Brasseries du Congo

A label that is exported all over Africa.

On Friday afternoons, the US Embassy is officially closed, which does not mean everyone stops working. But it makes a good time to organize community activities. That's the job of the Community Liaison Officer, also known as "The CLO." This week our CLO arranged for a tour of the local brewery, called Brasseries du Congo. Never one to pass up a brewery tour if it is available, Stro signed us up as soon as she got the invitation.

Unloading bags of corn from France.

The Brasseries du Congo dates from 1952 when they got a license to bottle the Belgian beer Primus. It is located not far from the port in a part of town that is highly industrial/commercial. The operation is highly mechanized, so 30,000 bottles are produced hourly by only 400 employees. At least some of them are highly trained technicians managing the quality control testing and operating the computerized brewing and bottling process. Still, one of the three main ingredients used, corn, was being unloaded by hand this afternoon. The chief ingredients come from Europe: corn from France, hops from Czech, and malt from Belgium.The company is wholly owned now by Heineken, whose international quality standards apply. A range of labels is brewed here, the differences among them the result of variations in the basic recipe. Most beer is in the fermentation tanks for 13 days.

The factory also produces soft drinks, such as Fanta orange and Fanta grenadine. In addition, they make a low-alcohol shandy-type of drink under the Primus label called Primus Radler Citron. 

From small tube to bottle!

Almost all the African beer comes in glass bottles with old-fashioned caps. They look like a McDonald's Super Size Me drink. Except for Guiness and Heineken, the beer bottles contain 65 cl or about 23 ounces of beer. Brasseries du Congo is moving toward replacing the glass bottles and old-fashioned caps with plastic bottles and screw-off caps. They see big gains in breakage reduction and the sales angle that such big bottles of beer can be enjoyed on more than one occasion due to the screw-on top. We saw machines that take what look like test tubes and "souffler" them (blow air into them) to shape them into soda/beer bottles (instead of glassblowing, it is mechanized plastic blowing). Unfortunately, in the absence of recycling programs the empties are more likely to find their way into the river, gutters, or roadsides than be reused as bottles or turned into material to make something else.

Dusty Tembo bottles 

Trunk of a huge elephant
outdoor sculpture

Now, bottles get reused and caps are recycled into jewelry, household items, and objets d'art. One of the more interesting facts of life here for people who drink beer is that to buy a case of beer, one must present a case of empties of the same brand. This makes it hard to get going if you are entertaining and need beer by the case.  And when a beer suddenly is not available, one can get stuck with empty cases of no value. For example, due to a heavy border crackdown of all sorts by the ROC against DRC citizens who lived here without papers, one of the best beers in the region can no long be purchased in Brazzaville. Tembo (elephant in Lingala) comes from the DRC. We made sure to have some when we visited Kinshasa early this month. It was only when we got to the port on the DRC side that Stro thought to wonder if we could have brought her three empty cases and exchanged them for beer to take home (on the small motor boat with the TVs and other stuff). Alas no Tembo available on this side for the foreseeable future.


Beer is almost always served cold but unless one is drinking pretty fast, it gets warm by the time you're done. I try to talk Stro into splitting a beer with me for that reason. The custom when serving anyone a bottled drink is to open the bottle in front of them, pour some into a glass (or not) and replace the cap on top of the bottle. These two steps are essential in assuring the recipient that the beer has not been tampered with. It also serves to keep bugs out of the beer. 

A man's beer! 23 oz.

Some beers, such as Ngok (Lingala for alligator) are considered "a man's beer." I like the label, so have had Ngok on occasion, once to raised eyebrows. This brought back a similar memory from The  Netherlands many decades ago when I preferred ice cold jenever (Dutch gin) to sherry as an aperitif. Nice girls did not drink jenever shots.

Our brewery tour group totaled 14, all Americans from the Embassy and their guests (that'd be me). We not only got to taste the beer but came home with brewery bling--tee-shirts in the Primus bright blue with "Primus Ambassador" on the front. How perfect.