Q: How easy/hard is it to learn to brew with fonio—is it as simple as replacing barley with fonio, or is it more complicated than that?
A: The fonio that we’re using, from Yolélé West Africa, is very easy to use in brewing. It’s already been de-hulled, it requires no milling, and it’s been pre-steamed, so the starch is already gelatinized. In the brewhouse, you’re basically rehydrating it, then going straight into saccharification. We usually add it during the last saccharification rest in the mash; we find that we get the best flavors and aromas that way. Some of our collaborating breweries have already done their first fonio brews, and all the brew days have gone really well. Note that we did see one case of possibly incomplete pre-gelatinization of the fonio, resulting in lower extract—but on average, extraction is approximately 71 percent as opposed to the 76 percent or thereabouts for most malts.
Q: Fonio has a “nutty taste.” What does it do to the taste of brews? Would a drinker distinguish a fonio brew from a non-fonio brew—and if so, what tastes different?
A: Fonio tastes “nutty” when eaten like couscous—which it resembles on the plate—but it doesn’t really bring that flavor to beer. Instead, it brings tropical-fruity, wine-like flavors reminiscent of sauvignon blanc and gewürztraminer—lychee fruit, gooseberry, mango, etc. It also gives a soft, round, silky mouthfeel to beers. We’re generally using it at 15 to 20 percent of the grist. The fonio “signature” flavors are always recognizable, and they don’t seem to be yeast strain–dependent, so the flavors show up as strongly in lagers as they do in warmer fermentations. In a pale ale, those aromatics are a great complement to dry-hop aromatics; in a pilsner, they bring a really nice lilt of fruit to the profile. People often say, “Wow, this kinda smells like white wine,” and they like that.
Q: How easy/hard was it to convince all these other big-name brewers to get on board with fonio in your Brewing for Impact series?
A: I was somewhat fascinated to see that it wasn’t difficult at all! Once people tasted the beers and understood what a paradigm shift fonio could represent for brewing, everybody was interested. I think Carlsberg pretty much convinced themselves by making a 100 percent fonio beer that was fantastic—it’s perfectly clear and has stone-fruit flavors that are somewhere between champagne and sake. We can’t wait to see where they can take it. Guinness is already strongly engaged in Africa and is excited to learn more about what fonio can do. The thing about the big brewers is that they all have serious ESG (environment, sustainability, governance) goals, and fonio—given its total lack of inputs—aligns perfectly with what they want to do in the future.
Q: Supply and demand: How easy is it to source fonio at the moment, and would this be easy to scale up? Does a big supply of fonio already exist, or is it a question of creating the demand to encourage supply?
A: At a current 700,000 tons per year, African fonio production massively outstrips “sustainable barley” production (so far, at least). The work that Yolélé West Africa is doing will allow fonio to scale up in a big way because they’re automating the de-husking and cleaning of the grain, which was the big bottleneck in the past. The automated cleaning will also decrease processing losses from close to 50 percent to nearly zero. Because fonio requires no irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides, or fungicides, land previously considered “nonarable” becomes productive. So, there’s huge upside potential.
Of course, without sufficient demand, we’re not going to see these resources developed, so there is a chicken-and-egg dynamic here. By creating demand in the brewing space, we hope to kick-start the upscaling of production to levels where this is a crop that major international brewers can easily make part of their total grain portfolio, spreading risk, creating great flavors, lowering our environmental impacts, and bringing economic security to thousands of smallhold African farmers.