In Person of Interest we talk to the people catching our eye right now about what they’re doing, eating, reading, and loving. Next up are Garrett Oliver, brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery, and chef Pierre Thiam, author, chef of Teranga, and founder of Yolele Foods, who speak with Bon Appétit about their partnership around a teensy African grain with huge potential.
When brewmaster Garrett Oliver spotted chef Pierre Thiam at a party in 2019, he made a beeline through the crowd. Oliver had just watched Thiam’s TED Talk on fonio, an ancient West African grain. They were at a benefit for the Museum of Food and Drink honoring Questlove, and Oliver had to introduce himself. He’d been inspired by Thiam’s telling of a resilient, nutritionally dense grain going back 5,000 years that is resistant to climate change, needs no fertilizers or inputs, and doesn’t require irrigation, especially in an area considered difficult to cultivate. “I wondered if Pierre had considered making beer with fonio,” says Oliver, who just celebrated 30 years at Brooklyn Brewery.
A native of Dakar, Senegal, Thiam learned about fonio while researching a cookbook in Kédougou, in the southeast. Once popular throughout Africa, fonio is now primarily found in the Sahel, a semi-arid region that extends from the Atlantic Ocean and Mauritania in the west to Sudan and the Red Sea in the east. It has an earthy flavor and can be eaten as a cereal, formed into noodles, incorporated into baking, or enjoyed as salad, like couscous. Historically, fonio carries deep reverence and myth. “The Dogon, another great culture of Mali called it “po,” or the “seed of the universe,” Thiam says in his talk.
Fonio is nutritionally dense, requires little water, and needs no inputs or fertilizers to grow in an area often thought of as difficult to plant by outsiders.
For Thiam, fonio was a delicious food that had been buried under the blanket erasure of colonialism, desertification, and a depletion of economic opportunities for locals. When foreign entities banned ancestral farming methods, and forced deforestation and mass planted cash crops, they blamed indigenous people for the changes in the land’s soil that occurred only after their time-tested land management practices had been disrupted. “Fonio can not only restore the soil, but it can bring economic opportunity to the community,” Thiam says.
For Oliver, fonio bridged diasporic heritage with beer culture. As one of the most prolific brewers in the industry Oliver’s impact speaks through the beer he’s made and collaborated on throughout the world. But since the pandemic, he’d been making concerted efforts to shore up inequalities in brewing and distilling opportunities and bridge connections through heritage and culture.
“Fonio connects my background as an African American brewer,” he says. “I would like to show many communities how they aren’t just connected to this product, but that their ancestors are the originators of it.” For Thiam, fonio was a delicious food from a naturally resourced region that “can not only restore the soil, but it can bring economic opportunity to the community,” he says. The goal was not to make a single product, but to inspire brewers around the world to use it regularly, just as they do barley and hops.
Oliver brought a batch of fonio beer to the Great American Beer Festival in 2019, where they unleashed a following. “People kept saying that they had to taste this beer made with the African grain,” Oliver says.
Their collaboration, and their Brewing for Impact initiative, introduced fonio to major breweries, who experimented with its diverse expressions: a 100 percent fonio beer from Carlsberg in Denmark, a fonio stout from Guinness worldwide, an IPA from Brewgooder in Scotland, and a West Coast–inspired IPA from Jing-A in China that highlighted fonio’s tropical, lychee-like expression. The fonio session IPA by Scottish brand Brewgooder was so popular it outstripped the ability of the brewery to produce it, Oliver says. “They had to bring other breweries online to work on it because it went so fast.”
Six years after that chance meeting, fonio is now available to brewers in North America from the largest brewery supply house in the industry, RahrBSG. An investment of this scope has immediate im-pact on Thiam’s network of farmers in Mali and Togo, many of them women, and facilitates large-scale production at the Senegal mill of Thiam’s packaged-food brand Yolélé. Oliver and Thiam aren’t declaring themselves the first to make fonio beer; this is an ancient tradition. But modern breweries using methods that Oliver has pioneered with Thiam’s processing model is groundbreaking, creating innumerable possibilities for beer drinkers on the horizon.
What’s the driving force of this project for you?
Pierre Thiam: We’re bringing it back to traditions: the farmers’ knowledge, the soil. Fonio is planted in rotation with Bambara groundnuts, and indigo fields around them. This is the way agriculture must go or there’s no future.
Garrett Oliver: It’s urgent. People don’t realize how grains are grown, that you’ve got to throw nitrate fertilizer on the soil, which is made from oil. It’s not going to work anymore. The good thing about this project is you don’t have to give up anything. You’ll just have a grain that’s easy to work with in the brewhouse and a food to eat.
