Bayab Gin’s Mission to Put African Gin on Every Back Bar

With a mission to bring African gin and spirits to every back bar in the world, long-time friends and business partners, Damola Timeyin and Chris Frederick, are using their collective experience in branding, advertising, finance, and the food and beverage industry to put their portfolio of spirits on the map.

With a special focus on their world-class Pan-African spirit, Bayab Gin, the South Africa-based brand currently offers four expressions and has already built a strong following.

Bringing an African Spirits Brand to Life

“It really began with a moment. Chris and I were out at a bar with a huge selection of spirits, and we asked the bartender if he had any spirits from Africa. The answer was no,” Timeyin shares.

“For us, that was astonishing given the size, the depth, and the diversity of the continent. That moment was really the catalyst that made us say something needs to change.”

Timeyin and Frederick have been friends for nearly 20 years before becoming business partners. While they grew up in the United Kingdom, they are both of Nigerian descent. Timeyin noting that he spent much time between the two countries over the course of his life.

The pair met while studying at Leeds University in Yorkshire, England. After graduating, they remained close, building careers in finance and banking before ultimately finding themselves on parallel paths in food and beverage.

“Chris worked in finance and owned a pub. He was one of the few Black publicans in the UK,” says Timeyin. He continues, “I left banking for advertising, and in the agency work, I was supporting spirits brands.”

Following their conversation at the bar that day, they used their experiences to inform their instincts and began building Spearhead Spirits, the parent company that houses their suite of products. Founded in 2019, the brand is focused on bringing African spirits to the forefront of the beverage industry.

Developing Expressions of African Gin

“While Africa has a plethora of spirits, there weren’t many African spirit brands in major markets like the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe. And if you were to ask bartenders in any of those places, African liquors weren’t really a thing, and that’s what sparked our interest and motivation,” says Timeyin.

Spearhead Spirits’ initial product was Vusa, an African sugar cane vodka, but they soon expanded into gin, a category with a well-established culture and reputation in the United Kingdom.

They launched their first African gin product, Bayab Gin, in 2020. Timeyin says, “What we understood is that gin is a great canvas for telling stories about flavor, and flavors from around the world because you’re using a tapestry of botanicals to paint that picture. And if we wanted to bring African [spirit] culture to the world, gin was quite possibly the best vehicle or place to start.”

While all gins require juniper as a core botanical, Frederick and Timeyin found it necessary for their version to be anchored in botanicals they felt represented and told the story of Africa. That choice became the baobab tree, also known as the “tree of life.”

Timeyin shares, “It’s a fascinating tree with a fascinating story. The trees grow for thousands and thousands of years. The baobab fruit is an ancient African superfruit that has some of the highest amounts of antioxidants of any fruit in the world and more vitamin C than an orange. For an African gin, we couldn’t have done any better than to start with that fruit.”

Along with the baobab fruit, other African botanicals like coarse salt from the Botswana plains were also selected with the intention of helping people explore the vibrancy, brightness, and uniqueness of flavors found across the continent.

“We didn’t want to be a gin distilled in South Africa, we wanted to be a Pan African gin that told a story of flavors from across the continent, while appealing to people who have varied tastes,” notes co-founder Timeyin.

This intentional exploration of ingredients led them to dream up and develop four expressions of Bayab African Gin to date. Their African Dry Gin, which they describe as their purest expression, features juniper, baobab fruit, and classic botanicals like coriander and citrus peels.

Another expression is more citrus-forward, made with burnt orange and marula, a celebrated African fruit that adds a touch of tartness. Their African Rose Water Gin combines oils extracted from Kenyan rose petals with grapefruit peels. The fourth and final expression carries deeply personal meaning for both Frederick and Timeyin.

Brought to market one year after the launch of the initial three expressions, Bayab’s Palm and Pineapple gin was created to celebrate Nigerian Independence Day. “It was more than just slapping a green and white label on a bottle,” Timeyin says. “But we wanted to make sure what was in the bottle represented Nigerian culture and Nigerian beverage culture.”

This limited edition expression was made using fermented palm sap (a nod to palm wine, a drink very common at Nigerian celebrations), which they balanced with ripe South African pineapple.

Timeyin shares, “You pop the bottle and get hit with the pineapple, but it’s really dry on the tongue, which confuses people in a good way. It was a really interesting way to bring a tropical flavor into the world of gin.”

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A Commitment to Sustainability

In tandem with Spearhead Spirit’s mission to bring their Pan-African spirits and gin to the world, Timeyin and Frederick have also made clear commitments to sustainability, both in how their spirits are distilled and the ingredients they use to create their products.

Timeyin says of this commitment, “We’ve always wanted to do things the right way, and it stems from our belief that the world has extracted everything from the African continent forever, and we do not subscribe to that approach, to the culture of extraction.”

Timeyin shares that it starts with the distillery located in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, which is fully solar-powered, meaning everything they craft is “powered by the African sun.” This also means no fossil fuels are used in the production of their African gin and spirits, and that they can meet the demands of the market without being detrimental to the environment.

They have also made an investment in preservation research for the baobab tree being conducted at Ho Technical University in Ghana. Timeyin shares, “Because the baobab tree grows very slowly, taking too much fruit can put the tree under stress. The research is to cultivate new variants of the baobab tree that grow faster and bear fruit faster. It will help lessen the risk of extinction and deterioration, and will offer a more sustainable way for the tree to exist in society.”

Evolving Flavor Tourism Through Bayab Gin

As Spearhead Spirits continues to expand, Timeyin says he and Frederick know where they plan to place their focus next. He shares, “The next year is really about spreading the good work. We love the idea of flavor tourism. We want to take people somewhere brighter with Bayab and that’s a campaign we’ll be running.” 

He adds, “Asia, Europe, and other continents have had their moments, and we want to spearhead the same for African spirits. No pun intended.”

For the founders, the journey has been one of entrepreneurship and exploration, and their growing impact suggests African spirits are poised for a much larger moment on the global stage.

To learn more about Spearhead Spirits and Bayab Gin, or to locate where they retail, visit their website, or keep up to date with events and news on Instagram.