Tastes Like Home
Written by Mary Chiney
The silence of the Epe mangrove forest is heavy. It is not the empty silence of a soundproof room but a thick, living quiet – the kind that amplifies the snap of a twig or the distant, prehistoric cry of a hornbill. Here, forty miles east of Lagos’ screeching mainland, the humidity hugs you like a damp towel. It is a wet, cloying heat that seems to rise from the peat itself.
It is 5:30 a.m., and the sun has not yet burned through the Harmattan haze. Sunday, a third-generation palm wine tapper, stands at the base of a raffia palm (Raphia vinifera) that shoots fifty feet into the grey dawn.
He is in his late 50s and has that lean, wiry strength common in tappers. He looks ten years younger until he stands still and you see the lines on his face. He adjusts the igba, a stiff, woven hoop of rope that serves as his harness, elevator, and life insurance, around his waist and the tree’s rough trunk. “You must respect the tree,” Sunday says, his voice low, testing the rope’s tension with a sharp lean, “If you fight it, you fall. If you fear it, you fall.”
He begins his ascent. It is a rhythmic, jerking motion that defies the physics of his age: lean back, slide the rope up, step up. Lean back, slide, step. There are no carabiners, no helmets, no Occupational Health and Safety oversight here. Just muscle memory, calloused feet, and a trust in the friction of bark against fibre.
I watch from the swampy floor, my boots sinking into the black mud. Sunday disappears into the canopy, and for a long moment, there is only the sound of his hand-forged, curved machete hacking at the inflorescence; the flower cluster where the palm sap hides. He is tending to his pots – the plastic jerrycans lashed to the crown of the palms, collecting the dripping lifeblood of the forest.
In the West, wild fermentation is a fashionable buzzword, a premium selling point for natural wines and sour beers. Here in the Nigerian bush, it is simply the way things are. But as Lagos expands, devouring the mangroves for concrete estates and oil refineries, this ancient rhythm is facing an abrupt silence.
Sunday pours the liquid into a calabash, a dried and hollowed-out gourd (Lagenaria siceraria) and it fizzes violently – a head of foam rising like a poured Guinness or a suffering cask ale. The colour is milky white, suspended with yeast, pollen, and the debris of the bush. I take a sip. It is shocking.
It tastes of lychee, coconut water, and a faint, yeasty funk that hits the back of the throat. It is intensely sweet, but with a vibrating energy on the tongue.
“It changes every hour,” Sunday says, wiping his knife with an oil-stained rag. “Right now, it is juice. By afternoon, it is wine. By tomorrow, it is vinegar.”
The science of palm wine is a race against time. The moment the sap leaves the vascular tissues of the palm, the airborne yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) the same engine behind your sourdough bread and Belgian tripel, begins to feast on the sucrose. Simultaneously, lactic acid bacteria (Lactobacillus) join the party.
Because the sap is so rich in sugars and the ambient temperature in Nigeria hovers around 30°C (86°F), the fermentation is explosive. In the first hour, the alcohol content is negligible. By hour four, it climbs to 2% or 3%. By evening, it hits 5%, and the taste shifts from fruity sweetness to a sour, biting tartness. By the next morning, the acetic acid bacteria takes over, turning the prize into cooking vinegar.
This ephemeral quality is why the ‘bush bar’ exists. You cannot bottle this moment. There is no preservative that can halt the process without destroying the flavour profile. To taste the beverage at its peak—that perfect equilibrium between sugar and alcohol—you must come to the source. It requires a pilgrimage.
“The city people,” Sunday says, spitting onto the ground, “they drink sugar and water. They don’t know this taste.”
He is referring to the widespread adulteration in Lagos. Unscrupulous sellers, knowing the wine sours quickly, make ‘white wash’ by mixing the now vinegary wine with water, chalk and pump it full of saccharine or aspartame to mimic the look and sweetness of the fresh sap. It is a zombie drink: dead, sweet, and headache-inducing. The drink Sunday has given me, by contrast, feels like health.
For decades, clearings like this one were the engine rooms of Nigerian social life. Consisting usually of just a few bamboo benches under a thatch roof or a large tree, there’s no counter, just a group of men sitting in a circle around a central keg. They were the original ‘listening bars’, long before audiophiles in Tokyo or London fetishised the concept of high-fidelity spaces.
In the 1950s and 60s, the genre known as Palm Wine Music flourished in spaces exactly like this. It was built around the acoustic ‘box’ guitar, the shekere (a gourd wrapped in a net of beads), and sometimes the agidigbo, a large thumb piano, with a simple empty bottle tapped with a coin providing the rhythm. A rolling, acoustic precursor to Highlife, the sound emerged when West African sailors, particularly the Kru people of Liberia, interacted with local musicians, blending traditional percussion with the portable guitars carried by European merchant ships.
The music was like the drink: unrefined, communal, and best experienced live. Musicians would gather under the thatch shades, drinking the fresh sap and playing intricate, two-finger guitar styles that mimicked the cadence of local dialects.
“My father played here,” Sunday says, gesturing to a dilapidated bamboo shelter nearby, its roof sagging under the weight of creeping vines. “Men would sit after farming. They would drink, they would sing. It was how they washed the day off.”
