which is local and traditional. Whenever Okavango is ready to sell millet malt, he says, he’ll be ready to buy it.
Brewing with millet has a long history in northern Botswana, though it remains largely undocumented. The traditional millet beer Mberera is a spontaneously fermented, opaque brew that’s been made the same way for generations. It is almost always brewed by women, generally in the home, and largely only for special occasions: births, weddings, rituals, and major celebrations.
It was at a New Year’s party in 2021 that Stephenson had his first encounter with Mberera. He was visiting Ecoexist’s base camp in the Panhandle—a seven-hour drive from Maun or a day-long journey by car, speedboat, and mokoro, the iconic dugout canoes that provide the most marvelous way to see the Delta. On New Year’s Day, the Okavango team visited the farm owned by Mmusi and her husband, Mosupi Simba. Their daughter Olemogile had brewed a batch of Mberera to toast the New Year. Once Stephenson tasted it, he had an idea.
“I filled a two-liter growler which I brought back to the brewery and worked on isolating and propagating the yeast strains found in the beer,” he explains. “I brewed a batch of Golden Ale and added the Mberera, then left it to do its thing.” After 18 months in a barrel, that beer was blended with marula, a juicy, plum-sized tropical fruit with a tart, almost citrusy flavor. Throughout southern Africa, marula is used to make wines, spirits and liqueurs, though nobody loves it as much as a herd of foraging elephants.
Just 150 liters of Okavango’s Marula Sour Ale were released in late 2022 in wax-dipped, Champagne-style bottles, a first for Botswana’s nascent beer scene. One bottle went to Mmusi and her family so they could sample what Stephenson had created with their brew.
When I visit the family’s farm, there is sadly no brewing taking place, but Olemogile does have some millet she’s in the process of malting for her next batch. It has a sour, yogurt-like aroma that hints at the tart character the final beer will have. I ask what separates an average beer from a good beer: Is it the base millet, the malting technique, the ambient temperature, or perhaps the equipment?
“No, none of that,” says Simba. “It is the brewer. It’s like cooking—two people can cook a meal with the same recipe but one works and one doesn’t.” His daughter, he is proud to say, has the touch when it comes to brewing millet beer—a skill she learned from her mother.
It is clear that Mmusi demands great respect from those around her. When asked about their farm, Simba sits back to give his wife her deserved place in the spotlight, leaving her to talk through an interpreter despite the fact that Simba could have told us their story in English. Theirs was one of the first farms to commit to elephant-friendly farming. Mmusi—elected chairperson of the local farm cooperative—played an integral role in encouraging other farmers to join the cause. McCulloch describes her as their rock.
The family has been farming here since 1981 and has had more than their share of elephant encounters over the years. But Simba says there’s definitely been a notable reduction in the conflict since adopting Ecoexist’s methods. They have also seen an increased yield in the sorghum, maize, and beans they grow on the sandy 20-acre property.
But above all, they’ve seen a growth in their output of millet—the core crop for this family and many like them, a crop that is now destined for the mash tuns of Botswana’s only craft brewery.
Words + PhotosLucy Corne
