Hawaiian Rum Travels - Part 1

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MK: Steve Jefferson (SJ) is a lifelong adventurer and entrepreneur who thinks, moves and talks at a dizzying pace. He studied Creative Writing at the University of California at Santa Barbara, rode a motorcycle with his soon-to-be wife through forty states, got married and sailed from San Francisco to Mexico to Hawaii on a 38-foot sailboat and then started a construction company.  I asked him how Kuleana came about.

SJ: At the time, we had little kids and the housing market looked like it was going to peak around 2006, 2007. We sold the last two houses we built and bought a catamaran. We decided we were going to cruise around the Caribbean with our one and three-year-olds while the housing market cooled off. We didn’t want to be stuck here. We are cruising around and one day we go to Martinique and taste some Rhum Agricole. We were blown away. ‘What is this stuff? Where has this been our whole life?’ They go, ‘yea it’s made from fresh sugarcane juice.’ We ask ‘why don’t we have any of this in the US?’  ‘Well, you guys can’t really grow sugarcane. Second of all, you guys add sugar, flavors and coloring and stuff. We take it and sell it in France and all over Europe instead.’ The whole time we are on Martinique, we are thinking this is just like Hawaii. Plants are like Hawaii. People are like Hawaii. Latitudes are very similar. Both had histories that were tied to sugarcane. Both even had volcanoes. The analogies were just obvious. I looked at my wife and said we have to move back to Hawaii and start a rum factory.

MK: I can’t imagine there are a lot of wives in the world whose husband tells her ‘Honey, we are going to build a rum distillery’ and they would be okay with it.

SJ: Well, she hears this weird stuff from me all the time. For her, it was yea, just throw it on the list. At the same time, we are sailing around looking for land to build a bed and breakfast. But for some reason, the rum thing totally stuck. We came back here and started learning how to make rum, playing around with a still with our original partners, Chris and Lora Schlarb’. We started by trying to replicate sugarcane juice by mixing some molasses in water, and some brown sugar and some white sugar and we came up with this recipe for what we thought tasted like sugarcane juice. Then we learned about this guy Noa Lincoln (pictured above), who was working on his PhD on the Hawaiian Field System and he has discovered all these heirloom varieties of sugarcane. We are like what? He goes ‘yea, there are 35 varieties of Hawaiian heirloom sugarcane.’ He is a soil scientist and he took DNA of all the plants and realized that all forty varieties of the sugarcane had the same DNA. He pieced it all together and got a PhD from Stanford for figuring this out. When the original voyaging canoes showed up here a thousand years ago, sugarcane was one of about twenty-five plants they brought with them.

NOTE: The Kuleana logo is a drawing of that ancient voyaging canoe.

SJ: They had some really good ideas and this great culture and they land on the island. Are they Hawaiian that night? No, they are Tahitian; they showed up from Tahiti. They are probably excited to be here because they don’t know where here is. They take their plants out of their boat and put them in the ground. They have done this throughout the entire Pacific. Hawaii was the very last archipelago that they settled. For 3,000 years they have been sailing around, settling all these islands with their plants and their culture. They are good at it. They don’t have compasses to guide them; they do this by watching the ocean and the stars. They show up and take their past with them and they put it in the ground and this is their future. That’s literally putting their culture in the ground. That’s a definition of culture. That is what they need to be a people and those are their rules and that is how they do things. They have committed to this place. That’s the moment they became Hawaiian. From those two or three cane plants they brought with them, they developed these 35 varieties. As things mutate, they would say that’s cool and they would put it in the ground. Oh, that one is purple, that one has blue stripes, etc. They did this for 100’s of years, probably about 800 or 900 years. This was hundreds of years before a single Pacific cane was brought to the Caribbean. 

For us, this was the best story ever. We were going to make rum Agricole and we just stumbled across these heirloom varieties of sugarcane. This is awesome. We go to this little botanical garden where Noa had dropped off his plants and got cuttings from everything and literally grew them in pots in our yard for 6 months. Then we leased a two-acre plot and planted that out and started making rum. We used cuttings from that plot to start the farm you see today.

