Revisiting Jamaica's Long Pond Rum Distillery
2023 Update
In 2016, I visited Jamaica’s Long Pond rum distillery as part of a WIRSPA-hosted tour of Jamaican distilleries. Such visits were extremely hard to secure then, as the distillery had been shuttered for several years while remediating distillation waste disposal issues. Many photos of Long Pond in Modern Caribbean Rum were taken during this visit. If you’re unfamiliar with the Long Pond distillery and/or its parent company, National Rums of Jamaica, I’ve included an overview at the end of this post.
Much has changed at Lond Pond since 2016. It restarted operations at the end of 2017, but a fire swept through the fermentation building several months later, bringing distillation to a halt again. In 2019, production resumed concurrently with restoration and improvements to the fermentation building. Long Pond and its sister distillery, Clarendon, made the rum for the Monymusk brand.
In November of 2023 Long Pond was my first stop in a Jamaican distillery tour covering five rum-making sites. My primary motive for revisiting Long Pond was collecting up-to-date photos of the distillery as it currently exists. Below, I’ve shared a few of these photos with annotations.
The image at the top of this post shows the upper portion of the distillery structure. The rectangular tower in the middle houses the Blair, Campbell and McLean column still, which distilled the CRV marque until 2009, when the column suffered significant damage. To the left is the substructure where distillation occurs, while fermentation occurs in the substructure to the right.
The 2018 fire gutted the fermentation area, destroying the vats within. Subsequently, the National Rums of Jamaica production team and owners worked with Mexican vat makers to build an extensive set of wooden vats. In the above photo, you’ll see a vat wall with the words Jamaica and Mexico. Long Pond has twelve 10,000 vats dedicated to fermentation, and there’s plenty of space now for more vats to increase production capacity.
Like several other Jamaican distilleries, Long Pond uses a few “secret spice” ingredients — dunder, cane acid, and muck — in its fermentation protocol to create the funk Jamaican rum is famous for. (You can read more about dunder, cane acid, and muck on pp. 82 and 83 of Modern Caribbean Rum, or here and here.)
Adjoining the fermentation vats are several smaller vats for dunder and cane acid. Dunder is what remains in the pot still after fermentation completes. Cane acid can be thought of as raw sugarcane vinegar made by fermenting cane juice with cane stalks. In the first image below, note the cane stalks protruding from the liquid.
While dunder and cane acid aren’t overly exotic, muck is the crown jewel of high-ester rum making; distilleries carefully guard their muck pit and its secrets. Thankfully, the 2018 fire didn’t destroy Long Pond’s muck pit, which resided within the fermentation area. The rebuilt fermentation building was shortened somewhat, leaving the muck pit outside. The muck pit is covered with corrugated metal so that we couldn’t peer down into the bacterial ooze. Having previously experienced the unspeakably foul odor of a muck pit, I found this only slightly disappointing.
The mash ingredients (molasses, dunder, cane acid, and water) come together in a mixing room connecting the fermentation and distillation substructures. The image above peers down into the cane acid tank with the “beer well” to the left.
Distillation at Long Pond is via a battalion of five double retort pot stills arranged in a row. None are new and shiny, and it’s easy to imagine they’ve been churning out rum for decades. Currently, just two at opposite ends of the distilling hall are distilling. The three still in between are in various states of disassembly and repair.
Accompanied by a distiller and photographer, I ascended steps to a metallic grate platform to see the stills up close, as well as some of the other mechanics of the distillation process. Among them is a set of valves that direct the just-condensed distillate into one of three thanks labeled low, high, and rum. When the distillers make distillation cuts, they close the open valve and open another to redirect the liquid to a different tank. If you’ve ever visited a Scotch whisky distillery, this is equivalent to a spirit safe, albeit far less picturesque.
How does the distiller know which tank to direct the distillate to? A large glass tube encircles two smaller tubes partially filled with the liquid coming from the still. A hydrometer bulb floats in one tube, a thermometer in the other. A nearby book of tables converts the two readings into the true alcoholic strength of the liquid, which changes over time. The liquid’s strength informs the distiller which tank — low wines, high wines, or rum — to direct the liquid to.
Distillation uses substantial heat to turn the liquid mash into vapor, and what heats up must eventually cool down. The cooling process can be accelerated by surrounding the vapor-carrying tubing with cool water. However, the cooling water must itself be cooled in an environmentally friendly way — no dumping it into a sewer or the ocean.
Spray ponds are one method distilleries use to release waste heat from cooling water into the atmosphere. The hot water passes through nozzles that spray the water upward into the air. The water’s increased surface area lets it cool rapidly and fall into the reservoir below for subsequent reuse. Spray pond cooling is rarely covered in books and articles about rum, and Long Pond’s spray pond is particularly picturesque, so I’ve included it here.
The remainder of this post contains background information on Lond Pond’s history excerpted from Modern Caribbean Rum. Additional sections on the technical side of Long Pond’s rum making can also be found in the book.
Long Pond Overview
The Long Pond Estate’s heritage in Trelawny parish dates to 1753, around the same time as Hampden Estate. Both were once just one of many sugar estates and rum distilleries dotting Jamaica’s landscape, and both are known for their high ester rums, a Trelawny specialty.
As with Hampden, Long Pond was taken over by the Jamaican government before it was later divested. The Long Pond distillery adjoins the Long Pond sugar factory, although they are separate business entities. The distillery is owned by National Rums of Jamaica; in an odd twist, the Long Pond sugar factory is owned by the Hussey family, who also own the Hampden Estate distillery.
Long Pond’s early days are not well-documented. As early as 1881, it was owned by J.B. Sherriff & Company Limited, Scottish blenders who later owned the Bowmore whisky distillery on Islay. Over the following six decades, Sherriff purchased and consolidated numerous Trelawny estates under the Long Pond umbrella.
Long Pond was one of four distilleries exempted from the normal Jamaican Rum Pool agreement of 1931. A Jamaica Gleaner article provides more detail:
The estate is owned by the Sheriffs, well known to you all as whisky people in Glasgow. They make a rum which is unlike any other now produced in Jamaica. It is somewhere between a Wedderburn and a Continental flavoured rum in ether content and flavour and they use a substantial amount of sugar material in its production. They do not compete with Pool rums, and export it all to Glasgow where all of it is used in their business.
In 1944, Seagram’s launched the Captain Morgan brand with rum sourced from various Trelawny estates. To ensure their rum supply, Seagram’s bought all of Sherriff’s Long Pond holdings in 1953, renaming them Trelawny Estates Ltd. Seagram’s also acquired several nearby estates to grow cane for the enlarged Long Pond Central sugar factory, among them the Vale Royal estate and distillery. That estate’s legacy lives on as Long Pond’s VRW (Vale Royal Wedderburn) marque.
In 1977, the Jamaican government assumed control of Long Pond and later merged it into the National Rums of Jamaica portfolio in 1980.
Between 2012 and 2017, Long Pond could not distill while it implemented a new approach to handling dunder. Disaster struck a year after it restarted, when a cane field fire spread to the distillery and destroyed the fermentation building and all its vats. In 2019, Long Pond relaunched production with limited capacity while a new fermentation structure was built and new vats installed.
As a long-time bulk rum distillery, Long Pond has been well-represented by independent bottlers over the years. In 2021 National Rums of Jamaica created the Long Pond brand and released its first expression, an ITP marque aged for fifteen years in Jamaica.
Hi Matt! You've seen the fermentation tanks with your own eyes. There is one question that bothers me. Do small flies live around the vats? They look like fruit flies or something.
It looks like it is, from want of a better word, agricultural, and almost a DIY distillery. I kind of love it for that!