Star: The Light Beer with More Goat

No one will argue that Star is a great beer. Just as no one would ever profess that Nescafe is their favorite coffee. But this is not a Portland microbrewery, nor is it a beer hall in Munich. We are sitting in a bamboo hut in a swampy village where electricity is supplied two hours out of ten. A chicken just darted between my legs to snatch a hapless butterfly. A crowd of half-naked children point and chant 'pomuy, pomuy, pomuy...'. I'm paying for the ambiance. And for 4000 leones a bottle, I'm not paying much.

Yes, I could have paid 1000 extra and gotten a bottle of Guiness, or shelled out double the price for a tall boy of Carlsberg, but why send money to a huge multinational corporation when you could buy local? Yes, for the same price you could buy four pouches of fruit wine, or twelve shots of rum or whiskey or gin, and for a thousand more you could get a delicious ginger beer mixer, but how could you ever pass up an opportunity to win a goat?

Goats do not come cheap in Sierra Leone. And no Sierra Leoneon beer drinker is going to turn a deaf ear to a radio announcement promising a free one under the cap of one lucky Star bottle. There was a time when we would follow up our PST classes with a brisk jog to the top of Candy Mountain, or a game of ultimate on the neighborhood field, but now our primary aim, to which the vast majority of walkaround allowances are wholly devoted, is winning this furry, hooved friend. And with an average of 20 volunteers x 2 Stars a day, I would guess our odds are not half bad.