OnTap Magazine

OT: How did you get started in brewing? PO: My family wanted me to study medicine but I didn’t want to so I thought let me give them something close to it. I started studying applied microbiology at Nnamdi Azikiwe University. Along the line we were introduced to brewing and I fell in love with it later during my industrial internship at Nigerian Breweries. OT: And how do your family feel now about you choosing beer over medicine? PO: (Laughs) They are actually very much in support. My dad asks me to send him beers once in a while! OT: You ended up working at Nigeria’s first craft brewery – how did that happen? PO: After finishing university I was working at the Transmission Company of Nigeria for my youth service year and I realised this wasn’t what I wanted to do. I started thinking about brewing and googled to see if there was a brewery in Abuja. And that’s how I found Bature. I followed the map to the doorstep and met Raju [then a brewer at Bature] and told him that I had studied brewing. I couldn’t find a job after my youth service and I though well maybe I could just intern at Bature. So I interned for six months, then in May 2019 I was employed as a full time member of staff. OT: Tell us more about Bature… PO: The brewery is based in Abuja and we’re a real microbrewery, producing just 360 litres at a time. We have 11 beers in the range but we are always trying to develop new beers. That’s what I enjoy most about working in craft beer: the experimentation and development of new recipes. I designed the mango beer recipe and have helped develop our new coconut cream stout. OT: Coconut cream stout sounds delicious. What is your most popular beer? PO: It would have to be between our Founders Beer, which is a pale ale, and Black Gold. Black Gold is a 10% ABV imperial stout with Nigerian coffee – it won a bronze medal at the 2019 African Beer Cup and I think it’s got even better since then. We took the feedback from the competition and made a few changes to try and perfect the recipe. OT: You use a lot of Nigerian ingredients in the beers – is that a key part of Bature’s identity? PO: Yes, we definitely try to use local products where we can. So we use Nigerian coffee, we use locally sourced coconuts, hibiscus, cocoa and mango and we also use Nigerian sorghum. OT: Do you use sorghum in all of your beers? PO: Not all of them, but we do use sorghum in most of our beers as an adjunct alongside barley. We use a sorghum extract that’s produced locally. OT: The pandemic has had a huge impact on the South African brewing industry – how has business been affected there? PO: It has definitely slowed things down. The brewery is normally lively and buzzing – we have live music, quizzes and that sort of thing but since the pandemic started it’s been really quiet. Although in one sense it has helped us. Usually we sell most of our beer on-site but with the pandemic we have had the opportunity to scale up our bottling and distribution, including house deliveries. OT: Bature started in Abuja but you now have a second location in Lagos – how is that going? PO: It’s going well. The taproom is set up and we are selling beers from there, although the beer is currently still all being produced in Abuja. Installations will soon commence in Lagos though and the brewhouse should be up and running before the first half of the year comes to an end.