The 40-plate mash filter at Tale Beer in Ghana takes pride of place on an elevated platform alongside the brewhouse. It’s not a piece of equipment you find at the average African craft brewery, but it is a crucial part of the kit.
All the beers at Tale get at least 75 percent rice in the grain bill—so, without that filter, they’d be dealing with a Groundhog Day of perpetually stuck mashes.
Based in Nsawam—about 25 miles north of the capital, Accra, and surrounded by palm trees and lush undergrowth—Tale poured their first beers at the end of 2022. The following year, three of their core beers went on to medal at the African Beer Cup. The most impressive part of that feat: Some of them competed against all-malt beers—and beat them.
At the helm of this remarkable brewery is Austrian brewmaster Jan Kaserer, who took the job in 2022 after leaving a previous brewing job in Cape Town, South Africa.
“I came on a site visit, and when they explained the concept, I could see that there was real potential,” Kaserer says. “I was of course attracted by the chance to pioneer something new, but I also felt it was a way to build a real African beer style. It wasn’t just a small brewpub—this was a sizable startup with proper infrastructure and financial backing, meaning we could really build something meaningful.”
Embracing Local
Historically, government regulations have a way of shaping regional brewing practices.
Britain’s 1880 Free Mash Tun Act encouraged lower-strength beers. The roasted, unmalted barley used in Guinness was originally a way to dodge a bit of tax. And the attraction of lower taxes is what fuels Japan’s happōshu trend—a growing category of beers with less than 67 percent malt.
In Ghana, meanwhile, the government places a high tax on imported brewing ingredients—there’s an excise of 47.5 percent on beers of less than 50 percent Ghanaian ingredients. However, if a brewer could find a way to use more than 70 percent local ingredients—not including water, of course—in their beer, the excise duties drop to just 10 percent.
That’s not the only driver for brewing local in Ghana, but the tax brackets were a welcome incentive for Tale’s founders, Belgian-born expats Kristof Henot and Koen De Grave.
“It’s not just about the tax,” Kaserer says. “Embracing local ingredients makes a lot of sense, to avoid fluctuating prices when your currency isn’t always stable. And, while we are taking inspiration from Belgian and American beer styles, we are not making Belgian or American beers—we are making Ghanaian beers, and you can’t do that without using Ghanaian ingredients.”
Brewing with Rice
Kaserer is experimenting with a range of African grains, including sorghum and millet. But Tale’s core range focuses on one ingredient above the rest: rice.
“We buy what’s known as broken rice,” he says. “This is rice that, after the polishing process, is deemed to be imperfect. It usually ends up as animal feed. We buy around 30 tons per month, directly from farmers in the north of Ghana.”
The founders conceived the brewery with rice in mind, and they built it to cater to the challenges it presents. Besides the usual grain mill, there’s a hammer mill to pound the rice into flour. Once the rice is pulverized, the production team pumps the rice into a cereal cooker, spraying it with 158°F (70°C) water to avoid clumping. A dose of steam brings the temperature up to 176°C (80°C), where it rests for an hour to gelatinize.
Unsurprisingly, it smells just like a giant pot of rice boiling on a stove—I’m not sure why I expected anything else.
Meanwhile, in the mash tun, the malt—imported from Belgium—begins its protein rest at 118°F (48°C). Because rice is low in protein, that’s a key part of the process, to ensure that Tale’s beers have adequate head retention.
A decoction follows, with a third of the rice added to the malt mash, with a pH adjustment—particularly important when dealing with the enzyme that Kaserer uses to assist gelatinization. Then they add the rest of the rice, and a standard infusion mash begins.
Tale Beer brews with “broken rice,” partial kernels left after the polishing process. Photo: Lucy Corne
Time to Taste
After the two-hour mash process, it’s time for Tale’s star piece of equipment to take the spotlight.
The team pumps that combined mash into the mash filter, forcing it through 40 plates to separate liquid from grain. What emerges is a remarkably clear wort with a surprising and impressive amount of malt character—it’s full-bodied and sweet, with a slightly oily texture. (Then the somewhat less attractive residue—the dry mush of rice flour and spent grains—must be cleaned out of the filter by hand.)
I’ve attended plenty of brew days in my career as a writer, but few have been so intriguing or educational—or hot. It’s so hot that I suspect I might never stop sweating. Periodically, I stick my face into the kettle, which makes the ambient temperature—easily above 95°F (35°C), even without the brewhouse running—suddenly seem a bit more bearable. That relief lasts a fleeting moment, then I’m once again embraced by Ghana’s heat and 80 percent humidity. Right: Time for a beer.
