How Tusker beer was born

Kenyans have a wounded Tanzanian elephant to thank for giving the country the most famous drink, Tusker. [File, Standard]

The journey of a 100 years started by the banks of a nondescript river. It is by these waters that another journey of terrified girls into womanhood started.

When three men — two brothers and a friend — communed by Ruaraka River. They dreamed of a new dawn when Kenyans would toast to their achievement with real beer and not tea.

Brothers Charles Hurst and George Hurst, accompanied by a friend, HA Dowding, had come to the Ruaraka River with only one intention - to start a brewery that would cure the thirst of White settlers in Kenya.

Their dreams came true on December 14, 1922. When using the most rudimentary implements, among them a copper vessel and smoky firewood kiln, they produced the first 10 crates of bottled beer.

But Kenyans have a wounded Tanzanian elephant to thank for giving the country the most famous drink, Tusker. The tragedy unfolded on August 25, 1923, near Ngorongoro crater. George, who was famous for being recklessly courageous, met his match. He was fearless.

George was known to walk into a herd of elephants as a  chicken farmer would in a coop. He would pick one elephant bull and shoot it, but on this day, he was attacked by a wounded elephant which killed him on the spot.

George was described as a “White hunter” who was the bravest and most reckless to ever hunt elephants. He was killed by a bull elephant that had been wounded by an African hunter.

The elephant did not kill Charles’s spirit for his brother, who named the beer Tusker in memory of George and the animal that killed him. So ingrained has Tusker been in the psyche of Kenyans that when a group of wealthy Kenyans flew to London in the 1970s for an agricultural show, they refused to touch European beer.

The then Gema chairman Njenga Karume was forced to call EABL Managing Director Kenneth Matiba who sent 30 crates by air.

Karume recalled how his friends gulped down the Tusker as if it was their first time. One of the members of the delegation, a church elder from Nyeri, also got carried away and got drunk.

When the cleric bumped into a female fellow church member in London he swore her to secrecy. She was never to tell a soul that she had seen him drunk.