Category: rum

In 2016 I took a trip organized by WIRSPA (West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers' Association Inc.) and their quality marque system ACR for Authentic Caribbean Rum. As this was a few years ago, this blog post is somewhat of a photo-and-data dump for you to enjoy photos and for me to refer to as notes for the future.

I would start this write-up with "I visited a very special distillery in Jamaica" but I visited 6 of them and they were all very unique and amazing! At this one, however, there was a working sugar refinery.

You might know Worthy Park for their Rum Bar brand, probably the main competitor to the ever-present Wray and Nephew on the island. 

Driving to Worthy Park is quite an experience – there are tons of hills and mountains in Jamaica, and you come over one of them and before you is a giant valley filled with growing sugar cane and the refinery in the middle.

The plantation was planted in 1670 and there used to be 5 sugar factories in the valley, while now there is only one. They have made rum on site since 1741, but not continuously. In 1960 they stopped distilling for a time, only to restart in 2005. They were exporting their rum in bulk until 2007 when they launched the 100% pot distilled Rum Bar brand. 

At Worthy Park they're able to use all of their own molasses from their refinery, and sell some of it to other distilleries. Worthy Park is the mopst efficient cane farm in the country they claim. It takes 9 tons of cane to make 1 ton of sugar here, while less efficient facilities take 11 tons for the same amount. Their cane is harvested both by machine and manually. 

Cane Sugar Production

Sugar cane is burned before hand-harvesting, but machine-harvested cane is not burnt first. 

Sugar cane is washed, shredded and juiced in a 5-stage mill.

The bagasse (solid bits) leftover are used to heat the boilers on-site, right after juice extraction. The leftovers are piled up in huge pile to be used later. 

The sugar cane juice is mixed with lime (assuming they meant calcium, not like.. limes) to assist with clarification. 

It then goes to he evaporator to remove 75% of the water, with the resulting juice at about 62 brix. 

The thick juice is then centrifuged to make crystallized sugar – there is a screen to which the crystals stick and the molasses passes through. 

Rum Production

Over in the distillery, the molasses is pumped underground from the sugar plant. 

The molasses is acid-adjusted before fermentation. They say their molasses has the least amount of residual sugar in it (on the island) because they're sugar production is so efficient. 

Here they don't use dunder in the process at all (though they do add some cane juice in fermentation). The highest ester rum they make is 900 ppm (while Hampden Estate goes all the way up to 1600)

Fermentation takes 2-3 weeks for their highest ester rums. The resulting beer is 8.5 – 9% ABV for light pot still rum, lower for heavier rum. (We learned on this trip that after regular fermentation happens, the additional fermentation actually eats up alcohol and lowers the ABV. So there may be good flavor reasons for long fermentations, but it's bad for yield.)

It is distilled in a Forsyth still- they had just one at the time of my visit. They did not have a column still.

The distillation time is about 1.5 to 1.75 hours in the actual rum extraction, but the total distillation time is 5-6 hours. The rest of the time is making the high and low wines that get redistilled. The rum comes out of the pot stills at 85-87%. 

The stillage at the end of the process is used as fertilizer for the cane fields. 

Most of the barrels they age in are ex-Jack Daniel's.  They have a 4-6% annual angel's share. The rum is diluted to 70% ABV before barrel aging. 

The rum is bottled at the distillery. They do carbon and paper filtration depending on the product. 

More Pictures, Just for Fun

Y'all know I can't resist a warning sign picture. 

In 2016 I took a trip organized by WIRSPA (West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers' Association Inc.) and their quality marque system ACR for Authentic Caribbean Rum. As this was a few years ago, this blog post is somewhat of a photo-and-data dump for you to enjoy photos and for me to refer to as notes for the future. If you'd like to read a detailed narrative write up from the visit, please check out CocktailWonk's blog post. 

Here are some notes, and then some pretty pictures. 

• Hampden Estate dates back to 1753.
• They've obviously been making rum the whole time, but have only been aging rum since 2010. 
• They estimate 60% of the Jamaican rum purchased by Europe doesn't go into actual bottles of rum, but into cosmetics. tobacco, and confectionaries.
• The maximum allowed ester count from Jamaica is 1600 ppm by law. This was established in a law in 1934. (I don't know how they counted esters in 1934.) They say they could get up to about 1700-1800 ppm if they tried. 
• There is a claim that the use of dunder may have begun at Hampden, and everyone copied their method. 
• They have four pot stills on site.
• We learned that what we thought of as "dunder" is actually "muck." Dunder is stillage – waste from the still after distillation. Muck is a combination of cane juice, dunder, cane solids, molasses, and water. A bunch of muck is added to the just-fermented molasses of a new batch and distilled together to create the super-flavorful, high-ester rums. 
• They add 11 parts fermented molasses to 7 parts dunder before distilling. 
• They generally don't need to add yeast to their fermentation – there is a lot of it around the distillery. 
• They ferment for about 2 weeks.
• Their highest ester mark is called D.O.K. that has 1500-1600 ppm esters
• Rum Fire, which is spreading around the US like… a rum fire, has about 500-570 ppm esters, where Hampden Estate Gold has 80-100. 