In the Yoruba and Igbo cosmologies, palm wine is more than a social lubricant; it is a spiritual conduit. In traditional Igbo weddings (Igba Nkwu), the marriage is not sealed until the bride finds her groom in the crowd and offers him a cup of palm wine. This is a playful ritual, where the groom hides among the hundreds of guests to test the bride. She has to navigate the crowd, with guests often trying to distract her or claim they are the groom, to find her man and identify him by giving him the drink. It’s a public declaration of choice. When he drinks, the deal is done.
It accompanies elders gathering; naming ceremonies, funerals, land disputes, or even just as a morning greeting. Before any big talk starts, the earth must drink first to invite the ancestors into the conversation. The first splash of wine is always poured onto the earth, a libation for the ancestors. “We are together,” the gesture says. “You are dead, but you are not gone.”
But the rhythm is breaking. The listening bars of Epe are emptying out. The young men who would have learned the guitar or the trade of tapping are now riding okadas (motorcycle taxis) in the city, chasing quick cash in the gig economy. The patience required to tap a tree, to wait years for it to mature, to climb it twice a day, to earn pennies per litre, does not align with the tempo of modern Lagos.
“My son is in Ajah,” Sunday tells me. Ajah is a chaotic suburb on the edge of the expansion. He continues, “He fixes phones. He says this work is for suffering.”
The threat to Sunday’s livelihood is not just cultural; it is geological and economic. The Epe mangroves are being eaten alive.
A few miles away, the Lekki-Epe Expressway is expanding. The rumble of heavy lorries hauling cement to the Free Trade Zone is a constant, low-frequency intrusion that vibrates through the ground. This corridor is home to the new Dangote Refinery, the largest single-train refinery in the world, and a deep-sea port.
Land here, once considered swampy wasteland suitable only for fishing and tapping, is now real estate. It is being sand-filled, flattened, and sold in plots to the burgeoning middle class.
“They want to build estates,” Sunday says. He points his machete towards a line of red surveyor flags cutting through the bush like a wound. “They say it is development. But when they cut the trees, where does the water go? When they cut the trees, where does the spirit go?” Sunday is being literal. In traditional Yoruba belief, trees and forests have resident spirits. When the forest is leveled for a refinery, those entities are displaced. For him, the land isn’t just property, rather it’s a living neighborhood of spirits.
The loss of the mangroves also means the loss of Raphia vinifera, which produces the thinner, sweeter, and superior ‘oguro’ wine. While the oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), best known for palm oil, can also yield palm wine from its sap, it results in ’emu ope’. While still popular, it is generally thicker, stronger and lacks the delicate, floral sweetness of the raffia’s oguro. It is, however, hardier and able to grow on dry land. The raffia palm tree needs swampy ground. You cannot grow a raffia estate on dry sand.
This is the real cost of sustainability. The sustainability that is not just about carbon credits or recyclable packaging; it is about the viability of a lifestyle. For Sunday, sustainability means the ability to access a forest that hasn’t been sold to a developer.
The economics are brutal. A 25-litre keg of fresh palm wine might fetch Sunday 5,000 Naira (roughly £2.50) from a reseller. By the time it reaches a bar in Victoria Island; the affluent heart of Lagos, it sells for five times that. This is where the high-rises, luxury hotels, and expensive cocktail bars are, and where Sunday’s wine is rebranded as a “cultural specialty”, but Sunday sees none of that margin. He is squeezed between the physical danger of the climb and the economic danger of the land grab.
We sit for a while as the sun climbs higher, baking the mud. The mosquitoes are beginning to wake up, a low hum joining the birdsong.
Sunday pours us a second cup. The flavour has already shifted. The intense sugar of the dawn harvest is receding, replaced by a sharper, boozy bite. It tastes more like a farmhouse cider now, or a dry Riesling. It is a lesson in impermanence.
I ask him what happens when the surveyor flags turn into bulldozers.
“I will go back to my village in Osun,” he says, shrugging. It’s about 80 miles from the Epe mangroves, and in Lagos traffic, that’s a 3 to 4-hour journey. “There are trees there. But the young men? They will drink beer. They will drink gin. They will forget.”
He is not being melodramatic: he is stating a fact. The erasure of palm wine culture is the erasure of a specific mode of Nigerian fellowship. The modern ‘beer parlour’ in Lagos is a loud place, dominated by televisions showing the Premier League and speakers blasting Amapiano, a modern genre from South Africa, at 100 decibels. You cannot talk there. You cannot play an acoustic guitar there. You certainly cannot pour a libation to the ancestors on a tiled floor.
The palm wine bush bar was a place of low intervention—in the drink, and in the conversation. It was a place to be human, quietly.
As we walk back to the road, the silence of the grove is finally shattered by the blast of a truck horn on the highway, announcing the arrival of another load of cement. Sunday doesn’t flinch. He just shoulders his rope, the tool of his vanishing trade, and walks on.
He looks like a man holding onto a fading rhythm in a city that is learning to dance to a different beat. And as I finish the last dregs of the cup, tasting the souring yeast, I realise I am drinking a ghost.
Mary Chiney is a culture journalist based in Lagos. Her work explores the intersection of culture, entertainment, tradition, and modern African identity.
Other articles by Mary Chiney
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