MK: The Kuleana farm consists of a crushing facility and sectioned plots, each growing a different variety of sugarcane. Steve explains that the array of solar panels nearby generates energy to run the well pump that irrigates the field every day. The farm is located at the North tip of the island and the wind off the Pacific is intense, which explains why there is a wind farm next door. I ask Steve about the wind farm and use of renewable energy.

SJ: The energy just goes back in the grid. It is illegal to transport any energy across the property. Even though they are making all this power, we can’t use any of it. The cool thing I thought about is that we are here taking care of these plants, mowing and weeding and whatever, and I realize it is the job of every plant to convert sunlight into sugar. Every plant on Earth does the same thing. They are all just making sugar. As my kids will attest to, every life form on the planet needs sugar to live. That’s our source of energy. So, these plants are just solar panels that are converting this radiation energy from the sun into sugar. 

MK: So, you have a field of solar panels?

SJ: Exactly.  

As you walk through the property, you see cane plants in all different stages of growth. We pass one section that was cut just days ago. Those stalks were crushed here at the farm, the juice was extracted and it is now fermenting at the distillery. Harvested plants will regrow new stalks and can be harvested several times. New plants are grown from cuttings, not from seed. Cane stalks are cut into four-to-six-inch sections, making sure that each cutting has several nodes on it. Then they are placed horizontally in the soil. Plantation cane growers would simply dig a ditch and bury whole cane stalks and new plants would grow.

MK: How long does it does it take to grow sugarcane?

SJ: Its roughly a year from when you cut them until they grow back. It’s about eighteen to twenty-four months when you plant them.Once the cane is ready, they are cut by hand or by mechanical harvester, depending on the size and accessibility of the plot.  We cut the cane and bring it over and load it on the conveyor belt. The conveyor belt dumps it into the first box that shreds it and turns it into pieces without the leaves. Then that goes up to the second box and comes down into the three-mill crusher, where it squeezes all that juicy pulp and then the fresh juice comes out. The bagasse comes out at the bottom and we will often re-run it because it still has some juice in it.

Now the race is on. The goal is to take the 1000-liter tote of fresh sugarcane juice eighteen miles down the coast to the distillery in Waimea before the natural sugarcane yeasts  and bacteria start fermenting the juice. 

SJ: Fresh sugarcane juice is the undisputed, elixir of life.  Because of this, wild yeast and all bacteria want to ferment this stuff. The second it gets turned into juice, biological warfare between any number of microorganisms immediately begins. It’s really difficult to have your particular yeast be the winner.  The secret to being an Agricole rum maker is being able to treat the sugarcane juice properly. Agricoles vary in quality because the handling of the juice is done differently depending on who is making it.

MK: How do you get your yeast to win?

SJ: We thought that was going to be a piece of cake. What we didn’t realize is that every other microbe on the planet also wants to eat it. One day it would look beautiful and then a couple of days later we would have fermenters blow up. The top blew off and we would come in the next morning and there would be this industrial grade lubricant on the floor. It was so slippery; we could have had an ice-skating rink. Bacteria got hold and bacteria propagates ten times faster than yeast and it totally crowded out the yeast into this wild-ass bacteria creation that made slime. We are like how are we going to do this? Every other distillery pasteurizes their wash to kill all the microbes before they pitch in their yeast. They get to start with this totally sterile thing and then they add their yeast and it’s a piece of cake. That’s the difficulty of making rum Agricole. You are making it from fresh juice and it’s got to be flawless. That’s super tricky. So, we hired Giles from Martinique to come over.

That is when Steve brought in Giles Cognier, a former Master Distiller at Distillerie La Mauny and Trois Rivières. Giles had spent thirty years making world class, award winning Rhum Agricoles on Martinique before becoming an independent consultant. With his experience, he was able to work with the Kuleana staff to refine their techniques, resulting in reliable and quality fermentations. 

MK: The next stop on my tour is the distillery. We make the twenty five-minute drive down the coast to a small industrial park. In a former food warehouse, Kuleana has their office, bottling plant, aging facility and distillery. The food cooler from the previous tenant has been converted into their office/conference room. 

