Tej is Ethiopia’s honey wine: honey and water fermented with gesho (Rhamnus prinoides), a shrub whose leaves and stems give it a bitter, slightly herbal edge – much as hops do in beer. It’s golden, cloudy, sweet-sour and surprisingly strong, and it’s traditionally served in a round-bottomed glass flask called a berele. Tej is the most widely consumed traditional fermented alcoholic drink in Ethiopia (Getachew et al., 2026).
What’s in Tej
Traditional tej is fermented spontaneously, by yeasts and bacteria from the honey, the gesho and the vessel. In a survey of 200 tej samples from ten production units in Ethiopia, yeasts and lactic acid bacteria were both present at around a million per milliliter; Saccharomyces cerevisiae made up over a quarter of the yeasts, and the samples had a pH below 4.0 (Bahiru et al., 2006). A 2026 sequencing study of six tej samples found Lactobacillus and Zymomonas as the dominant bacteria, a pH of 3.8 or lower in most samples, and 10.1–12.0% alcohol by volume (Getachew et al., 2026).
Because spontaneous fermentation makes quality inconsistent, Ethiopian researchers are developing defined starter cultures of S. cerevisiae and Lacticaseibacillus paracasei isolated from tej, for safer and more consistent production (Berhanu et al., 2026; Girma et al., 2025).
About Gesho
Gesho is sold dried in Ethiopian grocery stores in two forms: gesho inchet (sticks, the easiest for home brewing) and gesho kitel (dried leaves). It’s what makes tej taste like tej rather than a generic mead – without it you’ll simply have honey wine.
Keys to Good Tej
- Honey to water: about 1 part honey to 3 parts water by weight. More honey gives a sweeter, stronger tej.
- Warmth: about 20–28°C (68–82°F).
- Use unchlorinated water and very clean equipment.
- Taste from about a week. Young tej is sweeter; as the yeast eats the sugar, it gets drier and stronger.
- Want more reliability? About ½ teaspoon of wine or mead yeast gives a more predictable fermentation than relying on wild microbes – the same idea behind the starter cultures researchers are developing.
Troubleshooting
- No bubbles after 5 days: too cold, or the honey carried few yeasts. Move somewhere warmer or add wine yeast.
- Surface film: skim a thin white film; throw the batch out if you see fuzzy, colored mold or it smells rotten.
- Too sweet: ferment longer. Too dry or sour: bottle earlier next time.
- Bottles too fizzy: tej still fermenting in a sealed bottle builds pressure – refrigerate it and open carefully.
How Tej Is Served
Tej is poured from a berele and drunk with meals, often alongside injera and stews, at tej bet (tej houses), weddings and holidays. See our injera recipe and Ethiopia’s grain beer tella, which also uses gesho.
Tej is a strong alcoholic drink – not for children, during pregnancy or for anyone avoiding alcohol. Other honey ferments: mead and fermented honey water and the Maya balché. For grape wine made the old way, see Georgian qvevri wine.