The fermentation room we visited was the only time I've had to wear a hard hat at a distillery where I really felt happy to be wearing one: The room was full of wooden fermentation vats in a wooden room with wood floors, covered in spider webs, and smelling like a deep level of hell from the muck. I almost threw up it was so powerful (was actually looking for a place to vomit but barely managed to hold it in). It was amazing and the type of old-school rum-making that nobody gets to see.

They embrace the stank and that's what makes their rums so special. We weren't supposed to take any pictures in there but pictures wouldn't do it justice. You'd have had to smell it to believe it. 

In 2016 I took a trip organized by WIRSPA (West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers' Association Inc.) and their quality marque system ACR for Authentic Caribbean Rum. 

At the time, the Long Pond distillery was closed, but our group was soooo nerdy and adorable we were able to convince the owners to let us sneak a peek. The best write-up on this visit comes from CocktailWonk.com, so I encourage you to visit that site for good details. 

Since the time of our sneak peek, the distillery was partially acquired by Maison Ferrand, maker of Plantation Rums. (I'll skip the details of the sale as it would take me a lot of research to figure out the ownership structure.) The distillery caught fire in 2018. It was a big setback, according to the brand, but luckily not a total loss. 

This post is just to show some pictures of a spooky amazing closed distillery. It had only been closed for about five years but with its super old technology and knobs and dials instead of computers, it looked like it had been sitting dormant since about 1964. 

In 2016 I took a trip organized by WIRSPA (West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers' Association Inc.) and their quality marque system ACR for Authentic Caribbean Rum. As this was a few years ago, this blog post is somewhat of a photo-and-data dump for you to enjoy photos and for me to refer to as notes for the future. (I end up searching my own website for information kind of a lot.) 

Two of our stops in Jamaica were with the National Rums of Jamaica Limited. At the time they owned three rum distilleries, with only one of them operating, but since that visit Long Pond was sold. Our first stop was to the old Innswood Distillery, which stopped producing rum about 1993, after opening in 1959 initially. 

At this Innswood location, they age rum in two warehouses but no longer distil. The distillery once belonged to Seagram's and then Diageo. There was an old abandoned still in one of the buildings we peeked into. 

Clarendon

We then drove to the Clarendon Distillery, which is owned by the National Rums of Jamaica and where they produce the Monymusk brand. Monymusk has only been around since 2012. All Monymusk is a blend of pot and column distilled rum. 

Our hosts told us they make more rum marques than most distilleries, about 5-6 column still marques and about 20 pot still marques. 

They receive their molasses from the sugar refinery next door. When it is not in production, they receive it via tanker ships. 

At one point, each sugar refinery had its own distillery. But with consolidation and sales of many sugar facilities to Chinese companies, the sugar producers and rum producers have separate entities. This seems to have great impacts on rum production: the rum distilleries rely on molasses from the sugar refineries (though they can purchase molasses from other countries if need be), and importantly the rum distilleries' waste products are treated and spread on sugar cane fields as fertilizer. So if a distillery doesn't have an active deal with a sugar cane farm, they have nowhere to dispose of their waste, and Jamaican laws seem pretty strict about not just dumping it into the ocean. The lack of waste treatment/management can and has closed distilleries. 

To the molasses, water and nutrients are added to help with good fermentation. Fermentation for their light rums takes 30-36 hours. It's longer for their heavier rums, as that long fermentation allows flavors to build up. They can use the same fermented molasses (molasses beer) for their light marques distilled in pot and column stills, but use a different molasses beer for the heavy pot still rum. They have 24 open-top fermenters.

For the heavy pot still rum, fermentation takes place over 1 month: 2 weeks in wood (during which yeast are propagated) and 2 in stainless steel (with more molasses added).  

The column stills here looked shiny and modern, installed in 2009. The four columns are the wash still, aldehyde and fusel oils, rectifiers (where cuts are made), and methanol column that is only used when they make neutral spirit. The pot stills here are older. They distill for 300 days per year, and have a capacity of 9 million liters of absolute alcohol per year from the column stills alone; another 3 million from their pot stills.  Diageo at the time was purchasing 90% of the rum produced at Clarendon. 

They age their rum at 70% barrel proof. They don't rechar barrels.  At the time of my visit, they had recently started topping up barrels from the same batch. 

The third distillery, Long Pond, was closed at the time of my visit- but we visited that anyway. See the next post.