83 Islands Distillery has been making rum in Vanuatu for six years. A tour and tasting (2000VT) will get your holiday drinking off to a good start. Their process starts with fresh sugarcane delivered by farmers on Efate, crushed the day it arrives into a green juice that is about 12% sugar. It’s filtered and a commercial yeast discovered by a scientist in Guadalupe in the 1970s is added. This is done in a series of 2500L fermenters in 2000L batches, as the process creates heat, carbon dioxide and ethanol, so needs a bit of space. When you ferment pure sugarcane juice, it takes 3–4 days, however for rum made with thicker molasses, the process is slower. Fermentation is the process that produces the rum’s flavour.
The liquid then is pumped into a glamorous, 500L German pot still, in four batches each day. You can see though clever portholes, that they are boiling the ethanol to separate it out from the less desirable parts. What pours from the tap at the bottom is 90% alcohol, and tastes—from my knuckle—surprisingly great!
From there, head distiller Pierre-Luc Chabot explained, it’s barrelled, mostly in American bourbon, rye and brandy barrels. Every used barrel still has 30–40L of whatever it was used for in the wood, so it will flavour the rum as well. They’re all charred inside, which chemically changes the wood, helping it to release its caramel and vanilla notes. By opening the pores of the wood by charring, alcohol goes in when the day hears up, and the charred wood also catches some impurities too. The “angel’s share” in warm, humid Vanuatu is about 7% of the volume per year. The lost liquid is replaced by air that oxidises the alcohol and makes new esters adding different flavours. Scotland by comparison would only give away 1–1.5% per year.
In terms of the flavour, the two year old rum (5500VT/750ml) aged in barrels (including some from Woodford Reserve, is wonderfully smooth and easy to drink. Comparing molasses-based and heirloom sugarcane-based white rums (5000VT/750ml), I definitely preferred the vegetative notes and aromas from the Agricole. From the range of liqueurs (their side hustle, along with gins and vodka) the two that stood out were the Pomelello (1800VT/200ml) made from Santo-grown pomelos, and the locally made Gaston chocolate-infused Cacao Nibs infused rum (5000VT/750ml). I’m going to flambé bananas and pour the latter over the top of them with some freshly grated coconut. I’m told it’s also great on vanilla ice cream, so I bought enough to try that too. I suspect swirled it through hot milk might also be a winner, will advise once I am back in the cold...
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