Akpeteshie

A drink named for hiding

The word akpeteshie comes from the Ga language and refers to hiding. Both Wikipedia and an Associated Press report from Accra explain the name the same way: when the colonial authorities of the Gold Coast outlawed local distilling, people had to make and drink the spirit out of sight.

The historian Emmanuel Akyeampong, writing in The Journal of African History, traces how illicit distilling spread in the 1930s after a rise in tariffs on imported liquor in 1930, on the eve of the global depression. Urban and rural workers who could not afford imported gin turned to the local spirit. Illicit distilling threatened the colonial government’s reliance on revenue from imported liquor, raised fears of crime and disorder and exposed the weakness of colonial rule; in the end it led the British government to seek a change to the 1919 Saint Germain Convention, which had banned commercial spirit distilling in the African colonies.

Wikipedia notes that the ban did little to stop the trade: illicit spirits stayed easy to find, and demand encouraged sugar-cane growing in the Anlo area of the Volta Region.

From protest to legal trade

From the 1940s, Akyeampong writes, akpeteshie became a symbol of African grievances and was drawn into nationalist politics. Legalising it was among the first acts of the government of independent Ghana, and his study ends with the overthrow of the Convention People’s Party, which was seen as the ‘champion’ of the akpeteshie industry.

With independence, distilling became legal, and Wikipedia records that the first factory was set up in the Volta Region, close to its sugar-cane plantations.

How it is made and drunk

Akpeteshie is distilled from palm wine or from sugar-cane juice. In the method Wikipedia describes, the sweet liquid is fermented in large barrels, sometimes with added yeast; the barrels are heated over a fire, and the vapour runs through a copper pipe in a cooling barrel, where it condenses and is collected.

Much of it is not professionally bottled but sold in reused, unlabelled bottles, wholesale or by the glass. It is far cheaper than imported spirits, and both Wikipedia and the Associated Press associate it with poorer drinkers, and the AP adds that such traditional liquors remain popular in the countryside. The AP described drinkers downing it in shot glasses at roadside bars and mourners pouring it into plastic bottles for funerals; it also found Accra bartenders using it in cocktails, among them a mojito made with akpeteshie in place of rum.

To the uninitiated, the AP wrote, it tastes like fire, and Wikipedia likens its effect to a knockout punch.

A heritage product

Akpeteshie is also known as apio. In September 2026, Graphic Online reported, the Ghana Industrial Property Office held a two-day workshop in Accra with palm-wine tappers and distillers from the Volta, Eastern and Ashanti regions to prepare a book of specifications, the step needed to register the spirit as a protected geographical indication.

In Emblem World, akpeteshie sits in the Ghana drinks collection, beside palm wine, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.