In a corner of northeastern Poland, in the city of Białystok, the ministry of agriculture lists a drink as a traditional local product that Bulgarian immigrants brought there in the 1910s. It's a thick, pale, sweetish-sour millet drink, and it's called boza. The same word is on bottles in Belgrade supermarkets and over the counters of a shop in Istanbul that has sold it since 1876. A drink that travels that far and survives is worth knowing. Here's what boza is, where it came from, where you can drink it, how to make a liter at home, and why almost every grain-growing region on Earth ended up with a cousin of it.
What Boza Actually Is
Boza is a fermented grain drink: cooked cereal, water and sugar, left for a few days until bacteria and yeast turn it slightly sour and a little fizzy. The grain depends on the country. In Turkey it's usually millet, in other places wheat, bulgur, maize or rice. What you get is thick, like a runny custard, pale yellow, and sweet with a tang at the back, a bit like liquid sourdough porridge. In Istanbul it's served cold with a dusting of cinnamon and a handful of roasted chickpeas, leblebi, on top.
Is it alcoholic? That depends on who you ask and which bottle you pick up. English-language sources say around 1 percent, and the Serbian Wikipedia article calls it a non-alcoholic drink. Both can be true, because the number depends on the batch, the starter and how long it sat. Treat any single figure as an average, and read the label if it matters to you.
Is it good for you? It's a lactic ferment with lots of sugar (researchers measured about 12 percent total sugar in samples made from maize, wheat and rice flour), so it's food, not medicine. Folk wisdom calls it a winter tonic for colds, and that's about as far as the evidence goes here. Enjoy it as a drink with a story.
Older Than the Ottomans
Many boza articles say it's thousands of years old and trace it to Sumerian texts. The honest version is murkier. Fermented grain drinks are certainly ancient in the Near East, and some writers link them to boza, but nobody can show a straight line from a Sumerian jar to a glass in Skopje. Akkadian and Sumerian texts are said to mention a boza-like drink of fermented millet, but that is a resemblance, not a family tree. The oldest written mention we can point to is a word, not a recipe: Mahmud al-Kashgari lists a Turkic drink called buxsum in his dictionary of 1073. Turkish etymologists treat the word as Turkic, which is why boza is usually called one of the oldest Turkic drinks, with roots in Central Asia.
The golden age came under the Ottomans. In the 17th century the traveler Evliya Çelebi reported some 300 boza shops in Istanbul employing more than a thousand people, and boza was drunk by the Janissaries. Its low strength made it tolerable: his line, as quoted, is that drinking enough to get drunk is sinful but a small amount, unlike wine, isn't condemned. That gray zone is why boza kept ending up in sultans' decrees. Mehmed IV banned alcoholic drinks in the 1600s, boza shops included, and the rules were tightened and loosened again several times. An earlier ban, under Selim II in the 16th century, targeted a "Tartar" boza laced with opium, and the same source notes that the sweet, milk-white kind was usually made by Albanians. Keep that in mind for later.
The sweet, non-alcoholic style that most people know won out in the 19th century. In September 1876 Hacı Sadık opened a shop in the Vefa district of Istanbul. He had arrived in 1870 from Prizren, in Kosovo and Metohija, and spent six winters carrying copper jugs around the palace district on his shoulder, selling a thicker, paler, less sour boza than the thin brown kind then made by some 200 tradesmen. According to the company's own history page, that was the first proper boza shop, and Vefa Bozacısı still sells in the same district, now run by the fourth generation of the family. Boza vendors even turn up in modern literature: the hero of Orhan Pamuk's 2014 novel A Strangeness in My Mind sells it on the streets of Istanbul.
Where Boza Is Drunk Today
Boza is made in Turkey, Albania, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, the Volga region and the Caucasus, and in North Africa. The most useful split is by season. In Turkey boza is a winter drink, the sort Hacı Sadık sold from jugs on cold nights. Before refrigeration boza spoiled in summer heat, so makers sold lemonade or grape juice in July. Refrigeration means many now make it in summer too, though Vefa still switches to şıra, a sweet grape juice, when the weather turns warm. Further west the season disappears: in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Albania and North Macedonia boza is a year-round cold drink.
In Bulgaria it's a breakfast pairing. The banitsa article lists boza next to yogurt and ayran as what you drink with the cheese pastry, and the Bulgarian cuisine article names Radomir and Lyubimets as the places with the best-known recipes. Try it in Sofia or Plovdiv.
In Serbia the story belongs to the confectioner. According to the Serbian article on boza, it was a required item next to lemonade in the Oriental-style sweet shops run by Albanians and Gorani, where you'd also find tulumba, baklava and kadaif. It also says that in interwar Belgrade a drink considered lowly became a profitable item when a luxury shop opened in the early 1930s. If you've read our piece on the history of baklava, you know why boza and syrupy pastry sit on the same counter: the drink is thick and tangy, the pastry is sweet and rich, and each makes the other better. Ask for it at an old-style pastry shop in Belgrade, Skopje, Sarajevo or Tirana, and don't expect every shop to have it. In Istanbul, Vefa Bozacısı is a stop on day two of our Istanbul guide, after a bowl of beans in Süleymaniye.
