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Urwagwa Recipe: Rwanda’s Banana Beer, How It’s Made and How Strong It Gets

By Updated 2 min read

Urwagwa is Rwanda’s traditional banana beer — fermented from East African Highland bananas and woven into centuries of Banyarwanda ceremony and daily life. Here’s everything you need to know about making it at home.

At a glance

Urwagwa is Rwanda's traditional banana beer. Bananas are ripened under grass and leaves for about six days, peeled, and kneaded with spear grass to release their juice, which is mixed with ground roasted sorghum (about 5% gave the best results in a study) and fermented spontaneously. After six days at 25°C it reached 10–12% alcohol. Use only ripe, peeled bananas, and never distil it.

  • Rwandan banana beer: banana juice with ground roasted sorghum, fermented spontaneously.
  • Bananas ripened about 6 days under spear grass and banana leaves.
  • Juice extracted by kneading peeled bananas with Imperata grass (about 1 kg per 10 kg bananas).
  • 5% roasted sorghum gave the best beer; six days at 25°C reached 10–12% alcohol.
  • Unripe or unpeeled bananas raise methanol in banana beer.

Ferment profile

Origin
Rwanda
Fermentation
Mixed (lactic + alcoholic)
Main microbes
Spontaneous: wild yeasts and bacteria from the bananas, sorghum and vessel
Live cultures
Yes
Alcohol
High (over 6%)

Urwagwa is Rwanda’s traditional banana beer: the juice of ripe bananas, mixed with coarsely ground roasted sorghum and left to ferment spontaneously into a cloudy, sweet-sour, alcoholic drink. It’s mostly made at home or in small local breweries and remains one of the country’s most widely drunk alcoholic beverages. Its close relatives are Uganda’s tonto and the Chagga mbege of Kilimanjaro.

How Urwagwa Is Made

Researchers in Rwanda reproduced the traditional process in 2018 – noting that it had never been properly documented in scientific studies (Munezero et al., 2018):

  1. Ripening: mature bananas (mostly the Intuntu cultivar, with Kayinja and others) were covered with spear grass (Imperata cylindrica) and green banana leaves to keep them warm, and ripened for about 6 days, until yellow and soft.
  2. Juice: the bananas were peeled by hand and kneaded with the same grass – about 1 kg of grass to 10 kg of peeled bananas – which helps release and filter the juice. The juice was sieved and the pulp pressed.
  3. Sorghum: lightly roasted, ground red sorghum was stirred in. The researchers compared 0–15% (weight per volume); 5% gave the most alcohol and the flavour tasters preferred, and they recommended it to brewers.
  4. Fermentation: left to ferment at room temperature (25°C) for six days.

How Strong It Gets

By the sixth day, the urwagwa in that study contained 10–12% alcohol by volume, with a pH of 4.0–4.7 (Munezero et al., 2018) – the strength of a strong wine, not a light beer. Younger urwagwa, drunk after a day or two, is sweeter and weaker, and juice diluted with water ferments to a lower strength, but it should never be treated as a soft drink.

Safety

  • Ripe, peeled bananas only. In a 2026 study of Uganda’s tonto, half of the traditional batches had methanol above the national limit, and the high ones came from brewers who used unripe or unpeeled bananas (Atwine et al., 2026). The same rule applies to urwagwa – and never distil banana beer.
  • Clean, mould-free sorghum. Commercially produced banana beer from Kigali contained Fusarium mycotoxins and bacterial endotoxins at levels the researchers judged not harmful, but they warned that contaminated ingredients could raise them (Shale et al., 2012).
  • Alcohol: not for children, during pregnancy or for anyone avoiding alcohol.

For other African fermented drinks, see busaa and Ethiopian tella.

Recipe: Home Banana Beer in the Urwagwa Style

Makes
About 1 litre
Hands-on
60 min
Fermentation
2–6 days at about 25°C
Temperature
About 25°C (77°F)
Difficulty
Moderate

Equipment

  • Large bowl
  • Clean cloth for squeezing
  • Fine sieve
  • 1.5-litre glass or food-grade fermenting vessel with an airlock or cloth cover

Ingredients

  • About 2 kg very ripe bananas (fully yellow to spotted, firm enough to peel cleanly; no green or rotten fruit)
  • 200–300 ml boiled and cooled water (only if needed to loosen the pulp)
  • 5% of the juice volume (50 g per litre) red sorghum (lightly roasted and coarsely ground; mould-free)

Method

  1. Peel the bananas completely, discarding any unripe or damaged fruit.
  2. Knead and squeeze the pulp by hand in the bowl (a handful of clean, dry grass or a little water helps it release juice), then squeeze it through a cloth to collect the juice.
  3. Measure the juice and stir in 50 g of the ground roasted sorghum per litre.
  4. Pour into the clean vessel, fit an airlock or cover with a cloth, and leave at about 25°C.
  5. Taste from day 2. It gets drier, more sour and stronger each day; in a study it reached 10–12% alcohol by day 6.
  6. Strain, refrigerate and drink within a few days. Never seal it tightly while fermenting, and never distil it.
  7. Discard any batch with fuzzy mould or a rotten smell.

Frequently asked questions

What is urwagwa?

Rwanda's traditional banana beer: ripe banana juice mixed with ground roasted sorghum and fermented spontaneously.

How strong is urwagwa?

In a Rwandan study it reached 10–12% alcohol by volume after six days at 25°C; younger urwagwa is weaker and sweeter.

Why is grass used to make urwagwa?

Spear grass is kneaded with the peeled bananas to help release and filter the juice; it's also used to cover the bananas while they ripen.

How is urwagwa different from tonto?

They're close relatives – both are East African banana beers with roasted sorghum. Tonto is Ugandan, urwagwa Rwandan.

Is urwagwa safe?

Traditionally made urwagwa is widely drunk, but use ripe, peeled bananas to limit methanol, clean sorghum and equipment, and never distil it.

Sources

  1. Munezero E, Imathiu S, Bikoro M (2018). Effects of varying grilled sorghum content on the quality parameters of Urwagwa, a traditional Rwandese banana-based alcoholic beverage. J Food Res 7(6):70. Link
  2. Shale K et al. (2012). Toxicity profile of commercially produced indigenous banana beer. Food Addit Contam Part A 29(8):1300–1306. Link
  3. Atwine A et al. (2026). Characterization of physicochemical properties, volatile compounds, and sensory attributes of Tonto, a traditional Ugandan banana-based alcoholic beverage. Food Sci Nutr 14(7):e72071. Link
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