Traditional Beer · Sorghum
Ingwebu (Sorghum Beer)
📷 Closely related photo — Photo: Amcaja / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
Bulawayo's city council has long run its own brewery, selling commercial sorghum beer under the Ingwebu name.
Ingwebu is the Ndebele name — it means 'froth' — for the cloudy, low-alcohol beer brewed from fermented maize and sorghum malt, known elsewhere in the region as umqombothi. It's brewed over several days in large drums, strained, and shared from a communal calabash or sold in cartons.
Why it's made this way: The beer remains central to Ndebele ceremonial life, brewed for weddings, funerals and rites honouring the ancestors, and it is sold in Bulawayo's beer halls and shebeens.
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