tella

Tella is a fermented grain beer brewed across Ethiopia for at least two thousand years. In Amharic the word is ጠላ, and it names a category of low-alcohol beverages made from sorghum, barley, maize, or teff, depending on what grows in the region where it is made. The brewing process takes several days and involves gesho, a dried hop-like shrub native to Ethiopia and parts of East Africa, whose bitter leaves give tella its distinctive sharp edge. No gesho, no tella.

The word tella appears in Ethiopian chronicles from the medieval period onward, but the drink is almost certainly older than its written record. The Aksumite kingdom, which flourished roughly from 100 to 940 CE, maintained grain stores of a scale that implies organized fermentation. Ancient brewing in northeast Africa goes back to at least 3000 BCE in the Nile Valley, and Ethiopian highland brewing likely has similarly deep roots. Tella was never a luxury drink. It was the everyday beverage of farmers, soldiers, and monks on non-fasting days.

Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity shaped tella's social role in a specific way. Because the church prescribed fasting from alcohol on many religious days, tella was associated with celebration by contrast. It was the drink you drank when you were allowed to drink. At Timkat, the Epiphany festival, at harvest celebrations, and at weddings, tella was served from clay pots by women who had brewed it themselves. Commercial brewing is recent; home brewing is still common.

The taxonomy of Ethiopian fermented drinks separates tella from tej, which is honey wine, and from areki, a distilled spirit. These are not merely different strengths but different social registers. Tej was the aristocratic drink, served in royal courts; tella was democratic. When Menelik II received foreign dignitaries in the 1890s, they drank tej, and when the farmers of Amhara and Tigray drank together after the harvest, they drank tella.