Procera Gin

The Free Bacchus Story

Four men in Nairobi were drinking imported gin and reading the back of the bottle. A striking number of the botanicals listed on it grow in Africa, get shipped to England to be distilled, and are then sold back to Africa at an import price. Guy Brennan, Charles Murito and Alan Murungi decided the obvious thing was to skip the middle two steps.

Nearly every gin in the world is made with Juniperus communis, the common juniper of Europe. Kenya has its own species, Juniperus procera, growing wild in the highland forest, and it had never been the base of a commercial gin. Brennan picked berries himself and carried them to a distiller to see what would happen. The company is named after the tree.

Two things follow from using a wild tree rather than a bought ingredient. The first is that the berries are used fresh, where the entire rest of the industry uses them dried; harvesters across different altitudes report back on what is ripening, and the fruit is distilled immediately or flash-frozen. The second is that ripeness is judged partly by the competition. Brennan's account of how they know the berries are ready is the best sentence anyone has given us about wild harvesting, and it involves baboons.

The arrangement with the forest is where a claim like this usually falls apart, so it is worth stating what is actually recorded. No tree is felled. A tree is replanted for every one harvested at Kijabe, with a commitment to buy that tree's berries when it starts fruiting in seven to ten years — a promise dated a decade out, which is either serious or worthless and cannot be anything in between. Harvesters are paid by the kilogram at a rate that runs well above the local daily wage.

None of this is certified, and the page says so at the top. There is no organic scheme covering a wild forest tree in Kenya, and Procera has not invented one to point at. It sits in Track B, which is our route for producers whose practice is genuinely verifiable but whose paperwork does not exist, and Track B cannot reach our top tier no matter how good the gin is. That ceiling is the price of not having a certificate, and it applies here.