Rum Historian by Marco Pierini
HISTORY OF CUBAN RUM
9. INGENIOS AND THE CONTINUOUS STILL
The first decades of the 1800s were a period of enormous scientific and technological progress in sugar making and in distillation, progress that came first from France.
Regarding sugar making, this is the period when beet sugar arrived on the European markets. Actually, the potential of beet regarding sugar production was already well known to European chemists, but until then nobody had taken particular notice. Napoleon was the first to invest a lot of resources in the development of beet sugar as an economic weapon against his great enemy, Great Britain. During the Empire, a large sugar beet industry was operating in France. Immediately after the defeat of Napoleon and the return of a Bourbon king on the throne of France, the new industry floundered, but with the help of new technological developments and of the State, it quickly returned to prosperity and by 1835 some four hundred factories were producing nearly 80,000,000 pounds of beet sugar, more or less a third of global French consumption. Soon, all over Europe many governments followed the example of France, supporting the cultivation of sugar beet and the production and consumption of beet sugar. For the first time, Europeans could consume sugar in abundance and at reasonable prices, without the necessity of expensive import costs from distant colonies. As early as 1840 beet sugar surpassed cane sugar in the French and German markets. (See my article “NAPOLEON, SUGAR BEET AND RUM” in the October 2019 issue).
The French sugar planters of Martinique and Guadeloupe risked ruin and the French government supported them with large loans to develop new sugar plantations and by granting them a monopoly on the French cane sugar market. The production increased, but cane sugar could no longer compete in quality and price with beet sugar, for the producers of beet sugar had the advantage of lower costs, as well as more advanced technology. “The situation began to shift in 1841, when Paul Daubrée, a French industrialist, proposed to the colonists of Guadeloupe and Martinique that they follow the example of the beet sugar producers by separating farm work from industrial work. According to Daubrée, this could be accomplished by building totally mechanized Usines Centrales (Central Factories) to process large quantities of sugarcane cultivated simultaneously on several plantations.” (F. Moya Pons “History of the Caribbean”) The first steam-powered central factories capable of grinding great quantities of sugarcane from ten or twelve planters, greatly reducing costs, were built in the French Caribbean between 1844 and 1848; cane sugar was now competitive with beet sugar again.
The Cuban Sugar Barons adopted very quickly the new mechanized manufacturing processes in their large plantations, called Ingenios, as indeed they did with other modern innovations such as steam, railways, etc. but without separating farm work from industrial work, and around 1850 Cuba became one of the biggest producers of sugar in the world. It is important to remember that this sugar boom happened as part of an impressive economic and demographic growth (See the article “SUGAR, RACE AND GROWTH” in the December 2022 issue).
Regarding alcoholic distillation, this is the period when the Column Still arrived. I think it is useful to read again the fundamental, and so far unrivaled, R.J.Forbes’ “Short History of the Art of Distillation”. “For here the French technologists were supreme in the early nineteenth century, they were the men ‘distilled out of our virtues’ who led in the art. … the genius of the French distillers of the first two decades of the nineteenth century started an avalanche of patents of new distilling systems and apparatus … The pioneer of the new still was Eduard Adam … his new distilling apparatus ‘to prepare alcohol in one operation’ for which he got a patent on May 29th 1801 …So Adam, Solimani, Barre and Brunere had introduced the idea of running the first condensate counter-current to the vapors and thus enriching it to produce the desired strength of the alcohol in one run. …The final step of using the principles introduced by Adam etc. to build a distilling column was taken by Jean Baptiste Cellier Blumenthal.” The apparatus was designed for continuous operation and he may be truly regarded as the inventor of the modern fractionating column. Cellier introduced the idea of a continuous stream of wine entering the preheater and a continuous stream of spent residue leaving the still. A few years later, also the English inventors were drawn to the problem and the crown of their efforts was Aeneas Coffey’s continuous still, patented in 1830. “The Coffey still was an immediate success. … They easily gave 80% alcohol in one operation and therefore worked very cheaply as compared with the continental stills.”
Now, for the sake of clarity, about what exactly a Column Still was (and is) and how exactly it differs from the traditional Pot Still, let’s read what Richard Seale wrote some years ago on his personal FB page, later published in one single article - “Aeneas Coffey, John Dore and Foursquare” - on RUM DIARIES BLOG, February 9, 2021.
“The dichotomy is not pot still v column still but batch still v continuous still. All still designs fall into one of the latter two categories. The addition of fractionation or enhanced rectification to a batch still is still a batch still. The simple batch still relies solely on the lyne arm for rectification. Enhancing this effect does not change the fundamental nature of the still. … A batch still will produce a changing output over time (colloquially the heads, then hearts, then tails) from a single charge (batch) that itself changes as it is distilled. A continuous still produces an unchanged output that varies by position (not by time) on an unchanging charge that is fed continuously. Heads, hearts, tails are drawn off simultaneously from different positions. This is the fundamental distinction between the two processes which also explains why the two can never make the identical spirit. …Early column shaped stills (e.g. the columnar Pistorius still) should not be confused with a column or continuous still, it was a batch still and the Savalle or Cellier Blumental stills are not fitted with “a pot still” just because they had a pot shaped base/kettle – there were in fact continuous (or column) stills.”