Tale’s brewery is mainly a production facility, but there is a small—and blissfully air-conditioned—tasting room looking down on the brewhouse. The core beers all take what we’d see as a classic style—farmhouse ale, IPA, tripel, and tropical stout—and turn them on their heads. Each one uses at least 75 percent rice in the grain bill, besides a variety of locally grown botanicals—including ginger, cocoa, hibiscus, and lemongrass—all grown on the brewery grounds.
The Tale 5 Farmhouse Ale—the beer currently boiling beneath us—features lemongrass and is ideal for this climate. It’s fruity, dry, and effervescent, with an impressive pillowy foam. It also won gold at the 2023 African Beer Cup and silver the following year.
But the star, in my view, is the Tale 7 Ginger Triple—a magnificent manifestation of the base style and the herbal addition. For the Tale team, it’s a point of great pride that this Ghanaian take on a Belgian style won a bronze medal at the 2023 Brussels Beer Challenge. (It also won silvers two years running at the African Beer Cup.)
Right: Heritage uses a variety of Ghanaian ingredients in their beer and uses enzymes to improve fermentability. Left: The mash filter at Tale is crucial for their high-rice grist bills. Photos: Lucy Corne
Sorghum & Cassava
Tale isn’t the only Ghanaian brewery winning international awards while using local grains. Heritage Brewing, the country’s first brewpub, opened in 2023 in Accra—and it took both silver and bronze in the Alternative Fermentable category at the following year’s African Beer Cup.
Danie Odendaal, Heritage’s South African brewer, favors cassava—a starchy root vegetable also known as manioc—as well as maize and rice. To a lesser extent, they also use sorghum and tapioca, besides some imported malts.
“You could say that our concept has been nudged by the tax laws,” Odendaal says, “but there is more to it. It’s really about harnessing local flavors and making something uniquely Ghanaian. Imported malts actually land at a similar per-kilo cost to local ingredients—sometimes even cheaper. So, while the lower tax bracket is a factor, it’s much more than that.”
Odendaal, a former brewer with South African Breweries, had plenty of experience in brewing with African grains—notably sorghum—in his various roles around sub-Saharan Africa. So, brewing with up to 70 percent nonbarley grains wasn’t a huge leap—although making it work on a brewpub-sized system was more of a challenge.
“If you want to use 100 percent local ingredients, you need a mash filter,” he says. “But typically they’re built for a much bigger system, and while we looked into having one custom-built, it was prohibitively expensive.”
Instead, Odendaal and his team use a proprietary cocktail of enzymes, an adjusted mash process, and a custom-designed lauter tun to produce Ghanaian takes on IPA, lager, APA, stout, and several fruit beers. Those include a customer favorite that showcases Ghana’s oft-exported mangos.
Rising to the Challenge
Odendaal and his team have designed what he calls a “multipronged enzyme regime” to treat the raw, alternative fermentables. They first heat for gelatinization—between 167 and 176°F (75 and 80°C), depending on the ingredient—then they add malt.
Working with cassava, rice, and maize comes with all manner of complications. Almost nothing has a husk, they don’t offer much depth of flavor, and head retention is a challenge—though a touch of wheat helps with the last. Plus, as Odendaal says, the enzymes are “almost too efficient,” meaning he has to finesse them to ensure there’s enough residual sugar to help with flavor and mouthfeel.
So, what about that flavor? The lager is clean and crisp, the American-style pale ale is surprisingly bitter in a country where hop-forward beers are virtually unheard of, and the watermelon hibiscus sour is balanced, beautifully showcasing the fruit. But my favorite is the stout, which features garri—toasted cassava that’s eaten as a breakfast dish throughout West Africa. The stout is a tad rich for the weather but full of flavor, with locally grown vanilla and coffee beans also starring in the profile.
While the use of alternative fermentables and traditional African brewing grains is growing in popularity among brewers across the continent, most of them are following international trends. In Ghana, however—partly nudged by prohibitive tax rules—brewers are taking classic styles and totally reinventing them.
“What really makes me happy,” says Kaserer at Tale, “is when people drink the beer, enjoy the beer, and feel that it fits the style. Then they read that it has 75 percent rice, and they’re like, ‘What the fuck?’ That for me is the biggest compliment. That’s the best.”
