Louisiana Rum - Part 4 - Roulaison Rum Distillery
Louisiana Rum - Part 4 - Roulaison Rum Distillery
This story is the fourth in a series covering today’s Louisiana rum industry and its producers. For an introduction to Louisiana rum and the advantage the state’s distillers have over most other states, see Louisiana Rum - Part 1 - Overview.
Today, we’re looking at the Roulaison Distilling Co. in New Orleans. Located in the city’s Broadmoor neighborhood, the distillery is about two miles from the French Quarter as the crow flies. Roulaison’s owners are Andrew Lohfeld and Patrick Hernandez, who opened its doors in late 2016. Andrew runs the day-to-day operations and oversees all aspects of rum production. The Roulaison name, “rolling” in French, pays homage to the mill rollers that crush sugarcane.
Lohfeld was previously a beer brewer and later a distiller for Kings County Distillery in Brooklyn. A walk through the distillery reveals several items that once resided at Kings County.
It’s hard to miss the microscopic sugarcane field in the parking lot upon arrival at Roulaison. Although it contains nowhere near enough stalks for Roulaison’s needs, the sugarcane provides fresh material for Lohfeld’s cane juice experiments. I took home a piece of freshly cut sugarcane from Roulaison’s parking lot after my first visit, and after planting it in my backyard, I’ve had homegrown sugarcane for two seasons. (Mrs. Wonk is not amused by my idea to repurpose her planters for sugarcane propagation.)
The distillery occupies approximately 2,500 square feet in a single-story building surrounded by other buildings and set back from the street. The only space not used for rum production is the small tasting room through which visitors enter and depart.
Roulaison makes both molasses and cane juice rums. Typically, molasses rum makes up ninety percent of each year’s production; the other ten percent is cane juice rum. As Part One of this series notes, Louisiana’s relatively short sugarcane harvest season leaves only three months a year or so for making cane juice rum.
What makes Roulaison a rarity among American rum distilleries is that Lohfeld favors flavor development during fermentation rather than optimizing how much rum he makes. While many small American rum distilleries use a typical 2- to 5-day fermentation and let the cask aging do the heavy lifting flavor-wise, Roulaison’s molasses fermentation is a minimum of ten days. Thus, it’s not a stretch to see connections between Roulaison and how certain Jamaican distilleries operate.
Roulaison Rum Operations
Roulaison makes both molasses and cane juice rums using different fermentation protocols. Let’s drill down into each separately and then tie it all together.
Molasses Ferment
Lafourche Sugars in Thibodaux, about 47 miles east of New Orleans, supplies Roulaison’s second strike (“Grade B”) molasses with a typical Brix between 80 and 85. Once per season, a tanker truck pulls up to Roulaison and unloads 3,500 gallons of molasses into a large white tank, visible in one of the photos below.
Lohfeld doesn’t pasteurize his molasses to rid it of natural yeasts. Instead, he adds fresh stillage (“dunder”) to it a day before initiating fermentation. According to Lohfeld, adding acidic stillage contributes to native yeast and bacterial growth.
Two yeast strains, a Belgian beer strain and a Brettanomyces strain, are utilized in separate ferments. Both were chosen for their high congener production, and both are POF+, i.e., they create phenolic off-flavors.
Lohfeld’s “short” fermentation is 10- to 12-days, while the “long” fermentation is twice that duration. About a third of each ferment is spent in active fermentation, and the remaining 2/3rd is spent “resting.” Indeed, there are some similarities to Jamaican rum-making at play here. The final wash typically tests at around 7.5% ABV.
Again, the Belgian Beer and Brettanomyces strains aren’t used in the same fermentation batch. Each fermentation uses one or the other. Between the two strains and two fermentation lengths, there are four distinct molasses fermentation protocols, which we’ll return to later.
Cane Juice Ferment
In contrast to the four molasses ferments, Roulaison uses a single cane juice fermentation protocol that evolves over time. Generally speaking, it uses a mix of wild yeast strains endemic to the sugarcane varietals that Roulaison sources. Occasionally, a commercial strain pinch hits as necessary.
The typical cane juice fermentation is slightly shorter, between 8 and 10 days. However, the final wash is a relatively high 10% to 12% ABV.
Distillation & Aging
Roulaison uses a distillation setup that’s somewhat unusual in American craft rum distilleries. Rather than one or two mid-sized stills, it has five electric heated pot stills, each just 26 gallons. Each 90-gallon first distillation, i.e., the stripping run, uses four stills, with the remaining still available for the spirit runs.
Stripping runs yield an intermediate distillate at 30% to 35% ABV, while the final distillate after the spirit run is between 75% and 80% ABV. The saved-up tails from the spirit run are occasionally redistilled to make a batch of “Queen’s Share” rum.
Aging is in various cask sizes from five gallons up to a standard-sized bourbon barrel, with some sourced from Kings County Distillery.
Permutations and Combinations
Considering the different source materials, yeast strains, and distillations, Roulaison makes six regularly produced marks:
10-12 day Belgian beer yeast molasses ferment
10-12 day Brettanomyces yeast molasses ferment
20-24 day Belgian beer yeast molasses ferment
20-24 day Brettanomyces yeast molasses ferment
Wild yeast cane juice ferment
Queens Share
Roulaison Rum Lineup
Currently, Roulaison has three regularly available rums:
Traditional Pot Distilled: approximately a 50/50 mix of the 10- to 12-day fermented Belgian beer and Brettanomyces distillates.
Overproof: a blend of the longer duration Belgian beer and Brettanomyces distillates favoring the Belgian beer, plus a bit of Queen’s Share distillate.
Barrel Aged Reserve: aged in a variety of casks of different sizes and prior uses, e.g., bourbon, rye, brandy, single malt, etc. Each bottle comes from a single final barrel and is labeled with that barrel’s number.
Also of interest is a bottled-in-bond rum, aged for over 5 years and only available at the distillery.