25/11/2025
Fun fact about Borassus Flabellifer
lontar palm, wine palm, or ice apple, is native to South Asia and Southeast Asia. This tree can grow upto 30 meter high.
In Flores Island, lontar tree commonly spotted in the area near to the coast (100-500 meter above sea level). This tree has its female and male that you can see the major difference from their fruits even though the flowers can give you a distinctive type. a male lontar tree has a brown stick-like fruit meanwhile, a female lontar tree has a black skin ball fruit like a young coconut fruit.
One of the farming activities that is done by some people in Flores is tapping a liquid out of the male lontar tree which has sweet taste and juicy. The liquid is collected through the buckets hung on the branches and then when it's full, they will put it into a tank size of 50 liters for fermentation process.
The fermentation takes 24 hours-1 week without additional ingredients put into the juice, just natural. The sweet taste will naturally change to bitter and alcoholic to become less than 20%. The next process is to level it up by cooking or commonly mentioned as distillation.
In Aimere, a small town near Sawu Sea, located in the border of East Manggarai and Ngada Regency, most people rely on tapping the liquid out of lontar tree. During the distillation process, they immediately distill the fermented liquid to make the presentage of the alcoholic higher and they repeat the process over and over until they reach a maximum of 50% of alcoholic.
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