The primary objective of our mission up the west coast of Africa was to find surf. This can sometimes be thirsty work, so one of our secondary objectives was to find beer. We quickly discovered that along with casava root and Laughing Cow cheese, beer is a staple in much of sub-saharan Africa! We were more surprised to discover that beer is also a staple in some of muslim North Africa… but that’s another story.
Anyway, below we’ve picked our 6 favourite thirst-quenchers from the continent:
6. PRIMUS - Democratic Republic of the Congo

Lurks, Primus and the suspect DRC military man shortly before he stole our keys!
Perhaps it was the fact that we’d spent much of the previous 2 days crawling through some of the worst roads on the trip - the sludgy type generally used by trucks only - but the Primus beers we drank at the ‘beach party’ at Maunda that Sunday evening tasted particularly sweet. Strong-flavoured and served cold (we found this to generally be the exception rather than the rule) in 750ml “scud-style” bottles, this certainly deserved the title of “thirst quencher”.
The truck tracks on the roads in the DRC were sometimes so deep that our high-clearance Landcruiser found itself ‘beached’ - and we too found ourselves ‘beached’ when the seemingly friendly Congolese soldier we had been chatting to, slipped our car-keys off the table and into his pocket! As you can imagine, that took some crafty negotiating to solve, especially with a couple of Primus’s under the belt…
5. GUINNESS, a.k.a. “Michael Powers” - Cameroon

Tim and Stone cruising in the Guinness-mobile with Kumba’s very own ‘Michael Power’…
It may come as a surprise to hear that the biggest market for Guinness beer after the UK and Ireland, is in fact Nigeria… with Cameroon and Ghana not far behind that. A lot of this clearly has to do with the brews’ dark hearty texture and taste. A lot also has to do with the amazingly successful ‘Michael Power’ advertising campaign, run as a series of 3-5 minute mini-adventures on African television. Power, always dressed in black, invariably ends up saving the day in a uniquely African way, before cracking a Guinness.
In fact the ‘African James Bond’ was so successful, that one orders the stout from the bar not as a “Guinness”, but as a “Michael Power”. The campaign also appears to have spawned it’s own set of Michael-Power-impersonators, one of whom we met in Kumba, Cameroon. Complete with branded car, our Cameroonian Michael Power insisted on whipping us around the town to all the best nightspots (often just some chairs in the road outside someone’s house!), leaving us with a memory of Guinness that will not be soon forgotten…
4. CUCA - Angola

Oh yes, did we mention that Cuca happens to go really well with Angolan seafood too?
Angola is an interesting place for the consumption of liquids. It’s a place where, per litre, beer is cheaper than bottled water, and petrol is cheaper than both! This makes for interesting consumption behaviour as all of sudden it becomes remarkably easy to justify that beer with lunch… or sometimes even breakfast!
The brew itself is possibly a little watery, but tastes fine warm and complements the very nice lefthand pointbreak waves there very well!
3. DROGBA - Cote d’Ivoire

That’s 4-litres of beer! Lurks and JB get involved in some ‘Ivorian champagne’ (P.S: Happy birthday for tomorrow J.B!)
There’s a great story behind this one that we’ve spoken about before - something to do with the famous Ivorian football player Didier Drogba once turning down some of the Champagne-region’s finest in favour of the peoples’ SOLIBRA brew to celebrate a win.
Another bonus - we only ever saw these beers in their massive 1 litre version!
2. TURBO KING - Congo (Brazzaville)

This is one of the first brown beers we encountered going north. The fact that it tasted so good could possibly be put down to the fact that we were camped pretty much in the middle of no-where for a week, and even boiled palm-nuts were starting to taste good! It also makes great beer-bread (or ‘beer-buns’ in our case).
But the greatest factor earning it the #2 spot? Simply the name… TURBO KING. Is that not the coolest name you’ve heard of for a beer? You kind of get the feeling that if Superman was African, this would be his beverage of choice.
1. STONE LAGER - Ghana

Stone and Stone, 2 real winners!
On the subject of great names for beer, need we say more about ‘Stone’ lager? Much like it’s namesake AfricanSurfer team member, this brew is smooth, refined and incredibly good-looking… er… um… I mean… good tasting! Now this is awkward.
Stone Lager wins!
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