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Alcoholic drinks from Ethiopia, Eritrea

Tej (Ethiopian honey wine)ጠጅ

Tej is Ethiopia's honey wine. Honey is stirred into water in a smoked clay pot and left to start fermenting, then boiled gesho stems and leaves go in to bitter it, and the must ferments for one to four weeks with daily stirring. It is drunk yellow, sweet, fizzy and cloudy from a round-bellied berele flask.

Fully documentedAlcoholic drinks10 days – 25 daysFamily: Mead (base flow)

Recipe

Amounts from a sourceThe best of three formulations in a 2024 study that standardised Tigray mies (Eritrean and Tigrayan tej). Household tej has no fixed ratio; a review gives honey to water of 1 to 3.
Honey0.5 kg0.5 kg is formulation F3 of the Tigray trial; Fentie says crude honey is preferred, and red honey is named for Amhara tej[gebremichael2024][fentie2020][berhanu2023]
Water2 L[gebremichael2024]
Gesho (Rhamnus prinoides), coarsely ground0.05 kg[gebremichael2024]
Vernonia amygdalina leaves and olive woodTo scrub the pot and to smoke it before filling[gebremichael2024][berhanu2023]
Starterspontaneous (the microbes come from the raw materials, equipment and utensils)

Total time across the recorded steps: 10 days – 25 days

Start
Drag the bar or press Play

What changes: The pot is scrubbed with leaves and filled with smoke from olive wood and gesho

Step 1 of 6
Scrub and smoke the pot
Time
10–15 min
Reported
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Lactobacillus
Zymomonas
L. paracasei
Lactic acid bacteria
Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

cleaning and smoke cut down unwanted microbes

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Tej is Ethiopia's honey wine. Honey is stirred into water in a smoked clay pot and left to start fermenting, then boiled gesho stems and leaves go in to bitter it, and the must ferments for one to four weeks with daily stirring. It is drunk yellow, sweet, fizzy and cloudy from a round-bellied berele flask. Made in 6 steps over 10 days – 25 days. The longest step, second fermentation, stirred daily, takes 8–20 days (Fentie E.G. et al. 2020). Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Lactobacillus and Zymomonas do most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main step8–20 daysReported[fentie2020]Second fermentation, stirred daily
Temperature22 °CReported[gebremichael2024]First fermentation of the honey water
AciditypH 3.7 → 3.29Measured[berhanu2023]Second fermentation, stirred daily

What makes this one different

Tej is bittered with gesho (Rhamnus prinoides) instead of hops or spices, and it is fermented wild in a pot smoked with olive wood. It is drunk young, still fizzy and cloudy with live yeast.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Berz (birzi)Honey water that is unfermented or only briefly fermented; the first stage of mies.
  • Spiced tejFlavoured with ginger, tamarind or other plants.
  • Tej with wheat malt (Amhara)Ground wheat malt goes in with the gesho extract.

Safety

In Amhara tej aged 10–30 days, at pH 3.29–3.73, coliforms, Enterobacteriaceae and moulds were below detection. Tej keeps only a short time and sours quickly.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

Tej was once made only for festivals and royal families; today it is brewed and sold by households across Ethiopia, and most of the country's honey goes into it.

  1. [wp-tej] Wikipedia, Tej (outline only)wiki
  2. [tamang2016] Tamang, Watanabe, Holzapfel, "Review: Diversity of Microorganisms in Global Fermented Foods and Beverages", Front. Microbiol. 7:377, 2016paper
  3. [fentie2020] Fentie E.G. et al. 2020, Cereal- and fruit-based Ethiopian traditional fermented alcoholic beverages, Foods 9(12):1781paper
  4. [berhanu2023] Berhanu M., Desalegn A., Birri D.J., Ashenafi M., Tigu F. 2023, Microbial, physicochemical and proximate analysis of Tej collected from Amhara regional state of Ethiopia, Heliyon 9:e16911paper
  5. [gebremichael2024] Gebremichael W.M. et al. 2024, Process standardization and characterization of Mies, Ethiopian honey wine, Heliyon 10:e39272paper
  6. [getachew2026] Getachew T. et al. 2026, The bacterial microbiota of the spontaneously fermented Ethiopian honey wine, Tej, J. Food Sci. Technol. (abstract)paper
  7. [berhanu2026] Berhanu M. et al. 2026, Genomic and metabolic characterization of defined starter cultures for safe and more consistent production of Ethiopian honey wine (Tej), Int. J. Food Microbiol. (abstract)paper