palm wine

plural palm wines · alternative palm-wine

1. countableuncountableAny alcoholic drink produced from the sap of palm trees; toddy.

   Their food is rice, fish, and pisang, and their drink water; though they likewise have sagwire, or palm wine.

   1815, Walter Hamilton, The East India Gazetteer, London: John Murray, page 260, column 2

   2 more examples

   One of the few luxuries of Matabello is the palm wine; which is the fermented sap from the flower stains of the cocoa-net. It is really a very mice drink, more like cyder than beer, though quite as intoxicating as the latter.

   1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 102

   In Amboyna a man can keep himself and his family on next to no work at all; may dress decently, in the universal sarong and coat that both sexes wear; may eat of the best, drink sweet, intoxicating sagoweer or palm wine to his fullest desire (since he is Christian, not Mohammedan), may loaf, dance, and gossip half the day, eat a quarter of the day, and work perhaps an eighth.

   1914 March 7, The Sydney Morning Herald, page 5, column 5

   Synonyms: sagueir, sagwire, sagoweer

2. uncountableentertainmentA genre of popular music most closely associated with mid-20th-century Sierra Leone.

   Synonyms: palm wine guitar