What is tella beer? It is one of the oldest continuously brewed beers in the world — a mildly fermented Ethiopian grain beer bittered and flavored with gesho, a native buckthorn plant that functions as Africa’s indigenous answer to hops. Brewed in homes across Ethiopia for millennia, tella is less a commercial product than a living tradition: the drink of weddings, harvests, religious feasts, and everyday hospitality. Its flavor profile is earthy, slightly sour, faintly bitter, and deeply rooted in place — a beer that could only come from the Horn of Africa.
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This expedition maps tella’s geography, its remarkable continuity across Ethiopian history, and what the beer actually tastes like — including the gesho plant that defines it. If you want to brew it yourself, see How to Brew Tella Beer at Home. If you want to know what to eat alongside it, see the Tella Beer Food Pairing Guide.
The Geography: The Ethiopian Highlands and Beyond
Tella is a product of the Ethiopian highlands, a vast plateau that spans much of the country’s center and north at elevations between 1,500 and 3,000 meters (4,900 to 9,800 feet). This altitude shapes the beer in two ways: it determines which grains grow here, and it provides the cooler temperatures that slow fermentation and allow tella’s characteristic mild sourness to develop without tipping into vinegar.
The grain base varies by region. In the Amhara region of northern and central Ethiopia — including the historic cities of Gondar, Lalibela, and Bahir Dar — sorghum and barley are the dominant grains. In Tigray, to the north, barley tella is common. In Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region, and in the south and southwest, teff — the tiny ancient grain also used to make injera flatbread — appears in the grain bill, giving the beer a darker color and a more complex, slightly fermented-grain character. Some brewers blend all three: sorghum for body, barley for fermentable sugars, and teff for color and flavor depth.
What unifies all these regional variations is gesho: Rhamnus prinoides, a shrub in the buckthorn family that grows throughout the Ethiopian highlands and is used in tella brewing across the country. Without gesho, the drink is simply called korefe — an unbittered, very young grain beverage. With gesho, and with sufficient fermentation time, it becomes tella.
Tella is brewed throughout Ethiopia, but regional identities are real. The tella of Gondar is said to be particularly prized, and the city has a long reputation as a brewing center. Travelers moving between Ethiopian cities will notice differences in color, clarity, bitterness, and alcohol content from one town’s tej bet (tella house) to the next — a regional variation that mirrors the terroir logic of wine far more than the consistency logic of industrial beer.
The History: Three Thousand Years at the Table
The evidence for fermented grain beverages in Ethiopia stretches back to at least the first millennium BCE, and possibly much earlier. The ancient Aksumite civilization — centered in what is now Tigray and Eritrea and at its height from roughly the 1st to 7th centuries CE — left records of grain storage and fermentation that suggest organized brewing was already a feature of highland life. Tella, or its direct ancestors, likely predates the Aksumite period, woven into the agricultural fabric of a region that has been farming teff and sorghum for several thousand years.
By the time of the medieval Ethiopian kingdoms, tella was thoroughly embedded in ceremonial life. The Kebra Nagast — a 14th-century compilation of Ethiopia’s national epic traditions — describes feasting customs that include fermented beverages alongside injera and meat. Royal courts maintained brewers, and tella appears as a marker of hospitality and social status. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which has shaped Ethiopian life since the 4th century, incorporated tella into its calendar of fasts and feasts: the beer was consumed at major celebrations including Timkat (Epiphany), Meskel (the Finding of the True Cross), and at ceremonies surrounding birth, marriage, and death.
Unlike many ancient beer traditions that were disrupted by colonialism, industrialization, or religious prohibition, tella in Ethiopia has endured with remarkable continuity. Ethiopia was never colonized in the conventional sense — it repelled Italian invasion at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 and again survived Italian occupation from 1936 to 1941 — and its indigenous fermented beverage traditions were never systematically suppressed. Commercial beer arrived in Ethiopia in the early 20th century, but rather than displacing tella, commercial lager simply occupied a different social register. Tella remained the beer of home, ceremony, and rural life.
