Rum Distillery and Stargazing

Braving another couple of bus trips around/across the island we decided to do the tourist thing and visit the River Antoine rum distillery.

Remember that link to info about buses? Well we are getting bold here.... tell the bus driver we are going to River Antoine and when we got to La Poterie he told the waiting passengers to hang about he'd 'be back'. What followed was a personalized taxi service,  off-piste for buses, thrash down a side road to drop us at the distillery gate.

Despite being a top tourist attraction (they employ dedicated guides, and have a bus park for the minibuses that bring the hoards of cruise ship passengers), there is no sign at the gate and we kind of explored our way in past huge bast piles which at least suggested that vaste amounts of sugar cane were being minced up on site. 

It's a good start for rum making - lots of sugar juice.

Devonte gave us a personalized tour. It has been a good day for personalized. River Antoine was originally built by the French and (everything has to have something it can claim) is claimed to be the oldest still working distillery in the world. (There might be a word I missed like oldest RUM distillery, or oldest hand operated, or oldest... anyway it has a claim).

The aquaduct has been patched up, a reservoir built, water drives a water wheel built in Derby in the 1840s (or so), which turns the cane crushing mill. Elfen safety would have an apoplectic fit. The conveyor is driven off the water wheel too, is loaded by hand, and three or 4 blokes work over, under and beside the roller crushing mill feeding in cane, clearing the bast, throwing big bits back in to go round again, and dragging overspill out from underneath. The juice goes off down a sluice where someone fishes out the biggest bits of fibre that are floating in the juice. The bast is loaded by the armful into a mini railway trolley and pushed by hand over the sort of rickety high-level rail system you might see in an old Western movie where mining is involved (think wooden scaffolding) and swiveled and tipped into the bast piles drying in the sun.

Some poor bloke must have the hottest job in the Caribbean stoking dried bast into the large furnace they use to concentrate the sugar juice in 5 enormous evaporation pans. It has to be ladled by hand from pan to pan until it reaches the correct BRIX number, and then it is transferred to the mash tuns for fermentation. (The mash tuns were in fact replaced on 2002 with concrete tanks, and the only remaining tun tells you why - rum (or rather the fermentation process) had not served to preserve the wood from which it was made.)

8 days of fermentation (8 seems to be a magic number for both cocoa and rum) and then distillation. The kettles and condensation coils etc look like I've seen in a whisky distillery so there is clearly a standard way of getting the alcohol out of a brew of mash. It is 14% alcohol when it goes into the kettle and about 75% alcohol in the distilled product. Well exactly 75% to be precise (150 proof). Remarkably is is bottled by hand too. There is no barrel aging - this is white rum. 14 days from sugar cane to bottled rum.

Bottling is done by hand - hold a bottle under a tap (really, that unsophisticated).

Since 9/11 any beverage with 70% or more alcohol is considered under aviation rules to be an explosive, so River Antione also make a 69% alcohol rum so you can buy it and take it home if you are flying by commercial airline. Mr B availed himself of the sampling and was clear in his opinion that the 69% wasn't worth taking home if you had already tasted the 75%.

That would be the end of the story as the demand for rum here is so high and their production so boutique that none is exported (other than the odd low proof one in a suitcase). You will never see River Antoine in an off-licence (liquor store) near you.  However we had to get 'home' again.

NB the distillery employs 90 people.

Jiminey Cricket - we got involved in a bus race: two drivers leapfrogging one another trying to be the bus in the lead so as to get the passengers. We stopped for a bunch of school kids and one per seat goes completely out the window at school kicking out time. Jam them in, they are sitting on laps and nearly getting threaded in under seats to fit them all in. I guess packed that firmly they could withstand the forces of being hurled around bends in the road, and possibly couldn't see forward to know their lives were about to end in a head-on as our driver pulled out and raced past a rival bus that had stopped to put down some pale green, slightly wobbling commuters.

Heavy rain last night and this morning had cleared by lunch time and this evening I have been lying on the warm terracotta tiles below our stoop discussing stars and constellations with Mr B (who seems to have forgotten everything he might once have known about astro navigation).  He keeps this map I found years ago as the screen picture on his phone but clearly hasn't consulted with it recently.

We had a 'discussion' about whether we were looking at Cassiopeia or Ursa Major. There are only 4 constellations I can identify with absolute confidence: Southern Cross, Orion, Ursa Major (also called Big Dipper or Plough) and Cassiopeia. Everything else I locate by reference to one of those (Gemini - Castor & Pollux, Sirius in Canis Major, the Pole Star,  Andromeda, Aldebaran in Taurus....)

(If you really want these two pics to marry you have to turn Orion upside down and paste it top right of the blue pic, then cut slits on it all and paste it on the inside of a half spherical dome. Orion is closer to Cassiopeia than a flat picture like that would suggest.) Go outdoors on a clear night (northern hemisphere) and if it's cold take lots of rugs, then lie on the ground and look at it. Really look at it. The whole thing comes alive.

Spot the names on many of the brightest stars (well on the most important for navigation purposes anyway) . They are are Arabic. Arabic astro scholars named them long before my western European ancestors were even thinking about making long sea voyages or developing a system for navigation by fixing on points of light in our heavens.  I love that. I love that it is learning we have absorbed without having to rebrand it all.