As the driving force and voice behind the AJABU Cocktail & Spirits Festivala biannual celebration of the African drinks community,Colin Asare-Appiahhas established himself as a leading voice for Africa’s bar culture.

“There were a few paths that led me to the ‘aha!’ moment,” says Asare-Appiah. “I’d always wanted to create a festival on the African continent.” While he’d seen how bar shows in Europe and the U.S. provided “a space and community for people to further their ideas,” he felt Africa hadn’t had the same opportunity. Collaborating with Mark Talbot Holmes, he set out to change that, and AWESOME (the word means “amazing,” or “wondrous” in Swahili) debuted in South Africa in 2024.

Born in Ghana and raised in the U.K., Asare-Appiah worked his way up through the London bar scene in the 1990s and 2000s, cofounding the London Academy of Bartending (LAB) at age 22 and becoming a well-known fixture of the bar landscape in both the U.K. and the United States.Black Mixcellence,a cocktail book featuring recipes by Black bartenders that he coauthored with Tamika Hallcame out in 2022.

Currently living in Brooklyn, Asare-Appiah also works as the trade communications director for the Bacardi USA Brand Portfolio, focusing on educational programming, events, and seminars. AJABU dovetails with his bar education work, and it’s also a natural extension of his personal tagline: “Get involved, bruv” — a catchy social-media slogan, to be sure, but also a call to action.

The 2024 AJABU festival included a tribute to Ghana native and LAB cofounder Douglas Ankrah. While working in Cape Town, Ankrah created the Porn Star Martinithat now-beloved mix of vanilla vodka and passion fruit (plus requisite sidecar of Champagne); the drink was later popularized in London. Ankrah died in 2021 at the age of 51. When, during AJABU, dozens of bartenders featured at Cape Town pop-ups were invited to riff on the drink, it was a way to keep Ankrah present in the ongoing cocktail conversation. “It made sense to honor his name,” says Asare-Appiah.

Indeed, one of Asare-Appiah’s hallmarks is his dogged determination to keep the focus on the people who make drinks, not just the bars and brands.

“The trade is who we really want to empower,” he says, meaning the pros who work behind and around bars. “One of the things we’re acutely aware of with AJABU is the representation of women.” The team has worked closely with pros like Anna Sebastian of Celebrate Hera platform focused on women in the hospitality industry, to ensure “representation of women at all times at the festival,” a measure that extended from Inverroche gin founder Lorna Scott speaking on panels to a duo of women from Kenyan bar Hero slinging drinks at a pop-up for journalists covering the conference. Asare-Appiah adds, “We’ve started conversations with Speed Rack” — the high-speed bartending competition for women that benefits breast cancer research — “to see how we can bring it to AJABU.”

Looking ahead, the plan is to expand “the pan-Africanism” of the conference and to create African hospitality awards that center the continent. “We get celebrated by a lot of external award ceremonies,” says Asare-Appiah. “But it’s about time we tried to create ourownaward ceremonies.”

Africa is one of the biggest continents, yet until now its drinks community has never been afforded the connections and opportunities for growth that festivals like AJABU provide. “America is a third of the size of Africa, and we have cocktail festivals. Europe, every country has its own cocktail festival,” he notes. “It’s time we had in Africa.”