The 20th century did bring pressure from urbanization and changing tastes. In Addis Ababa and other cities, commercially produced tej (honey wine) and lager beer became more common, and the skilled alewives — called tella dagiy — who had long been the guardians of brewing knowledge faced economic pressures as their craft generated less income than commercial work. In rural areas and smaller towns, however, the tradition held. Today, estimates suggest the majority of alcohol consumed in Ethiopia is traditionally home-produced, and tella accounts for a substantial share of that figure.
International interest in traditional African fermented beverages has brought new scholarly attention to tella in the early 21st century. Researchers at Addis Ababa University and international institutions have begun documenting regional variations in tella production, the microbiology of wild-fermented tella, and the properties of gesho as a bittering and antimicrobial agent. This documentation effort parallels similar work on lambic in Belgium and chicha in South America — a recognition that traditional fermented beverages are living archives of botanical knowledge and microbial ecology that deserve preservation.
What is Tella Beer? Taste, Aroma, and Appearance
Appearance: Tella ranges from pale amber to deep brown depending on the grain bill and the degree of roasting applied to the grains before mashing. Sorghum-dominant tella tends toward golden amber; teff-heavy versions are darker and more opaque. Clarity varies: freshly brewed tella can be quite cloudy with suspended grain particles and active yeast, while tella that has settled for a few days clears somewhat, though it is never bright in the way a filtered commercial beer is. It is typically served at low carbonation, with very little head.
Aroma: The nose is earthy and grainy, with a mild lactic sourness from wild fermentation. Gesho contributes a distinctive herbal, resinous quality that is unlike any hop variety — it suggests eucalyptus, bay leaf, and a faint pine note, with a slight astringency. There can be subtle notes of bread, fermented grain, and sometimes a faint smokiness from roasted grain additions. The overall impression is of something ancient and agricultural, with none of the tropical or citrus notes associated with modern craft beer.
Flavor: The taste follows the nose: earthy grain up front, a mild tartness from lactic fermentation, and a moderate bitterness from the gesho that lingers into the finish. The bitterness is herbal rather than floral — closer to the bitterness of black tea or fresh herbs than to the resinous bite of a well-hopped IPA. Some versions have a slight sweetness from residual fermentable sugars, giving the beer a fuller, rounder profile. The finish is dry and slightly astringent.
Mouthfeel: Light to medium body, with low carbonation. Tella is often described as smooth and approachable despite its complexity, which is part of why it functions so well as a session beverage for long ceremonies and social occasions.
ABV: Typically 2–4%, occasionally reaching 5% in longer-fermented batches. The alcohol content varies with fermentation time, grain bill, and the brewer’s intent. Freshly drawn tella — consumed within a day or two of completion — is often closer to the lower end of that range.
Tella does not appear in the 2021 BJCP Style Guidelines as a named style. A homebrewer entering tella in competition would most likely use the 27: Historical Beer category, entering it with a written style description, or alternatively as a 34C: Experimental Beer.
The Ingredient That Makes Tella Unique: Gesho
The defining ingredient in tella — the element that makes it tella rather than any other sorghum beer — is gesho: Rhamnus prinoides, commonly called shinyleaf buckthorn or gesho in Amharic. The plant is a woody shrub that grows readily throughout the Ethiopian highlands and is cultivated in home gardens specifically for brewing use.
Gesho serves the same function in Ethiopian brewing that hops serve in European brewing: it contributes bitterness, herbal aroma, and crucially, antimicrobial properties that help preserve the beer and suppress competing microorganisms during fermentation. The compounds responsible for gesho’s bitterness are different from the alpha acids in hops — gesho contains saponins, tannins, and a range of phenolic compounds — but the practical effect is similar: a cleaner, better-preserved fermented beverage with a bitter finish.