It is important to underline yet again that when the new column stills began to be used, rum production and exportation in Cuba was already huge. In 1820, José Agustín Govantes had written: “The prohibition to export molasses or the duties imposed on it, have enriched us with stills that produce 30.000 pipas a year. The prohibition or the duties imposed on foreign rums have naturalized this branch of industry and not only satisfyed our needs, but we also export rum abroad and in Spain too.” (Leonardo Padura “La larga vida secreta de una fórmula secreta”, 1988).
But, when did they arrive in Cuba? I found in the Spanish archives some 1826 and 1827 patent applications regarding continuous stills, as we will see in the next article. And we already know that in 1832 the “Handbook for Distillers” stated: “The old ones are the most common; there are several distilleries that have continuous distillation.” So, in 1832 at the latest, we are sure that some continuous stills were already operating in Cuba.
According to the great work of Manuel Moreno Fraginals “El Ingenio. Complejo económico-social cubano del azúcar”, published in 1978 (in my opinion an essential reading if we are to understand XIX century’s Cuba), around 1840 some great distilleries began to be founded in Havana, Matanzas and Cárdenas. They were no longer within the sugar plantations as an ancillary activity, but they were built in the towns as a real, independent industry. And export grew. “Cuban rum exports, in 1854, accelerated at a remarkable pace. There were a few reasons. That year, Britain opened its ports to foreign produce and commodities, including rum. Western Europe was in the throes of the oïdium blight … Cuba exported nearly three million gallons per year. Six years later, Britain equalized foreign rum import duties, placing Cuban rum producers on a par with their British Caribbean competitors.” (A.Miller and J.Brown with D.Broom and N. Strangeway “CUBA. The Legend of Rum”, 2009)
The Cuban rum industry became of primary importance in the economy of the island, so much so that when in 1855 Leopoldo García Ruíz published the “Manual de la fabricación del aguardiente de caña” he stated that its objective was “to improve one of the most important industries” and then added that the Adam apparatus “is commonly used in this County”.
Los Ingenios
Two years later, in 1857, Justo G. Cantero published “LOS INGENIOS Colleccion de Vistas de los Principales Ingenios de Azucar de la isla de Cuba” The book is considered one of the best Cuban publications of the XIX century thanks to the numerous, beautiful lithographs by Eduardo Laplante, which constitute also a mine of images of the Cuba of the time. In the Introduction, Cantero wrote: “Rum distillation has also prospered and it has begun to be made properly: everybody is already familiar with the most advanced methods, the French, English, Belgian stills & co., as well as Blumenthal, Sanguier y Coffeg [Coffey?], Derosne, Egrot, Shear & son &c, &c distillation apparatuses. We have recently received the work which was published in Paris: Duplais, Traité des liqueurs et de la distillation del alcools which we would like to get translated. The apparatus I have used is Shear and son from London and it has given me wonderful results, producing a gallon of rum every gallon of molasses, which is the best you could wish for … Over the last few years, a considerable number of stills have been installed, some of which capable of producing fifteen to twenty pipas a day, which means from 1695 to 2260 gallons.”
Towards the end of this period, Jacobo de la Pezuela in his “Diccionario de la Isla de Cuba” published in 1863-1866, wrote: “Sugar is the main, but by no means the only product of the plantations. They produce molasses too … and the various types of rum of different degrees and kinds that are consumed on the island, and those that are meant for foreign markets ... From the alembics equipped with Shear, Derosne, Sanguier, Egrol Coffeg y Blumenthal distilling apparatuses, for each gallon of rum corresponding to 4 ½ bottles, we obtain the same quantity of rum of 30 degrees Cartier many times over. There are stills whose production exceeds 45 pipas a day.”
Let us conclude. To answer a question asked by my rum friend Richard Nicholson (New Zealand Rum Society), who was the first to use a column still in Cuba? Sadly, I do not know. Only a deeper immersion in Spanish and Cuban archives could, maybe, answer this question, but it is not in my plans, for now. For now, I think it’s enough to have demonstrated that the new continuous stills were adopted in Cuba at least as early as 1832. This means that in Cuba they were among the first to adopt them in the Caribbean (maybe the very first?), thanks to the dynamism of the Cuban Sugar Barons and also to the strong relations between Cuba and France, which we will return to in the future. And this early adoption is in my opinion very important, for it concurred to change Cuban rum for ever paving the way for its lasting, worldwide success. Yes, because as well as being more efficient and economical, producing a bigger quantity of spirit faster and at a lower cost, it soon became clear that the rum (and the whiskey) produced by the new Column Stills was qualitatively different from the old spirit made in traditional Pot Stills. It was in fact another kind of rum. It did not have any of the usual bad smell, the good old “rum stink’”. On the contrary, it smelt pleasant. Moreover, it was lighter, easy to drink, and with a bit of ageing, it even tasted really good.
I think that’s enough for now, see you next month.
Marco Pierini
POST SCRIPTUM
The process of making sugar could be very different according to time, places, markets, technical choices etc. I want to remember that for the sake of simplicity I call molasses all the many kinds of by-products it produced.
