S ince the pandemic, Lola Pedro has been spending a lot of time at an eco-tourist hamlet in Badagry town, on the outskirts of Lagos, surrounded by coconut and African apple trees next to chalets with showers open to the sky. The hamlet’s beach house serves as operations base and brainstorming centre for “Nigeria’s first premium spirit”, as the 42-year old researcher, who was raised in London, describes the brand she co-founded in 2018. “I found a level of affinity with the ethos of the space – a farm-to-table eco resort,” she says while conducting a tour around the facility in dungarees, a velvety bucket hat and flip-flops.
map One stop is at a tasting and cocktail lounge still under development. Inside are maturation tanks and a giant neon logo for Pedro’s Premium Ògógóró, which owes half its name to a Nigerian nickname for distilled palm sap, a west African favourite until its colonial-era ostracisation a century ago. For centuries, the palm tree has been integral to communities on both sides of the Atlantic.
Its branches come in handy for construction, chaff for charms, nuts for sauces, kernels for biofuel . Palm wine, its sap, has cultural, economic and spiritual significance across west Africa. The distilled version was once a phenomenon, says historian and archivist Ed Keazor, who drank it as an undergraduate in eastern Nigeria in the 1980s.
“From the late 19th century, it was brewed on a very small scale but [blossomed] in the 1920s when Josep.