LETTER FROM SUDAN:Sudanese had to drink smuggled beer under Khartoum's rule, but now they make it freely, writes JODY CLARKE
TWO KILOMETRES along a sun-beaten dirt track topped with gravel as big as fists, you smell it before you see it. It hangs in the air, just as it has for 251 years outside St James’s Gate in Dublin. The soft, bitter whiff of hops.
But this isn’t some trendy new microbrewery in Dublin. Indeed, it’s not, as you probably guessed from the mention of the sun, anywhere in Ireland at all. It’s Juba in southern Sudan. And looking for a symbol of the independence of the region, which is likely to split from the rest of Sudan next year, you won’t find a better one than that familiar aroma.
Following the imposition of Islamic law in 1983, anyone having a cool beer in Sudan ran the risk of 40 lashes. But in a peace deal signed in 2005, which brought an end to the 22-year civil war between the Muslim north and Christian south, southern Sudan was made exempt from Sharia. And that meant they couldn’t just drink beer freely again. It also meant they could make it.
“It was not easy getting beer when Khartoum was in charge,” says William Dut Chagai (41), knocking back a can of Heineken by the river Nile. “You had to take locally made alcohol like suk suk, a spirit. But you can’t take much suk suk because in 10 minutes you get high.”
“Police would stop you,” adds John Bullen Alier (30), who has pitched for the local 6.5 per cent Guinness. “So we used to smuggle it in from other countries.”
For more than 20 years, that was how most southern Sudanese got their kicks, until South Africa’s Sab Miller started building the gleaming brewery that now stands about 5km from the centre of Juba.
“We did some research and it was obvious that there was quite a strong beer market here,” says Ian Alsworth-Elvey, managing director of the 7,400sq m plant.
“We were importing 320,000 hectolitres of beer every year from our plant in Uganda, so we thought there had to be a viable business opportunity in south Sudan.”
A South African, Alsworth- Elvey despairs at explaining how many pints that is. But at 100 litres a hectolitre, that means south Sudan’s eight million or so people were knocking back 54 million pints of the company’s Ugandan beer every 12 months.
“It’s tiny. But looking at the population of southern Sudan, it was reasonably encouraging.”
Production started in May 2009, with water pumped along a 5.2km pipeline from the Nile river to the plant. Once it gets there, Sab Miller’s people do their magic. They’ve developed a beer called White Bull Lager, which they say is a crisp, refreshing drink designed to meet the tastes of locals.
So what do the locals think of it? “It’s quite popular,” says Suzy Belcher, owner of the Bedouin Camp Hotel in Juba.
At five Sudanese pounds for a 500ml bottle, it is cheaper than other beers on the market, which probably helps in one of Africa’s poorest regions. But at 4.2 per cent it “is a bit weaker”, adds Alier who, as a fan of export Guinness, is used to something stronger.
However, with 283 southern Sudanese employed at the brewery, locals are keen to do their part for the economy by buying the beer. And as southern Sudan dumps Arabic for English as its national language and introduces a secular school syllabus, it is another example of the slow strides it is taking towards independence.
But considering the problems Sab Miller has in developing and distributing the beer, it is clear that southern Sudan still poses major challenges. The company had to negotiate land access in a place that until early last year had no land legislation.
More importantly, it has to import all the ingredients for the beer, in a country 12 times the size of Ireland but with just 50km of tarmacked road. Everything from sugar to more than three million brown 500ml bottles has to be transported up along bumpy roads from Kenya – not an easy business.
Elvey says the company has a programme looking at using local crops such as sorghum and cassava, not just because it assists in the development of the region, but because it “shortens our logistics routes. We have to bring it from Mombassa, so if we can shorten our routes, that would be great.” If more people drank the beer, it wouldn’t hurt either.
But as Chagai explains, getting some drinkers on to it won’t be all that easy. “The cattle rustlers won’t touch beer. They only drink suk suk, because they say it gives them speed.”