Pito is the traditional sorghum beer of northern Ghana; in Burkina Faso the same kind of beer is called dolo, and Nigeria’s burukutu is a close relative. It’s brewed from malted sorghum – often red sorghum, which gives it a reddish-brown colour – and drunk young: slightly sour, lightly fizzy and cloudy, often from a calabash.
How Pito Is Brewed
A study of four production sites in Burkina Faso and Ghana followed dolo and pito wort from malt to finished wort (Sawadogo-Lingani et al., 2007):
- Malting. Sorghum is soaked, germinated and dried, then ground into malt.
- Mashing. The malt is mixed with water and taken through a mild heat treatment. Dolo brewers single out the boiling of the wort and of the thick sediment as factors in quality (Pale et al., 2010).
- Souring overnight. The wort is left at ambient temperature (30–33°C) for 12–16 hours. Lactic acid bacteria multiply to very high numbers, the pH falls from about 5.6 to 3.7, and acidity (as lactic acid) rises from 0.13% to 0.61%. Lactobacillus fermentum dominated at every site (Sawadogo-Lingani et al., 2007).
- Boiling and fermenting. The soured wort is boiled, cooled and fermented with yeast saved from earlier brews. Pito yeasts are almost all Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and the samples studied in Ghana were dried yeast kept at commercial brewing sites (Glover et al., 2005). In Ghanaian and Burkinabè sorghum beers, more than half of the Saccharomyces isolates were unusual strains that use only a few sugars (van der Aa Kühle et al., 2001).
Dolo brewers and drinkers judge quality by taste, alcohol and a properly cooked wort, and list malt quality, the yeast source, the proportions of grain, water and plant mucilage (used to help clarify the wort) and the boiling times as what makes the difference (Pale et al., 2010).
Grain Quality and Safety
Sorghum can carry mycotoxins. In a study of Nigerian burukutu, brewing reduced the toxins but appreciable amounts were still found in the finished beer, and the authors conclude that good-quality grain is what makes the difference (Chilaka et al., 2018). Use clean, mould-free sorghum, discard any malt that grows mould while sprouting, and treat pito as the alcoholic drink it is – not for children, during pregnancy or if you avoid alcohol. We found no published measurement of pito’s alcohol content, so we don’t give one; it varies with the brew.
Relatives
Pito belongs to Africa’s family of grain beers: Kenya’s busaa (roasted soured maize with finger millet malt), South Africa’s umqombothi, Zimbabwe’s hwahwa and Ethiopia’s tella.