SJ: Yea, we just took a bunch of Sawzalls and turned it into our office space. Cool, huh?

The building is divided in half, with the office, storage and shipping on one side and the distillery on the other. On our way to the stills in the back corner, we pass three 1,000-liter, temperature-controlled Letina fermenters. One is bubbling away with cane juice that was just squeezed three days ago. Once fermentation is finished and the wash has reached an ABV of 8 to 9%, it is moved to the still.

Up to this point, Kuleana has been distilling on a 600-liter copper Alembic still from Iberian Copper in Portugal. It looks very similar to the still I saw at Montanya Distillers in Crested Butte, Colorado several years ago. It might not have the brick base, but the shape definitely reminds me of a cognac still.

MK: What made you decide on this type of still?

SJ: Well, what I did was research distillation and realized this was the method we wanted to use. I had seen some stills that were similar and then I just started calling manufacturers. This one was hand built in Portugal for us. I was a little nervous. They tell you how much and I am like what if I give you half now and half when you ship it? And they are like ‘do whatever you want and when you give us all the money we will get started.’ So, we basically just wired them the money. This is when we were starting out and every dollar was so dear.

Next to the still is a table covered with collection jars that are used to make the cuts.

SJ: These are the last cuts here. We started at 73% ABV and ended at 46.7%. At some point we are going to save what we call good seconds. Here, the distiller is earmarking these as hearts. He does his thing and he says these are hearts, hearts, good hearts, good seconds, good seconds, good seconds. That is cognac vernacular. In the rest of the distilling world, these would all be hearts, but the cognac people have this concept of good seconds where it is still as tasty as hearts but it has more of those fatty acids, longer fatty acid chains that do marvelous things in barrels. They break apart, make more flavor, give it more mouth feel and stuff like that. When you mix it with the lighter rums, it’s crazy. It’s like adding butter. You get all this fatty delicious crazy flavors. You don’t need a ton of it. For our white rum, it is all the hearts plus a certain number of good seconds and we blend it every time and score it against our reference rum to make sure it’s as close to exact as possible. Then we take the rest and use them in our aging program. 

Across from this still, Kuleana has installed a new 2,000-liter hybrid still from Revival Stillworks in British Columbia. Staff members from both Kuleana and Revival will be on hand this month for the initial startup. It is obvious that Steve is eager to fire it up.

SJ: Each one of their stills is completely custom made. We told them exactly what we wanted. I am sure there are things that are standard for Revival and that they do well, but this one was specifically designed for a bunch of stuff that we wanted. We have a beer pot four times as big, so it is more efficient. It’s a pot still, so we can do the cuts, which is important. We have one, two, three, four, five plates that we can use to make adjustments. The lentil on the other still is water cooled, which is really hard to adjust. We literally have to run over to the sink and adjust the faucet. ‘How’s that?’, adjust some more, ‘how’s that?’ Now we have five plates that we can open or close to control that. We have already set our distillation curve, it’s what ABV runs out and how long it runs at a certain ABV and when it drops off. We already know what our flavor curve looks like. What we will do is just run it and mess around with it to get that curve. If the ABV is really high, we just open it up. If the ABV is too low, we close it down.

The next partner to join the Kuleana team was David Perkins. Perkins started the High West Distillery in Park City, Utah in 2006. He won numerous awards for his whiskies which he created in Utah by blending sourced spirits from various large distilleries with whiskey that he made.

SJ: David Perkins heard what we were doing and he came over. We are like super embarrassed you know, like Frank Sinatra is listening to you sing in your shower. In our business plan, we said we were going to do with rum what High West did with whiskey. One of the early investors in High West saw this pitch and said ‘I am going to talk to the High West guy’ because he knows him.  Then David flies over and scrutinizes us and then he joins us. ‘Yea, these guys are onto something good.’ So, David joins and he gets a bunch of High West investors to join. Now he helps with the blending program, which is his genius. His palette is shocking. You can put forty rums together, two years apart, and you put one stinker in there and he will identify it the same way he did two years ago. The exact same way, same remarks, same criticisms.  

