The Guaraní's original pineapple beer: the fermented drink of the pineapple's homeland, made from the whole fruit: skin, core, and flesh simmered and left to ferment until gently fizzing, tart, lightly sweet, and alive with the wild yeasts of the Paraguayan river basin
Origin: Brazil / Paraguay
From the journey of Pineapple.
Chicha (the broad family of fermented drinks made from maize, cassava, fruit, and other starchy or sugary substrates) has been produced by indigenous peoples of South America for at least five thousand years. The Tupi-Guaraní peoples of the Paraná-Paraguay River basin, who first domesticated the pineapple (ananás in Tupi; literally 'excellent fruit'), made a fermented pineapple drink from the whole fruit: skin, core, juice, and flesh were simmered, strained, and left to ferment in ceramic vessels. Unlike maize chicha (which uses salivary amylase; human chewing; to begin fermentation), pineapple chicha relies on the wild yeasts on the fruit's surface and the natural sugars in the juice. The result is a mildly alcoholic, effervescent, tart-sweet drink that is cooling in tropical heat. Pineapple chicha remains a living tradition in rural Paraguay, parts of Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, where it is sold by street vendors as a non- or low-alcohol fresh drink and made at home for festivals. The drink is one of the oldest continuous culinary traditions in the Americas and the first known preparation of the pineapple as a human food.
The word 'ananás', from the Tupi language of the Guaraní peoples, is the etymological origin of the pineapple's name in every language except English (which coined its own 'pineapple' from its visual resemblance to a pine cone). When the Portuguese naturalist Pero Vaz de Caminha described the pineapple in 1500 he used the Tupi name; within a century 'ananas' was the fruit's universal name in European scientific and culinary writing. The English 'pineapple' is the anomaly. The Guaraní fermented pineapple tradition is thus the oldest documented use of the fruit that gives the pineapple its name in all but one of the world's major languages.
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