Pierre, you told me years ago that fonio was not being consumed as regularly in the Sahel because of the deep colonial history. Has that narrative shifted?
PT: Yes, it’s changing for sure. The colonial system has disrupted a lot, including our perception of ourselves and our food. When the French came to Senegal, they wanted our farmers to focus on growing peanuts because peanut oil was valued, and it became a cash crop. The farmers used to grow fonio, millet, and sorghum, but the French imported leftover broken rice from Indochina as the grain that Senegalese would eat, so that the farmers would not grow other grains.
Now supermarkets in Dakar have fonio on the shelves. That’s why our distribution hub is based in Senegal, because we want to reach the West African market as well as being positioned to reach Europe and the United States.
You look at fonio as an investment in Africa rather than following colonial patterns of extraction and exploitation. How did you go about that process?
PT: We didn’t want to change the way the farmers had been growing fonio because that was a contribution to the food system; they’d been doing it that way for thousands of years. The challenge was they had no access to the global market. For me, it was about branding fonio to tell the story of the grain and connect it directly to the culture where it’s from. If the grain is not grown by these small farmers in West Africa, it shouldn’t be called fonio. Fonio is not just a commodity. It’s a grain that belongs to these communities, and they should benefit from it and have a dignified living from its success.
GO: The first thing people ask us is, “Where can we grow it in the United States?” People are looking immediately to repeat that extractive process. Growing it in Africa is the point. It’s systemic: This pro-ject benefits the local community of farmers, the end users, and the planet.
Particularly as it relates to Africa being a rich resource.
GO: Africa is not naturally poor. Historically, we set up a system to exclude African countries from global commerce. We’re not asking for lower prices and looking for ways to increase our margins. We’re asking, “How can you build a future in this?”
Did you foresee fonio being such a versatile ingredient?
GO: We’ve seen multiple breweries brew with fonio now. Carlsberg made a 100 percent fonio beer. I was skeptical: When flavor is that concentrated, it doesn’t usually taste good. But it was like a sparkling sake with notes of mezcal or ogogoro (a West African spirit usually distilled from palm tree juice).
What’s the prospective impact of breweries consistently using fonio as a base for beer?
GO: If a major global brewery includes just 10 percent of fonio in all its beers, you’re changing the whole food system. You reverse climate change and desertification at the same time as you re-enrich the continent of Africa, at the same time as countries stem immigration that they say they don’t want, at the same time that you make better beer, at the same time as companies meet climate goals they’ve claimed.
PT: I was reading about a genetically modified corn that’s supposed to face the challenges of climate change. But those solutions already exist with fonio.
In 2024, Oliver launched Brewing for Impact, a campaign that marked his thirtieth anniversary as Brooklyn Brewery’s brewmaster. The initiative highlights breweries around the world who work with fonio, showcasing the grain’s diverse expressions.
A portion of sales from the Brewing For Impact series collaboration benefit the Michael James Jackson Foundation for Brewing and Distilling, also founded by Oliver. The foundation awards scholarships to Black, Indigenous, and POC developing talent in the industry, which results in an inspiring pipeline: African farmers who practice traditional methods are part of the entrepreneurial network for future brewers and distillers in the diaspora.
As of this writing, Oliver says more than 120 breweries have signed on with Rahr/BSG as fonio customers, which suggests more groundbreaking beer is on the way. These are a few beers that fonio has inspired so far:
- Fonio Rising pale ale, now part of the core portfolio from Brooklyn Brewery
- Brooklyn à Dakar fonio pilsner from Senegal-based Maison Kalao
- British cask-style fonio pale ale from Thornbridge Brewery in the United Kingdom; Oliver recently collaborated on a 15% fonio strong mild (fermented on the Burton Union system) that is expected to release late spring/early summer this year
- Sweden’s Omnipollo Blacker Chocolate Stout with fonio, a hat-tip to the Black Chocolate Stout, the first beer Oliver brewed for Brooklyn Brewery
- All-fonio lager from Carlsberg in Denmark
- Fonio Belgian Blonde from Russian River out of Santa Rosa, California; Oliver says the brewery is also incorporating fonio into several beers at up to 30%
- Kiitos Brewing in Salt Lake City, Utah, made a fonio-based grapefruit cherry sour
- West Coast IPA with fonio from Jing-A in Beijing
- Guinness Fonio Stout
- Fonio lager from Georgia breweries Our Culture (Atlanta) and Creature Comforts (Athens)
- Scotland’s Brewgooder Fonio Session IPA
- Fonio Spritz from Orange Bike Brewing Company in Portland, Maine