Dried gesho leaves and stems (affiliate link) are available online and from Ethiopian grocery stores in major cities, making this ingredient increasingly accessible to homebrewers outside Ethiopia. Both the leaves and the woody stems are used; the stems are generally preferred for their more concentrated flavor and longer shelf life. Gesho is typically added during the boil or during a hot steeping step, analogous to a hop addition, and its bitterness is somewhat more tannic and astringent than hop bitterness.
Tella also depends on wild fermentation: the brewer does not add commercial yeast or cultured bacteria. Instead, the indigenous microflora of the brewing environment — including wild Saccharomyces strains, Lactobacillus species, and other organisms — colonize the wort and drive fermentation. This produces tella’s characteristic mild sourness and complex flavor that differs from batch to batch and kitchen to kitchen.
Commercial Examples Worth Seeking Out
Finding commercial tella outside Ethiopia is genuinely difficult — it is not a beer that travels well, and no major Ethiopian brewery has attempted to bottle and export it. The following represent the best options for experiencing the style:
- Tej Bet tella, Addis Ababa (various) — The tej bets (traditional drinking houses) of Addis Ababa’s Merkato district and Piazza neighborhood are the most accessible place for travelers to encounter tella. Each house brews its own version, and quality varies considerably. Arriving around midday, when fresh batches are typically ready, is the strategy recommended by most food writers covering Ethiopian cuisine.
- Tella from Gondar — The northern city of Gondar has a long reputation as a center of tella craftsmanship. The region’s barley-dominant grain bill and cooler highland climate are said to produce a particularly complex and well-balanced tella. Food-focused tours of Ethiopia often include a Gondar stop specifically to sample local tella.
- Dogfish Head Craft Brewery — Theobroma and experimental ancient-grain releases — Dogfish Head’s well-documented exploration of ancient and traditional brewing ingredients has included multiple collaborations with archaeologists to recreate pre-industrial fermented beverages. While no commercially released Dogfish Head beer is known to feature gesho specifically, the brewery’s experimental ethos makes it a useful reference point for the broader tradition of indigenous-ingredient brewing.
- Home-brewed tella by diaspora communities — In cities with large Ethiopian populations — Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, Seattle, and Columbus, Ohio in the US — tella is often brewed domestically within the Ethiopian community for weddings and holidays. Attending an Ethiopian community event, or developing a relationship with an Ethiopian restaurant that may have connections to home brewers, remains the most authentic path to tasting traditional tella outside Ethiopia.
How Does Tella Compare to Similar Styles?
The style most commonly mentioned alongside tella is umqombothi, the South African sorghum beer brewed by Xhosa and Zulu communities. Both are unfiltered, low-ABV, slightly sour sorghum beers with deep cultural and ceremonial significance. The critical difference is gesho: umqombothi is not bittered with any plant addition and relies entirely on wild fermentation for its character, producing a beer that is thicker, sourer, and earthier than tella. Umqombothi also typically incorporates maize (corn), which tella does not. The two beers represent parallel solutions to similar brewing contexts, but they are distinct styles.
Chicha — the maize beer of the Andean highlands in South America — is another useful comparison point. Like tella, chicha is an ancient grain beer produced by wild fermentation and consumed fresh, often at communal events. The key distinction is that most chicha does not use a bittering agent; tella’s use of gesho is a distinctive technological development that aligns it more closely with the hopped-beer tradition of Europe than with other indigenous grain beers worldwide.
Tella is also sometimes compared to kvass, the Eastern European fermented bread beer. Both are low-ABV, slightly sour, grain-based fermented beverages with a long domestic brewing tradition. Kvass uses leavened bread as its grain base and does not incorporate a bittering agent, making it sweeter and less bitter than tella.
Tella is a beer that has been mapping itself onto Ethiopian life for longer than most of the world’s most celebrated beer traditions have existed. Its survival into the 21st century — continuous, unbroken, still brewed in home kitchens from plants that grow in highland gardens — is a form of cultural tenacity worth understanding. Gesho-bittered grain beers are a chapter in the global history of fermentation that deserves more attention than it has received.
Ready to go deeper? – How to Brew Tella Beer at Home → – Tella Beer Food Pairing Guide →
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