WHAT IS OGOGORO?

Ogogoro is a distilled spirit from West Africa distilled from palm wine. It goes by many names in different places, but ogogoro is the most common name in Nigeria, from where we source our spirits.

GROWING THE TREES

Yes, ogogoro is made from palm trees! Ours comes from the raffia hookeri which likes to grow near water sources like streams, swamps, or rivers, and produces the sweetest palm wine.

HARVEST

When the palms are full of sugar, the top of the tree splits into 3 parts and is ready to be climbed and harvested. Palm trees full of sugar?? And how do they get up there??

FERMENTATION

Fermentation converts sugar to alcohol, and begins before the palm wine has even left the tree from naturally occurring yeasts that float around in the air.

DISTILLATION

Time to take all of that delicious palm wine and carefully concentrate it into ogogoro through distillation.

WHY NIGERIA IS SO COOL?

From street fashion, literary genius, technology, arts, and our favorite, music - Lagos and Benin City set the pace for culture in West Africa.

RESEARCH

We get by with a little help from our friends in the academic world. These are great resources to dive deeper and learn more about the process and science that makes Ogogoro the next great spirit to hit the market.

Add Info

Do you have new information about ogogoro to add to this website, or do you see information here that is wrong? Reach out and tell us!

WHAT IS OGOGORO?

Ogogoro is a distilled spirit from West Africa distilled from palm wine. It goes by many names in different places, but ogogoro is the most common name in Nigeria, from where we source our spirits. Across the country and the West African region, palm wine is a celebrated and sought-after beverage. There is evidence that palm wine has been consumed as long as humans have existed, and even before. According to Patrick McGovern, scientific director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Project for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, even, "The earliest primate on the planet, the Malaysian tree shrew, drank a fermented palm nectar all night long." 1

This "fermented palm nectar", or palm wine, is the base that is distilled into ogogoro.Perhaps no one knows exactly when ogogoro distillation started in West Africa, but according to Chima J. Korieh, Associate Professor of History at Marquette University, it first arrived in Nigeria the 1920s, likely from a young man named James Iso. James had traveled to the United States for work, and had there met alcohol traffickers from whom he learned the distillation process. Upon returning to Nigeria, he began teaching it to others, and local production began to spread across the region 2 .

GROWING THE TREES

Ogogoro and other similar palm distillates can be made from several different species of palm trees. In the Delta State region of Nigeria, where most of our research is centered, the most popular palm is the raphia hookeri palm, a kind of Raffia palm. Its palm wine is sweeter compared to other palms, and it produces palm wine in large quantities.

In the Delta State of Nigeria, a species of raffia palm, raphia hookeri, is cultivated for palm wine tapping. The sap (that becomes palm wine upon tapping) from these palms is sweeter and more flavorful than that of oil palm or other species 3 . These trees grow best along rivers or in swamp forests. Depending on the season, the ground may be intermittently muddy, or covered in water deep enough to float a sizable canoe. It takes around 7 years for a palm to reach maturity for tapping. In order to harvest the palm wine, a tree must be tapped after maturity, but before it bears fruit. The sugars that the tree is preparing to put into the fruit can instead be diverted by making an incision in the tree.

The raphia hookeri trees are naturally occurring, but over time persistent tapping shapes certain areas of the swamp forest so that they are the dominant species 4 . The palms grow otherwise wild in a natural freshwater swamp ecosystem. Although this is not the case for all palms, tapping of the raphia hookeri palms kills the tree before it fruits. Because of this, palm tappers leave some trees deliberately untapped so that they go to seed and replenish the swamp forest.

HARVEST

Once tapped, a palm can produce as much as 50 liters of palm wine in a day, and will continue to produce palm wine for weeks before eventually dying. Exactly how palm trees are tapped for wine varies depending on the species and preference of the tapper. With oil palm, the tree is generally felled before tapping, and often fire is used to facilitate the extraction of the palm nectar. In some places, tappers use non-destructive techniques to harvest the palm nectar, usually by cutting into the "inflorescence," or the part of the tree that would eventually flower, instead of the stem. This technique is much slower, so it is usually practiced in areas where palms are scarce. With the raffia palms from which Delta ogogoro is sourced, the tree is tapped while upright. The palm wine tapper will climb to the top of the tree and make an incision at the top of the palm stem. A tube is placed in the incision, with a container placed below it. As the container fills daily, the tapper will remove it either to be sold raw or for distillation into ogogoro. Because palm wine must be consumed soon after tapping, it is often ordered in advance if it is going to be consumed raw.

