With little fanfare and just in time for the holiday season, Dashen Brewery PLC, one of the leading breweries in the country has launched a new brand, Balageru, with alcohol content of 5.2 percent.
The new product is expected to be introduced in all regional capitals in the coming days.
Dashen is partly owned by TIRET Corporate and the United Kingdom based Vasari Global (Vasari), a subsidiary of, Duet, an asset equity firm.
Dashen Brewery built a state-of-the-art plant in Debre Birhan a year ago at a cost of three billion birr. It has been in the rush to complement its factories in Gondar and North Shoa Zone, with a combined production capacity of three million hectoliters of beer.
At the inauguration of the plant, where the new beer is produced, the company called it “one of a handful of its kind in the world”. The plant represents, press release of company reads, a major competitive advantage in terms of maintaining consistent quality and efficiency, while lowering operating costs and minimizing environmental impact through energy and water conservation.
In a stiff competition for the average beer consumer, Dashen is known to sponsor concerts and use English footballers to promote its products within Ethiopia.
Ethiopia’s per capital consumption of beer is growing fast in recent years with big multinationals joining the markets and the launching of massive expansion projects by the existing breweries. According to the Food, Beverage and Pharmaceutical Institute, per capita beer consumption of Ethiopia was at 10 liters per person last year, a jump of two from the previous year.
