A visit from her mother, a competition brief and a breakfast that would not leave her head. What came next took a lot of failed garnishes to get right.
Chiamaka Victoria Ayola Umekwe’s mother was visiting Lagos when she asked for a simple favour one morning: akara and ogi for breakfast. Chiamaka made it, the two of them ate, and she then sat down to read a competition brief from Johnnie Walker. The plates were barely cleared, but the breakfast had settled in her mind and would not move.
Months later, that meal had become a cocktail called “The First Step” and a ₦1 million prize at Lagos Cocktail Week. Getting from one to the other took a fermented drink, a clarification technique and a crispy bite of akara that refused to behave.
A stop on the way to work
Chiamaka, who founded The Boozie Lab, builds cocktails around everyday African ingredients and food culture. For this competition, she started with a scene she knows well. Lagos is a city that is always moving, and before the day properly begins, many people pull over at an akara joint. The stop is so ordinary that hardly anyone stops to think about it, yet she sees it as part of what makes the city what it is.
That became the story she wanted to tell. If a quick breakfast stop could be shaped into a cocktail with real polish, it would say something about how much is already sitting in Nigerian kitchens.
Why pap water and whisky
She chose omi ogi, the sour liquid from fermented pap, because she had worked with it before. An earlier cocktail of hers paired it with whisky, so she already knew how it behaved and believed it had a future in the glass. She is also drawn to fermentation in general, and she says she loves the complexity it brings.
The challenge was giving a flavour everyone recognises a new expression. She infused the omi ogi with ginger, whose warmth sits naturally beside the sourness of the pap. Coconut milk went in to bring back the comfort of a Nigerian breakfast table, only in a more refined form. The whisky tied the other ingredients together.
The step that changed the drink
The first mixtures had plenty of good flavour but lacked finish. Milk clarification fixed that. The technique removes the solids and tiny suspended particles that make a drink cloudy, leaving it clear, smooth and silky. Run through it, the whisky, omi ogi, coconut and ginger came together as one drink that still tasted like that breakfast but looked and drank like a competition cocktail.
Reaching that point was slow. Some versions were too intense, and others lost the character of the ingredients entirely. Omi ogi already carries a strong fermented acidity, so every change to the sweetness, texture or structure shifted the balance somewhere else. She kept adjusting until the cocktail felt familiar and elevated at the same time, without becoming heavy.
The akara that would not stay crisp
The garnish turned out to be the harder problem. Chiamaka did not want the akara to sit on the rim as decoration. A cocktail is mostly liquid from first sip to last, and she wanted the guest to have something to chew on, a crispy bite of akara to take between sips so the familiar flavour arrived in a different form.
Her early attempts did not work. She tried several garnish styles, including a tuile, a baked wafer, but none held up the way she wanted. It took a long run of trial and error to find a texture that stayed crisp and still tasted like akara. She also added a little spice to it, so the heat could echo the warmth already coming from the ginger and the whisky and wake up the palate before the next sip.
What two earlier losses taught her
This was not her first run at the title. Two years earlier, she competed at Lagos Cocktail Week and in World Class Nigeria in the same year and did not get the results she hoped for. She says those outings showed her where to improve, and the gaps were not only in technique. Her storytelling and her confidence when presenting a cocktail needed work too.
She took those lessons with her and kept learning. Coming back, she understood herself better as a bartender and was clearer about the stories she wanted to tell. Winning this time felt more meaningful because she could see how far she had come between the two attempts.
From a small food business to the bar
Her route to the bar was not direct. She has worked in food and beverage for about three years, and before that she ran a small food business that sold simple drinks such as Chapman and different juice and spirit mixes. Culinary school came later, and it was there that she discovered bartending.
The two fields fed each other. The kitchen taught her how ingredients, flavours and techniques work, while the bar gave her a new way to be creative. Since then she has been building her skills in cocktails on purpose and looking for ways to tell Nigerian stories through drinks.
More than prize money
The ₦1 million matters to her, but she describes the win mostly as validation. In her view, it shows that the stories people carry from home, and the ingredients they grew up with, can stand on a global stage. It has also given her more confidence to keep experimenting.
She hopes the win changes how people look at African ingredients. In her view, flavours, spices, fruits, grains and fermentation methods from the continent have far more potential than the label “traditional” suggests, and when they are handled with creativity and technique, they can compete anywhere in the world.
What she wants to build next
The win has pushed her to aim higher. She plans to explore more fermentation, try unconventional ingredients and keep making cocktails that people remember long after the last sip. The Boozie Lab remains the home for that work.
Further out, she would like to create her own spirit or beverage brand, one that carries her approach to flavour, storytelling and African ingredients. For now, she says, her focus is on growing and picking up the skills and experience that could help her build something truly unforgettable.