MK: Years ago, at a rum seminar, I heard a speaker sum up the art of blending with the old adage “the whole should be greater than the sum of the parts.” I mention this to Steve.

SJ: Yes, exactly. That’s exactly what our HuiHui means. HuiHui is our light cocktail rum blend. Hui in Hawaiian means a group of things. HuiHui means a group of things that is better because they are together and not by themselves. You are exactly right. HuiHui is one of the highest rated rums in the world, by BTI, Beverage Tasting Institute. We start with a 94% ABV rum that we get from Papua New Guinea. We are the only ones who get rum from there. At first, they didn’t even know how to ship it to us. They are like, ‘what?’  But we tried it and it was amazing. It’s a really clean, delicious light rum and Papua New Guinea is where sugarcane started on Earth, so it is a great story. We get rum from them and add our Hawaiian Agricole to give it flavor. Then we get a little Rhum Agricole from Martinique because Martinique has this great Agricole. It’s a little bit more peppery; it has this spiciness. Our Agricole is more juicy, fruity and they have this peppery stuff and it just makes this beautiful cocktail rum. 

For our Hawaiian Rum Agricole, we wanted an exceptionally flavorful rum, perfect for sipping neat or in world-class cocktails. We make it from the fresh juice of the estate-grown Hawaiian heirloom sugarcane that you saw on our farm. The sugarcane juice is fermented using a special yeast and distilled in that handmade copper pot still to 60-74% ABV. This slow, careful process makes delicious and flavorful rum that showcases the magnificence of the kō (sugarcane).  

Wine Enthusiast called Kuleana’s Agricole a “Top 100 Spirit”. Beverage Tasting Institute described it as “a fresh and fruity Fresh Cane Juice Rum with great balance and length.”

SJ: Nanea means ‘of absorbing interest, fascinating, enjoyable.’ It especially means ‘to have a good time.’ We wanted a beautiful aged cocktail rum, a rum that shows people what an aged rum is supposed to taste like, a rum without artificial colors, flavors or sugars. We wanted a rum that you can make Old Fashions with or whatever cocktail or sip it, because it is so delicious. We chose for its base a beautiful molasses-based rum from Guatemala, distilled to 90-94% ABV and aged in Bourbon barrels for two years. To build its depth and flavor, we blended in our own super-flavorful, aged Hawaiian Rum Agricole, made from fresh sugarcane juice. We also add a rich, molasses-based rum from Venezuela distilled to 85% ABV and aged 2 to 8 years in ex-Bourbon barrels. To increase Nanea’s dynamic range and make it sing, we then add two molasses-based rums, a 3-year-old from Trinidad and a 5-year-old from El Salvador.

Hōkūlei is the name of a constellation of stars forming a lei, which marks the middle of the night sky. We wanted to come up with a spirit that shows people that rum can be as good or better than any spirit they have ever had. So that’s huge. Let’s go straight for the top. You are thinking of Pappy or Stag or Extra Añejo Tequilas, these great big sipping monsters. We created a base with four molasses rums from Panama, Nicaragua, Barbados, and Venezuela. Each was distilled to 85%-94% ABV and aged 2-3 years, 3-8 years, 5-8 years, and 8 years, respectively. Then we added layers of depth and flavor by blending in our very own aged Hawaiian Rum Agricole and a 15-year aged rum made from molasses in Barbados, distilled to 90%-94% ABV. To put Hōkūlei in the upper echelon of spirits, we then add complexity and intrigue with a molasses-based rum from Trinidad, distilled to 90%-94% ABV and aged 18 years.

In addition to the four core products above, Kuleana does Special Releases and Barrel Finished Releases. While sourcing rums for their blends, Kuleana will occasionally come across very special rums that are only available in volumes that are too small to be used in a blend. Recently they happened upon a weathered and dusty barrel of Jamaican rum that had been sitting for more than 11 years. The liquid inside was stunningly beautiful, a Jamaican funky hogo transformed over a decade into a super-sipper. They bought the barrel, filled 188 bottles and Jamaica 11 became their first Special Release. Their Barrel Finished Releases have included a Cognac barrel-aged Nanea and upcoming barrel-aged versions of their Hawaiian Rum Agricole.

