The Orange Hat

April 14th
Yesterday I went to the Kenya Cup!
There were horses
British people
Baggett’s, bree, and cake
Even some gouda
I should not bet

Lazy weekends, I need to have occasionally.
Time just to sit back and enjoy the ride.
Sleep in late
Go to bed early
Read, drink tea, watch the sun rise and then set
Porches are nice for such occasions


Article of the Day!:

-Beer, Wine, and the Glass bottles which Shine.
The most common beer in Kenya is by far: Tusker. Everywhere you go bars will be stocked full of 500 ml brown glass bottles of Tusker and it’s sibling Pilsner. East African Brewing Company located in Kenya makes both lagers. Prices range from a bare bottom minimum of 70 ksh to 150+ ksh in a bar. The precious liquid never comes in a can or surprisingly from a tap, with rare exception. Recently I’ve been pricing Tusker around Nairobi; in it’s various containers and found my results to me somewhat surprising by American standards. The cheapest overall I found tusker for 70 ksh at central, a local police bar which is right off the University of Nairobi campus, and on sale at Nakumart (the largest grocery store chain in Kenya) for also 70 ksh a bottle. Cans of Tusker beer sell for 75-85 ksh at Nakumart (with the occasional sale “buy two get a third free,” when the expiration date is coming up.

Cans are always more expensive than the lowest priced bottle. This is very odd since the cost of making of a can by pressing sheet metal, and bending of parts is much cheaper than the heating, molding, and cooling of glass. Turns out recycling facilities here are both better and worse than in the states in terms of their accessibility. When you buy a bottle of Tusker, you are actually paying a down payment of about 10 ksh or less for the bottle (so the beer is about 60 ksh) which you can return to Nakumart or any seller of Tusker and reclaim your deposit – this is true of any bottle, Coke, Sprite, Fanta, all of which are sold cheaper in glass than plastic or in cans.

A can, cannot be returned- it is a final sale. I have yet to find a location where aluminum is recycled, or a can, can be taken to. Where bottles are taken back to the factory and cleaned (many times you can find the left over residue of a sticker on the outside from a different beer) cans have to be remade and re-sealed- which I believe to be a more expensive process than rebottling a bottle that has already been produced.

*I recently talked with a friend who claims that whenever you leave cans outside they are quickly obtained by the locals who use the cans themselves for making cups, crafts which can be sold. So I guess it’s like a recycling system on a different level.

Wine bottled are not returnable to anywhere- hence are extravagantly more expensive (as if you actually bought the beer bottle it would also be more expensive than the can) Even at the cheapest vender of fermented grapes the lowest priced wines I’ve found are in the high 300’s (+$4) [Two buck Chuck doesn’t exist here sad face]

Kegs are very rare, and I’ve only found two locations out of ten to serve draft beer, they are always “higher class” venues and usually serve Westerners or Indians (I’ve been informed there are a few others, but not many). One such location served bottled tusker for 140ksh and draft tusker for 130ksh. I have yet to explore more into the expenses of a keg, but this seemed very odd to me. You definitely have to put a deposit down on the keg, and I would love to assume the price per quantity is less than say if you bough bought a single beer, but: buying tusker in larger quantities (say a six pack, or a crate) does nothing to diminish the price. There are no real advantages to buying higher quantities of beer at a single time – it just cost the same. This would be a great opportunity for anybody interested in consulting EAB. (I wonder if this has to do with their near monopoly status)

A new competitor of EAB, which is in the process of promoting itself, is Sierra beer- it produces only cans of Amber and Blond at 85ksh a pop. It’s good beer with a thicker and fuller taste than Tusker, and more importantly; an alternative taste that allows me to compare different beers. I believe EAB realizes the in-coming competitor since is recently rebranded it’s Pilsner brand to try and capture what’s left of the market: (making the square logo round, increasing the font size, and flipping the logo (a red lion) to the left instead of the right) it was a good rebranding party with plenty of free beer, loud music, and good food, but I had to double take at the three meter bottle with the new logo to make sure that it was different, I got the feeling that the plethora of college student attending the event could care less what the bottle looked like.

This brings me to an observation on Kenyan culture on food and possibly attitude on change.

The food here as described by Lonely Planet Kenya (which almost every foreigner has) is:” focused on feeding lots of people and quickly with little emphasis on taste.”

With this in mind I ask do Kenyans really care if everywhere you go the beer is the same? The ugali is the same, the chicken doesn’t have much variation, and one chama joint isn’t very different from the next except for the levels of the meats toughness.

I recently spoke with a consumer trends analysis about this subject to shed more light on the subject. He described the typical Kenyan as a person who is satisfied with consistency. Finding one service, one product that they enjoy, and they will have it for the rest of their lives. This being said 65% of Kenya lives below the poverty line. So the “typical” Kenyan lives as cheaply as possible. The room for growth as he described is in the emerging middle class, which has tasted the fruits of western culture, and enjoys verity. The middle class is what funds the alternative choices, such as Sierra Beer.

With new competitors emerging, and a weak effort at creating a new image for a beer that the company is trying to modernize, Easter African Brewery is doing a poor job at keeping up with a growing, more flavorful, market. To bad they control most of it.

This is not over, I've decided to look into it more :)

Note: EAB has two other major brands of beer which I did not mention; Tusker Malt which is found almost everywhere Tusker is and does actually have a very distinctive taste, and Senator beer which I have yet to taste and have never found in a super market- apparently it is aimed at the other 65% of the population and is dirt cheep but only comes in a keg (this is just what I’ve heard), and is meant to be drunk warm.


*high is used to refer to any sort of intoxication, equivalent to “drunk,” “wasted,” or “hammered”… there are many more, but the word “stoned” is directly related to marijuana and I am unsure what the state glue sniffing would be referred to.