Only the finest fruits are used by Uncle Jack, who personally oversees the fermentation and distillation never wavering from the secret recipe and never compromising on the quality of his special brand of premium Mampoer.

Nyati JJJ's subtle flavour embodies the pioneering spirit of the adventurer who heeds the call of wildest Africa.

Visit the Nyati jjj Distillery and taste the True Spirits of Africa. In the glorious custom of the distilleries of old, Nyati is housed in a traditional farm building. What’s different about Nyati, though, is that it stands within the confines of a game reserve - Buffalo Hills Private Camp and Game Reserve - where you can embrace the Big Six in the heart of the Garden Route, on South Africa’s Southern Cape Coast.

Making Nyati jjj

Making our Nyati jjj Mampoer begins when the citrus growers of the Garden Route deliver us their oranges, naartjies (clementines) and grapefruit between May and August.

Juicing
The juice is extracted in an automatic juicer which cuts each fruit in half and squeezes it. Everything else, though, is done by hand to ensure that our product is of the highest quality (in fact, the raw juice is of such a high quality that it’s a firm favourite with our guests at Buffalo Hills Private Camp).
Pith and pips are removed from the juice to prevent any possibility of methyl alcohol appearing during the fermentation process.

Fermentation
After sifting, the juice is poured into huge drums where it naturally begins to ferment within a day or so. We add brown sugar and a natural, imported yeast to boost the alcohol content, and the mixture is allowed to continue fermenting for four to eight weeks, depending on the weather (fermentation slows in the cooler months).

Distillation
Once the juice has reached the desired alcohol content, we pour it into a 1000-litre copper kettle, bolt the head down firmly, and bring it slowly to just below boiling point. We heat our kettles with gas because it allows for accurate temperature control (pot stills were traditionally heated with wood fires, but this leaves the distiller without any control over the temperature: at 100° or more, the distillate rushes through the kettle and produces an inferior product which contains impurities - water, methanol, oils, etc.).
Pot stills produce two kinds of alcohol - methanol and ethanol. Methanol, or wood alcohol, comes from the pips and pith of the fruit, and has a much lower boiling point - 65° - than ethanol - 78°. Although we take great care to remove as many impurities as we can during the juicing process, some of this dangerous methanol always appears in the distillation. But, because it has a lower boiling point, it comes out of the still before the ethanol: this ‘voorloop’ is a cloudy liquid and is discarded.
At 86°, the distillate clears and the pure, ethanol - drinkable alcohol - appears.
About 15 - 20% of the distillate that comes from the kettle is alcohol. At its peak, immediately after the voorloop has run out, the distillate’s strength is between 68 and 70% alcohol by volume, but this decreases as the process continues.
When the temperature inside the kettle reaches 96°, alcohol content reaches 46% by volume and the distillate turns cloudy again: this is called the naloop. This highly prized products is separated from the heart of the run and distilled a second time to remove cloudiness and produce our traditional double-distilled Nyati jjj Mampoer.

We use traditional copper pot stills to produce our Nyati jjj Mampoer and Nyati jjj Liqueurs because they are safe (unlike lead stills which can lead to lead poisoning) and because the thermal qualities of the copper allow our distiller to maintain the steady temperatures he needs to produce a pure, quality alcohol. Like all great inventions, copper pot stills are highly efficient and work on a simple principle: when alcohol reaches its boiling point (methanol at 65° and ethanol at 78°) it turns to steam and rises. The steam is trapped by the head of the kettle and runs down an escape into a heat exchanger where it condenses and runs out into a collection bucket.