The night before my tour of the distillery, my wife, daughter and I had a great sushi dinner at Sansei in the Queens’ Marketplace in Waikoloa. Coincidently (or not) the restaurant was next door to the Kuleana Rum Shack, a 3,000 square foot restaurant, bar and rum tasting center. I convinced the family that we should have some drinks and Malasadas for dessert. The Malasadas (Hawaiian donuts) came with three dipping sauces: lilikoi curd, haupia coconut cream and bananas foster, each made with a different Kuleana rum. To go with the sweets, we had Rum Old Fashions and the obligatory Mai Tais. The place was fun, the food was good, the drinks were great and the service was amazing. Our waiter, Cameron was attentive and knowledgeable. He was enthusiastic, but not over the top.

MK: We had a great time last night at the Rum Shack. If we have brewpubs, I see no reason we can’t have rumpubs. What were your goals is creating the Rum Shack?

SJ: Our intentions for the Rum Shack are three-fold. One, we definitely wanted to cast a really wide fishing net for people that have no idea that they are coming into a rum place to learn about a rum distillery. They just heard that the food is great, even better that the cocktails are good, and they decide to come in and enjoy themselves. That’s number one, great marketing. If we can break even with that, great, we are winning. Two, we wanted to show how dynamic and comprehensive rum can be. We make Rum Old Fashions. We make all kinds of stuff with rum that people would normally use another spirit. We expect people to poo-poo it and they try it and wow, that’s really good. Then you tell them that not only was that Old Fashion made with rum, but with one third white rum and two thirds aged rum. We use a split base, one third HuiHui and two thirds Nanea. It tastes great. People are like what? We want that moment. We just want people to love cocktails, because if they like cocktails, they will realize how great rum is. Three, we wanted it to be a test bed for all the other cocktail programs on the island, to show that you can do that with rum and maybe even like it more. If you want your Negroni to be more interesting, put in rum. Put in a split base of rum. We do a martini with not only rum, but rum Agricole, which is arguably the most favorable spirit on the market. We have the Agricole martinis and it’s like, I didn’t know you could do that. We want to build ambassadors, that go home and tell their friends. That is better than trying to buy a billboard in New Jersey to get a bartender or store to carry our rum. We want to get people to say ‘I went to Hawaii and tried this amazing stuff and did you know that you can make an Old Fashion with rum?’ At the end of the day, we are developing content to make all the other cocktail programs, whether they are on Hawaii or anywhere else, better. We want to give them something so that their program is better than it was before. If we do that, we have succeeded. My goal is to turn people into ambassadors. I want people to go and say did you know you could do this?  

Steve and company are in the process of designing a new distillery-visitor center at the cane farm. This will allow Kuleana to truly go from dirt to glass on the same property. They are currently working with celebrated architect Greg Warner, whose previous projects include the Quintessa Winery in Napa Valley. In addition to being a modern Agricole distillery, the new facility will offer visitors a premium rum tasting experience and a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean and the island of Maui. 

Steve is third generation, but still not considered a native. But there is a word, kamaʻāina, which means of the land, which means you were born there. Native or not, Steve is passionate about Hawaiian culture, Hawaiian values and incorporating those in his business. 

