Bouza is a fermented wheat beer from Egypt: thick, pasty, yellowish and sour, drunk fresh on the day it’s made. It’s an opaque beer, like the sorghum and maize beers of sub-Saharan Africa, rather than a clear, filtered one. The FAO describes it as “a thick, pasty yellow beverage with an agreeable taste” that “produces a sensation of heat when consumed” (FAO, 1999).
How Bouza Is Made
The traditional process, as described in the FAO’s survey of fermented cereals (which draws on a 1973 Egyptian study of bouza’s chemical composition), has two parts made from the same wheat (FAO, 1999):
- Bread: about three-quarters of the wheat is coarsely ground, kneaded with water into a dough in a wooden basin, shaped into thick loaves and baked only very lightly.
- Malt: the remaining quarter is moistened and left to germinate for 3–5 days, then sun-dried and ground.
- Fermentation: the loaves are broken up and soaked in water in a wooden barrel with the ground malt, and bouza from a previous brew is added as the starter. After about 24 hours at room temperature it’s sieved to remove large particles and thinned with water.
The malt supplies the enzymes that turn the bread’s starch into sugar, and the old bouza supplies the yeasts and bacteria that ferment it.
How Strong It Is, and Why It’s Drunk Fresh
Within 24 hours of fermentation, bouza reaches a pH of 3.9–4.0 and an alcohol content of 3.8–4.2% – about the strength of a standard beer. Like other opaque beers, it has a very short shelf life and is expected to be drunk within a day (FAO, 1999): it keeps fermenting, turning sourer and more alcoholic. That’s why it’s made in small batches and sold fresh.
Bouza and Ancient Egyptian Beer
Bouza is often called the descendant of pharaonic beer. Brewing in Egypt certainly goes back that far. At Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt, one of the oldest known large-scale brewing installations dates to about 3600 BCE; residues from its vats show the main grain was emmer wheat with some barley, and their chemistry suggests that dates may have been added for sugar and flavour (Farag et al., 2019). Microscopy of residues from Hierakonpolis and Tell el-Farkha shows the emmer had been malted (Heiss et al., 2020).
Ancient brewing wasn’t the same as today’s bouza, though. A microscopy study of ancient Egyptian beer remains found that brewers blended cooked and uncooked malt with water and strained out the husks before adding yeast – evidence against the older idea that Egyptian beer was simply made by soaking half-baked bread (Samuel, 1996). So bouza shares the ingredients and the principle – wheat, malt and a living starter – rather than an unbroken recipe.
Relatives
Bouza shares its name with boza, the thick fermented millet and grain drink of Turkey and the Balkans, which is sweeter and much lower in alcohol. Other bread- and grain-based beers include Russian kvass, Ethiopian tella and Kenyan busaa. If you don’t have a previous brew, a lively sourdough starter or a little yeast can stand in for one.