A Visit to St. Lucia Distillers

Getting to St. Lucia Distillers — best known stateside as the producer of the Chairman’s Reserve and Admiral Rodney rum lines — isn’t easy. St. Lucia is found near the southernmost tip of the West Indies island chain, though it is serviced directly from the U.S. and the UK by a handful of carriers. Our journey from Austin involved a stopover in Atlanta, about 9 hours travel time in total, airport to airport.

From St. Lucia’s international airport, you travel north along the coast and through the mountains, about 1 1/2 hours until you reach the area of Marigot Bay, where St. Lucia Distillers calls home. It’s treacherous driving — on the left side of the road, as St. Lucia is part of the Commonwealth — but with care and the grace of God you may well be able to avoid the many blind hairpin turns, potholes, livestock, and other drivers who seem to treat you like the enemy. Take a breath and enjoy the view of the majestic Pitons along the way.

On a warm spring day we were fortunate to spend the afternoon at St. Lucia Distillers, a guest of CEO Margaret Monplaisir, master distiller Ian John, and master blender Denny Duplessis, who each took a turn telling us the SLD story and walking us through every step of the production of the company’s unique rums.

Like most producers, SLD makes a huge range of products, only a few of which are released stateside. The lion’s share of production goes to various expressions of Bounty Rum, which is clearly the local favorite and what you’re certain to be served if you ask for any rum cocktail at a bar. But while all the company’s rums are made in the same facility, a variety of different equipment and raw materials are used to make it happen, distinguishing one product from the next.

SLD was established in 1971 after two local distilleries merged and formed a new entity. It’s now the only rum producer on the island save for a lone craft distiller which I never encountered during a 10 day visit here. Like most rum producers, SLD (usually) starts with molasses, which is now imported from all over Central and South America. It arrives by tanker, deposited 3500 metric tons at a time into five large holding tanks on the property which are drained until near-empty and another shipment is brought in. SLD takes only 1 or 2 such shipments annually to fuel the production of 1 million liters of rum each year.

In addition to molasses distillate, SLD makes rum from fresh cane juice — just don’t call it agricole. SLD grows its own cane on the property from two different strains, crushing it on site.

Aside from the purchase of molasses, all other operations at SLD are done in-house, including fermentation, distillation, aging, and bottling.

SLD is unique in that it utilizes two separate yeasts to drive different flavor profiles in its washes (one is used mainly for white rums, the other for aged rums) — and they have to be handled separately, fermenting at totally different times. If both yeasts are used in different vats at the same time, the more dominant yeast will eventually migrate into the other tank and kill out SLD’s more floral, delicate yeast strain. Master distiller John says that the yeast is responsible for 99% of the flavor profile of the finished product, so it’s kind of a big deal. He also stresses that the unique environment of St. Lucia contributes an unmistakable character to the rums. It’s not exactly terroir, but rather the character of the distillery itself that imbues the finished spirits with SLD’s unique character. All of SLD’s fermentation batches rest in their tanks for some time before they head on to distillation.

In distillation, again SLD is unique in that it operates four different types of stills, including various pot, column, and hybrid stills, and each type of wash can be distilled in each type of still. The combinations here are seemingly endless: molasses or cane base, yeast A or yeast B, four different stills. Well, not endless, but at least 16 combinations, and that’s before considering that John can pull rum off the column still at varying heights, and then there’s aging, which normally involves bourbon barrels used up to four times each, but can also involve more exotic woods like sherry and Port barrels. (Don’t forget, the angel’s share in these parts is about 7% of a cask’s volume annually.)

Then it’s up to Duplessis to figure out how to blend all of this together. Very few of SLD’s products are single barrel or even single distillate products, but rather a blend of multiple types of rums. Most SLD rums hit the bottle at 5 to 7 years of age, but there are barrels as old as 25 years somewhere amongst the 10,000 barrels aging on the premises.

As a final step, we had the luxury of tasting a wide range of both unaged and aged spirits from Duplessis’s collection, including a selection of cane and molasses rums, both column and pot distillates. The differences among all the fresh distillate was remarkable and informative, and while I don’t have the space here to go into all the nuances among the floral exuberance of a column-distilled molasses rum vs. the grassy punch of pot-distilled cane juice, I will say that Duplessis clearly has his work cut out for him when it comes to keeping the brand identity of dozens of products intact.

Public tours are readily available at St. Lucia Distillers. Just dress for some heat and give yourself plenty of time to navigate the roads so you get there intact.

St. Lucia Distillers
XX3G+G2G, Roseau, St. Lucia
stluciadistillers.com

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