Quinto’s absinthe

To praise the distilate that is captured and sealed in what looks deceitfully like water fails to capture what is really unique about Quinto’s stuff. It is the real marker. It has the brow-clinching taste and the sting in the nose like a kick from a horse. It does not burn your throat, but it clings to the sides of your gullet and washes down into your capillaries like effervescence. If you hold it against the sun as it trails the glass like a sweat, and sparkles purely, slowly oxidizing with the elements, it will send you into hypnosis. You will slur your speech, make somersaults in your head and you will be happy. Plus it does not have a hangover.

That’s Quinto’s stuff, the real deal. You can look him up in Busia if you doubt anything I say. Just go all the way to Bulanda and ask for Quinto. They will look you up, not in the google sort of way. But they will size you up to know if you are police or government. Then maybe they will take you past the dusty centre where the junction splits the road like a Catholic cross. There is a hospital there, a private clinic by name Egesa which was built in the 1980s. Just so you know, we are not just liquor distillers but have medical doctors who run their own hospitals among us. Now you go past the hospital and the road slumps like tired shoulders and bends at the spine and you exit on the right. If go past there and you’ll see a quarried space – they call it mlipuko in local lingo I guess because it was blasted. Take a left and you’ll come face to face with the cradle of chang’aa, at Quinto’s. You need to have a sip of that stuff to believe me. Have you ever had your head roll and loll and swerve and turn until you figure the world really does those crazy rotations that science people tell us.

Quinto has this modest, but ambitious place. It’s a mud house built in the contemporary architecture of corners and not round huts like they had in the past. It has a mansard roof or what we call French cut with a web of supporting beams that would awe Francois. It has a cement floor and three rooms: the lounge, kitchen and bedroom. It is quite impressive what he has done with the limited resources. It looks as if he would have built a castle if he had the dough. Outside he maintains a well-trimmed hedge and a close-cropped lawn. An ordinary villager would have put to plough that patch of land to plant maize and groundnuts. But as you can already tell, our Quinto, although not necessarily rich, is a tad elegant. But his stuff can take on Johnie Walker toe-to-toe my friend. It should be awarded something for some craftsmanship. And it could, only if he distilled that stuff my way.

For one, I would change location. Quinto does not distill that stuff in Kenya for obvious reasons. The government, in the wisdom of its laws and the sanity of its officials, banned the absinthe in Kenya. The exact reason is not known. Some claim it is poisonous. On the contrary, I don’t think Jack Daniels is nutritious milk. Some say it is too cheap; as if poor people do not deserve quality stuff. And yet if you compare it to the mix of soap and hydrochloroethane into third-generation alcohol that is currently being sold off in the market chang’aa is actually healthier.

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But they maintain their laws, so long as the taxman can count how many parts methanol and put it in their little record book next to liver mortalities and call it economic growth.

So Quinto has to distill in Uganda. It is not too far off, just across yonder. The two countries are split by a colonial fable and a stream, Muyala, so thin you can hop over it. Quinto has relations on the other side and has hired out a plot from one of his relations. It is a small place where his relation was building one-roomed brick houses for renting but only managed half the job.

Half of the establishment is already going to ruin; trees have set root in the slab, the branches jutting out of the windows and the incomplete roof like intoxicated arms trying to escape. The other half is hurriedly and coarsely done. Just a tin roof and a wooden door, unpainted and secured by a stainless-steel locker. The distillation is done here. Stale millet beer is locked in air-tight plastic drums; the type manufactured for storing water. The mixture is kept there for days. With a measure of yeast added to it the damn thing ferments so hard you can get high on just the fumes. It is ugly and frothing and burps on the surface and you have to stir it once a while so it doesn’t boil over.

The distillation is done in the unfinished part of the structure. It is very hot business. You put the fermented stale beer in a pot and you have three sufurias. A big one that can cover the entire mouth but has holes at the bottom, a small one that goes into the big one and another one the same size as the big one with a concave bottom. It is the local distillation technology. You heat the mixture at the bottom, it passes through the holes of the bottom sufuria and gets cooled on the top one then trails on the concave bottom and lands on the smaller sufuria within. All you have to do is keep pouring cold water on the top sufuria and replacing it with more cold water when it heats up. They use cow dung to seal the distillery such that it is airtight and nothing escapes.

The operators, Manyalas, defy the smoke rising from the blazing fire, the heat and sweat and keep pouring cold water on the top sufuria, emptying it and adding more cold water. In a full-scale production there is a total of over twenty hearths, steaming like an industrial complex, the red bricks sweating, water cooling the distillery. Trickle after trickle single devils are caught trying to escape the broth of stale millet and are sealed in orbs of crystal clear purity; Quinto’s heavenly stuff. Here timing is crucial and experience is paramount if you are to get the right product.

If I were him, I would approach the business with the foresight of the manufacturers of the distilled hydrochloroethane mixture that comes in all sorts of names; from scotch, champagne, gin to tequila. None of those glassy bottles, wooden cases and fancy stories can hide the tinge of hydrochloroethane mixture. But the branding and the story blind me when I part with my hard-earned money to buy overpriced hydrochloroethane. With this background, I would build the branding first; we’ll call it Quinto’s Absinthe. Fancy and slick; something that can be picked quickly by teenagers who want to try out their first trip into the path they were ably told goes straight to hell. It will stick easy in a hashtag.

We’ll have a signature taste so that we can get the most of this branding thing. My folks just take stale millet beer and make that shit and it is graded on its kick, Kenya 1 the purest form then down Kenya 2, Kenya 3 to gumaofwe- a the worst version of the local drink whose meaning translates literally to bend over and die. While this is practical for a market that lacks brand differentiation and cannot handle consistency in taste. So I’ll have one brand made solely from, say, cassava stale beer and another from millet beer. Call them hand-picked virgin grains moistened by the humidity of fresh water of Lake Nyanza, the pearl ever so desired by Queen Victoria of the British Monarchy etc etc. I would declare that the spirit is produced in ancinet pots made of red clay kilned with wild scent of rare timber grown in the grave of the first man on earth etc etc.

And then for crying out loud I will have to do something about the smell. They have invented everything including scented condoms; they sure can invent how to make chang’aa smell better. I am sure there are traditionalists who say the damn authenticity is in the smell. But so is it in the kick of the mule. I would make mine taste bitter and smell better and let us see how that will work out on the market.

If they do not lift their imagined laws, I would sell that stuff wholesale with a distribution network like the making of a mafia movie. If I can price it right, someone will carry it. Like the prohibition, I will have middle men smuggle that stuff in Toyota Proboxes and nduthis; they will be shipped as transit cargo and flood the capital like a plague, messing up the livers of an entire generation like an episode in the comedy of existence. I would turn the Luhya watchmen joke into a real mafia outfit complete with official branding like a security firm or something.

I would pay politicians, change the law and legalise the stuff. Then I’ll export it to every corner of the world. But because I cannot manufacture enough genuine millet and cassava stuff to sattisfy the growing market, I will gradually introduce distilled hydrochloroethane mixture and produce by the millions of galons.

But I will keep reminding you how Quinto’s is a deeply-satisfying spirit brewed from red-grain spiral bud millet that only grows on the soil where the first man walked the earth. It tastes of the grey boulders on Atlas’ shoulders and when you lift it just a tad little onto your lips, it will crumble into your pit with a ting sound as your eyebrows touch. Uniquely African; Quintos Absinthe.