The spirits family tree has numerous branches, and many of those feature liquors made from, well, trees and branches. From fruit brandies to gin’s juniper to spirits made from saps, pine cones, and more, there are plenty of ways for craft distillers to harness the sugars, aromas, and flavors that (literally) grow on trees.
But what about a spirit built entirely—and exclusively—from different elements of one tree? A distillery in Kenya is proving that it’s not only possible but also that the results could be influential in the gin category.
Based in Nairobi, Australian expats Guy Brennan and Charles Murito and Kenyan chef Alan Murungi founded Procera Gin in 2018. Brennan says that they were enjoying gin and tonics one afternoon when they began to look more closely at the list of botanicals on a bottle of Bombay Sapphire Gin. He says they marveled at how many were grown in Africa—then sent to England to be distilled and eventually sold back to Africa (and points around the world) as gin. To Brennan, that raised a question: “Why aren’t we just making gin here, with African botanicals?”
None of them knew how to make gin, but they were all keen to use African juniper, Juniperus procera. They took its berries to South Africa and experienced distiller Roger Jorgensen. After distilling the berries alone, Jorgensen turned to Brennan and remarked, “What you’ve brought here could change the course of a 300-year-old category.” Jorgensen moved to Kenya not long afterward, and the group officially launched Procera.
How These Gins Are Different
Procera’s range of gins includes three expressions: Blue Dot, Red Dot, and Green Dot.
Blue Dot is a classic gin, complex and perfect for martinis—an instant sell at some of the world’s finest gin- and martini-serving establishments, such as London’s Connaught Bar and American Bar at the Savoy Hotel. Red Dot, meanwhile, is the brand’s more experimental gin, designed for straight sipping or for enlivening negronis or other cocktails. Brennan says that with a botanical mix that includes six different African peppers, oyster shells, and seaweed, Red Dot tends to appeal to drinkers of darker spirits.
The Green Dot, finally, is Procera’s single-tree gin, special for the way it celebrates the procera tree. Besides the tree’s juniper berries, the only botanicals involved are the tree’s leaves and wood.
Before diving into the specific practice of making a single-tree gin and what that entails, it’s worth considering a few traits that all Procera’s gins have in common—traits that separate them from other entries in the gin market.
The first is the juniper, grown in equatorial Africa. The juniper known to most drinkers of European and American gins is grown in the Mediterranean, and it yields flavors that many associate with Christmas trees. In contrast, Brennan describes African juniper as bright, fresh, rich, and spicy, with a sort of vegetal umami character and a touch of nuttiness.
“This juniper gets so much sunshine,” Brennan says. “It’s dense with essential oils. It has a rich, almost butter-fat quality.”
Furthermore, Procera uses only fresh juniper, as opposed to the dried juniper that most distillers use. They partner with harvesters, who report back on the berries they’re finding in different regions—the berries ripen earlier in the year in lower-altitude areas, later at higher altitudes. Once the team decides they’ve pinpointed the best-tasting berries, it’s time to harvest and get them to the distillery for immediate use or for flash-freezing. While they can make the Blue Dot later using flash-frozen berries, they distill the Green Dot and Red Dot right away, over eight continuous runs. Brennan says this is the best, most flavorful way to showcase Juniperus procera.
The other key differentiator is how Procera makes its gins. The team introduces the berries to a neutral base spirit made from Kenyan sugar cane via “the pillowcase technique,” Brennan says. “As in, Roger literally used a pillowcase the first time when he was testing this.” (Their production no longer involves actual pillowcases.)
Essentially, Jorgensen puts the berries into a giant teabag, which enjoys a warm bath (110°F/43°C) in the sugar-cane spirit for about 15 hours. The idea is to avoid astringency from over-extraction, which can be a feature of other gins. (Brennan says you can even pick out burnt notes in a few gins because their distilleries apply too much heat and allow too much direct exposure to the spirit.)
The Single Tree
While all three Procera gins stand apart for their fresh, ripe African juniper and restrained maceration, the Green Dot is a rare study in terroir.
Once the harvesters have identified the juniper berries at their peak, the Procera team chooses their favorites and sets up camp near those trees. They sample the berries until they decide which tree is offering the best—then they pick from that one tree, also taking branches from it for the wood and leaves. One year’s run of Green Dot comes from this single tree.
Brennan says they never have to cut down a tree; they also replant a tree for every one they harvest in the town of Kijabe, promising that they’ll buy the tree’s juniper when it’s ready in seven to 10 years. He says sustainability and community impact are important parts of Procera’s mission.
While the berries go into the “pillowcase” for warm maceration, they strip the leaves from the branches, and they chip and toast the wood—literally, in actual toaster ovens. Then they introduce the spirit to the leaves and wood via vapor basket.
Procera uses a 200-liter Müller still—“a tiny little still we run incredibly slowly,” Brennan says. “For over nine hours, it just drips out.” There are no plates, but a continuous copper spiral. Green Dot comes off this still at 180 proof, and getting it down to 88 proof for bottling involved a bit of a learning curve.
“We were adding water in one go to proof it down,” Brennan says. “Then you have this reaction where it heats up but never integrates.” Later, he met Alexandre Gabriel, owner and master blender at Maison Ferrand. “He tasted our gin and said, ‘This is amazing. I’ve never tasted something like what you’ve done—but I can tell it’s a chopped spirit.”
Gabriel introduced Brennan to the concept of gradually integrating the water to proof it down, and he and the team decided to take it to an extreme. “We got an actual hospital drip bag, and [we] drip the water in drop by drop,” Brennan says. “First we have the slow distilling creating this velvety, luscious effect, and then this slow proofing.” This process takes two weeks; they use rainwater collected at the distillery and run it through reverse osmosis filtration.
This annual batch of Green Dot yields only 2,000 bottles. They bottle only 100 per day because Procera pays local glass-blowers to make the bottles, and 100 is the most they can produce in a day.
All those extremes—from harnessing the terroir of a single tree, to the drip-drip of proofing down, to partnering with local growers and methodical glass-blowers—are intentional and integral to Procera’s brand. The team is highlighting African ingredients to the rest of the world, and they aim to back that up by supporting local suppliers as well as the environment in which they harvest and distill.
Sunrise in Narok County, southwestern Kenya.
The result is one of the few African spirits to appear on influential back bars around the world—and Green Dot, which delivers all that is unique about African juniper via a single tree, is an outstanding way to get acquainted.