I was in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to write and photograph a piece on tej bet, rustic bars where men and almost exclusively men – drink honey wine. And the tej bet that Birhanu had taken me to was, frankly, photography gold.
Ascending a cobblestone street in the city’s ancient, frenetic Piassa district, we ducked into an unmarked door on a cobalt-colored building and emerged into several linked, dark, smoky, cacophonous rooms, the walls painted green, the perimeter lined with low benches that were absolutely packed with dudes. At knee level, along a low table, were small, beaker-shaped glasses of orange liquid – the eponymous tej. I was shaking with excitement and trepidation.
A server arrived, and from an immense teakettle poured streams of tej into our beakers. Made from fermented honey and given a slightly tannic hit with the addition of a leaf known locally as gesho, tej looks and tastes like orange juice. It generally contains around 6% alcohol, but one barely tastes it, and it’s possible to slam several beakers before it hits you all at once.
As a white guy with a notepad and a huge camera bag, I couldn’t have stood out more in the tej bet, and I sought to ease the tension by clinking glasses with those around me. I fell into conversation with Wasyihun, a 23-year-old painter whose youth and sober state made him stand out almost as much as I did.
I asked him why he opted to drink tej rather than beer or whiskey. “To feel the real essence of the people,” he said, rather grandly, in English. “It’s not just about putting alcohol in your stomach. It’s about socializing. It’s what our fathers did. We are drinking history!”
(Austin Bush / For The Times)See full article on Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/)
The Ethiopian Herald November8, 2019
BY AUSTIN BUSH