SJ: The word Kuleana, that’s our name. If you look in the dictionary, it means responsibility. But it doesn’t just mean responsibility, that’s just a Western translation. We only have thirteen letters in the Hawaiian alphabet, five of them are vowels and eight are consonants. The bottom line is that many Hawaiian words are values, they are concepts, not just words. Kuleana is the rights and the privileges you get if you are willing to be responsible. Everything in the Hawaiian culture has an associated Kuleana that comes with it. Everything that has value to society has Kuleana. My thoughts were, let’s build a company that can compete against any other company in the world as far as value, capital in vs profit out and have a product that people already know and want. A) Let’s do it better than anyone else. Let’s make this world class rum that’s just unbelievably delicious. That’s the big thing. When people try our rum, they are like what? We don’t put flavors, colors or sugar in anything we do. They are like I didn’t know rum could be as good as Scotch, or as good Gran Anejo Tequila. B) Let’s make it from an Agricole program that is totally done in house. We go all the way from dirt to Mai Tais. We control every single part of that process. We do absolutely everything you can do. Then we have this blending program to create these businesses so scalable that we can compete against any other entity and we can do it using Hawaiian values and Hawaiian ways of doing things You saw the farm, that’s a nice place to be. There is nothing nasty happening there, it’s beautiful. We are taking Hawaiian land and growing Hawaiian crops that Hawaiians invented and we are growing them on that land so that people can enjoy them and learn how the canoes showed up a thousand years ago, using celestial navigation. The Europeans were in the Dark ages, clubbing each other in the head and dying of cholera and these Hawaiians were setting up these amazing civilizations. We can share all that and allow it continue and make room for it so that it can actually thrive now. Fifty years ago, people didn’t want sugarcane to thrive; it was kind of a bummer, it was a necessary evil. Now it’s yea, what do we need to do to grow more of this? Because of the high value added, people can actually make a lot of money. We are working with other farmers now. They can get ten to fifteen thousand dollars an acre by growing their crops on their land, with their people and their way and then sell it to us. They are making money. You have ten acres; you can make a hundred and fifty grand a year. That’s a nice job. If we can do that, and let Hawaii be more Hawaii, and let the visitors come here and see more Hawaii than they ever did before and get a product that is Hawaii in a bottle, that’s just good for everybody.

At this point, I reluctantly say goodbye to Steve and drive twenty minutes South to the Queens’ Marketplace where I am scheduled to attend a rum tasting and Mai Tai Class with Chelsea Yagong, the Manager of Hospitality at the Kuleana Rum Shack. Two of the walls of the Rum Shack are lined with large garage doors that roll up and give the restaurant a tropical, open-air atmosphere. The Rum Shack is not open yet, but people are bustling about getting the restaurant ready for that evening. There are eight of us at the table, Chelsea, myself, three employees and a couple and their adult son, who are on vacation and heard about the class. On the table in front of us are a significant collection of glasses, cocktail shakers, jiggers, Mai Tai ingredients and, of course, Kuleana rums. Chelsea starts the class with a history of sugarcane on the island and what makes Agricole rum different. She moves on to the Kuleana story and their corporate philosophy. Her talk is fun and entertaining, filled with funny stories and engaging questions. Then she fills our glasses and the tasting begins. As she takes us through the four rums, she offers tips on how to seek out aromas and flavors. She doesn’t use pretentious tasting verbiage, but rather reaches back into her family history, recalling spices in her grandmother’s kitchen, smells from her childhood home. I see the heads of the couple across from me nodding their agreement with her descriptions. As the warm finish of the Hokulei lingers in our mouth, we begin to make Mai Tais. We start with the rums, 1-1/2 ounces of the white HuiHui and 1 ounce of the aged Nanea. Then we add ¾ ounce fresh lime juice, ½ ounce Orgeat and ¼ ounce orange liqueur. A couple dashes of Bitters and it’s time to shake. The Mai Tai is pretty darn good, if I say so myself. At this point I realize that Chelsea has been entertaining and educating us for over an hour. Time has flown by. I remember Steve’s goals for the Rum Shack: we had good drinks, we had fun, we discovered new rums and we are probably going to go home and share our experiences. The night before, when we were having drinks at the Rum Shack, I remember seeing a lot of diners walking out with bottles of Kuleana rum in their hands. At the tasting, the couple across from me buys several bottles and I walk out with a bottle of Hokulei. Great marketing, indeed.

My family’s time on the Big Island has come to a close and now we head to Oahu, where coincidentally (or not) there is another rum distillery to visit. 

I would like to offer my thanks to Chelsea Yagong for an enjoyable class, to Jeanne Lewis for her help with photographs and a special thanks to Steve Jefferson for spending so much time with me and answering all my nerdy rum questions.

Mike Kunetka