How to Make Boza at Home
Quantities below follow the Baking Hermann boza recipe, which gives metric weights and yields about a liter. The idea is the same at Turkish Style Cooking, which uses cups: 1 cup of millet to 6.5 cups of water and 1 cup of sugar stirred in at the start, three days of fermenting, then straining and two more in the fridge, so the order differs. Both are home cooks' recipes, not a shop's formula, so adjust to taste.
Ingredients
- 170 g millet, rinsed well
- 1.9 liters water in total (1.5 l for cooking, 400 ml fresh later)
- 100 g sugar, plus more to taste
- Ground cinnamon and roasted chickpeas to serve
- Optional: 100-200 g of an earlier active batch as a starter
Steps
- Rinse the millet, then simmer it in 1.5 liters of water for about an hour, stirring now and then, until it's soft and porridgy.
- Cool to room temperature (roughly two hours), add the remaining 400 ml of fresh water, and blend smooth.
- Strain through a fine sieve, pressing out as much liquid as you can. The pulp is good in breakfast porridge.
- Pour the liquid, which should look like runny custard, into a clean jar. Close it and leave it in a cool, dark place for 2 to 4 days (if you have an earlier batch, stir in 100 to 200 g now), stirring daily and tasting. It's ready when the bland taste turns fruity and a little tangy.
- Whisk in the sugar, thin with 50 to 150 ml of water until thick but pourable, and chill for 24 hours.
- Serve cold with cinnamon and chickpeas. It keeps 3 to 4 days in the fridge, and gets sharper as it sits.
What goes wrong? Too warm a kitchen means a fast ferment that overpowers the batch, and the recipe's answer is to move it to the fridge if it's already showing signs of fermenting after day one. It's easiest in the colder months, which is also when Turkey drinks it. Start with a clean jar, washed in hot soapy water and rinsed well, or you invite the wrong microbes. If it smells rotten rather than sour, or you see mold, throw it away. A spoonful or two of the last batch speeds up the next and makes it more reliable, which the recipe says is how it's commonly done in Türkiye.
Cousins on Every Continent
Wherever people grew cereal, someone left it in water and found it improved. The results have different names and the same logic. Here are the closest relatives.
Kvass (Russia, Ukraine, the Baltics, Poland and beyond) is the nearest in spirit: cloudy, sweet and sour, low in alcohol, traditionally made from rye bread or rye flour and malt, fermented for about 12 hours with sugar and yeast. Its first written mention is in a chronicle account of the celebration of Vladimir the Great's baptism in 988. Kvass is thin and fast, boza thick and slow.
Chicha de jora (the Andes) is made from germinated yellow maize, and sits around 1 to 3 percent alcohol, pale and slightly milky, something like a hard cider. The Inca used it in rituals and drank it in huge quantities at festivals. In some places the maize was chewed first, the enzymes in saliva doing the work of malting. In western Mexico, tejuino is a close New World match for boza: a cold, lightly fermented drink of tortilla-style corn dough and unrefined cane sugar, served in Jalisco with lime juice, a pinch of salt and shaved ice or lime sorbet. If you've read our piece on tequila and mezcal, that's the same state, with a very different glass.
In Southern Africa, mageu or amahewu is a non-alcoholic drink of fermented maize porridge, with a little wheat flour added to supply the lactic bacteria, and its sourness comes from lactic acid, like yogurt. Next to it, umqombothi, the South African beer of maize and sorghum, is thick, creamy and gritty, usually under 3 percent alcohol and high in B vitamins, and in Nigeria kunu is a milky drink of millet, sorghum or maize. Ethiopia has tella, a home-brewed beer of barley, teff or other grains at roughly 2 to 4 percent, fermented in a clay pot that's first smoked, and traditionally served in tella houses.
Further east, in the mountains of eastern Nepal and in Sikkim and Darjeeling, tongba is a drink of fermented finger millet. The name belongs to the vessel, and it's sipped through a straw after the millet has steeped for a few minutes. Offering it is a sign of respect to a guest among the Limbu people. Millet, then, is boza's thread from the Balkans to the Himalaya. In East Asia the equivalent is makgeolli, Korea's milky, lightly sparkling rice drink, though at six to nine percent alcohol it's much stronger than boza.
The pattern is the point: grain, water, warmth, and microbes that arrive on their own. Nobody invented this once and shipped it around the world. People kept inventing it, and each place kept the grain it had. Boza is the Anatolian and Balkan version, and it has a shop that has been selling it since 1876.
Where to Drink It
If you want to taste boza on its home ground, start with our guides to Istanbul, Sofia and Belgrade, and see what we have on Turkey, Bulgaria and Serbia. For other drinks with a story, there's Serbian beer and Japanese sake. And if the Andes, Nepal and Ethiopia in this post made you want to find them on a map, try Pinpoint. Then make a jar, wait three days, and see what you've grown.