For full-time palm wine tappers and ogogoro distillers, tapping is a year-round activity. Experienced tappers cultivate their palm trees so that there are always some palms reaching maturity for tapping.

FERMENTATION

Palm wine is a sweet, and fruity liquid that becomes lightly alcoholic and carbonated within minutes of being tapped by reacting naturally with yeast in the air. It is similar in consistency and sweetness to a fruit juice..Its flavor profiles are diverse, but often include hints of apple and papaya, with some woody, herbal undertones from its origin in the palm tree. Palm wine’s fermentation quickly progresses once the nectar has exited the tree. After 24 hours, its alcoholic content increases dramatically, and it begins to acquire a vinegar flavor not unlike a sweet, tropical kombucha. After a day, the taste becomes very vinegarized and is considered by some to be unpleasant to drink. When drinking raw palm wine, most people prefer to drink it the day it was tapped, although some connoisseurs prefer the strength and complexity of the day-old wine.

DISTILLATION

Palm wine forms the raw basis for Ogogoro. In most cases, it is the only input. Ogogoro is made with the same basic process that is used for almost all distilled spirits, “fractional distillation.” The palm wine is placed in a metal barrel or drum, and a fire is lit underneath with slowly increasing heat. The alcohols in the palm wine boil at a lower temperature than the water and solids, and they rise as a gas through a tube before being cooled back to a liquid and dripping into a container. The liquid that comes from this process is already a crude ogogoro, and many people produce and drink it like this directly. Others add more complexity to the process, distilling it multiple times, and removing and selectively re-adding different parts of the distillation.

Depending on the distiller, the palm wine is aged for different amounts of time before distilling. Some wait as long as 6 or 7 days before distilling it into ogogoro, while others begin distilling immediately after tapping. The character of the base liquid affects the ultimate flavor. We’re still exploring the exact effects, but it seems like longer-aged palm wine introduces more musky and citrus-peel characteristics, and a fresher base usually conveys more bright, herbal and tropical fruit flavors.

Different distillers create ogogoro with different characteristics depending on how the spirit will be used. Many people in Nigeria purchase ogogoro to mix with medicinal herbs. This ogogoro is generally optimizing for maximum alcohol content with less attention paid to taste, since the strong taste of the herbs will overwhelm most of the spirit’s flavor. Other people drink for enjoyment, and these producers may optimize more for purity and taste.

The ratio of palm wine to ogogoro is about 10 to 1. In other words, a 200 liter drum of palm wine will ultimately produce around 20 liters of ogogoro.

Artisanal ogogoro distillers in West Africa generally use a variation of alembic stills, similar in many ways to the “Filipino still” that is used in mezcal. A metal drum is filled with palm wine, sometimes insulated with clay or other materials to encourage more consistent heat. A wood fire is lit underneath the drum, at a low enough temperature that the alcohol will evaporate, but not the water in the palm wine. The gas then passes through a metal pipe submerged in water to condense it back into a liquid. Finally, the liquid, now an early version of ogogoro, drips into a container. At its core, this is a variation of alembic pot still distillation that is used globally for spirits like whiskey and many others.

WHY NIGERIA IS SO COOL

Nigeria is a country of over 200 million people, the most populous country in the African continent. It is a regional and, increasingly, global epicenter for technology innovation, fashion, and music. Situated along the coast and spreading northward almost to the Sahara, it is an incredibly diverse place. Over 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria, although the official language is English.

RESEARCH

About

This website was created based on some initial research by Jeremy Kirshbaum and Carolyn Kissick, with a lot of input from our friends and colleagues. We are researchers and geeks who work across a lot of industries, and spend at least a few months each year in Nigeria.
We are in the very beginning stages of exploring ways we could start a business involving ogogoro, but this website is a public resource to collect and share information about this wonderful liquid. Please feel free to share and re-purpose for any non-commercial purpose.

Disclaimer

The information about ogogoro (and all its other names like akpeteshie, sodabi, koutoukou, etc.) is woefully incomplete. We want to create a central place for people to find out more besides the negative, misleading information that usually pops up in an internet search. Please feel free to send us any information you have, and we will add it to the site as soon as we can! We are especially interested in different histories (oral or written) about the invention of ogogoro, since our current information mostly highlights the colonial documentation. We believe there are many “truths” and some of them may contradict each other, so ee do not insist on a written source or documentation to support every fact that is submitted. However, we do undertake some light curation and triangulation to do our best to make sure everything that is on here is useful and credible.