Balché (balche’) is a ceremonial drink of the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula and the Lacandon Maya of Chiapas: honey and water fermented with strips of bark from the balché tree, a Lonchocarpus species (usually given as L. violaceus or L. longistylus), traditionally in a hollowed log or canoe-shaped vessel. It’s drunk in group ceremonies to reach intoxication and to make offerings (Carod-Artal, 2015), Scholars have traced how balché rituals and the gathering of its ingredients express relationships between people and deities (Vail & Dedrick, 2020), and anthropologist R. Jon McGee made a 1988 video of a Lacandon balché ceremony (reviewed by Heath, 1989). Spanish missionaries tried to suppress it after the conquest, but it survived in traditional communities.
Why There’s No Recipe Here
Earlier versions of this page gave a home method and assured readers that balché bark is safe in traditional amounts. We couldn’t find the research it relied on, and the evidence we did find points the other way:
- Lonchocarpus is a fish-poison genus. Several species contain rotenoids and are traditionally used to stun fish. In French Guiana, an 86-year-old woman who ate a bowl of mashed Lonchocarpus fish-poison plants developed vomiting, lost consciousness and had breathing failure before recovering (Chesneau et al., 2009).
- Rotenone is a neurotoxin. It causes Parkinson-like symptoms in animals and has caused fatal poisonings (Rhee et al., 2016). Farmers who had used rotenone as a pesticide had about 2.5 times the odds of Parkinson’s disease in a US study (Tanner et al., 2011).
- Bark isn’t standardized. Which species you get, which part of the tree, how much rotenoid it holds and how much ends up in the drink are all unknown for bark bought online.
Low, occasional exposure in a ceremony isn’t the same as home-brewing from an unverified supplier, but we can’t point to a tested safe amount – so we don’t recommend making balché at home, and we don’t suggest buying the bark to brew with.
Honey Ferments to Make Instead
If it’s the honey wine you’re after, Ethiopian tej uses gesho, a plant that has long been used this way, and our mead and honey-water guide covers simple honey ferments. For other traditional Mesoamerican drinks, see pulque from agave sap and tejuino from corn.