When an exotic fruit becomes a breeding ground for innovation

As you know, exploration is at the heart of our approach. So today we'd like to take you behind the scenes of our R&D laboratory, where we recently carried out tests on 'monkey bread', the fruit of the baobab tree, a few kilos of which we brought back from Senegal.

Fascinated by its unique potential, we set about transforming it into spirits...

Challenges and discoveries

To the best of our knowledge, this fruit had never been fermented before and so it presented us with some unprecedented challenges.

In particular, we tested different fermentation methods, including the use of malt (thanks to our distiller Quentin for the suggestion!), to find the ideal flavour profile.

But let us tell you straight away, turning 'monkey bread' into a spirit was no easy task!

A surprising and promising result

After several trials, here's what we can tell you: it was the fermentation of 'monkey bread' alone that produced the most interesting results, with a distillate that, to our great surprise, had cereal notes reminiscent of whisky.

The addition of malt, on the other hand, proved less successful, being a perfect example of the gap that can separate theory from practice: sometimes the best discoveries are not necessarily those that seemed the most logical on paper.

A future full of possibilities

Today, we still don't know if this experiment will have a future as a spirit, but it has already been very rewarding from a pure R&D point of view.

Our team is now looking forward to sharing this discovery with Alexandre Gabriel to consider possible next steps - or not!

Stay tuned!