“We are 100% cane-to-glass,” Cane Land Distilling Co. Production Manager John Landry tells 225 Dine as he leads a tour of the new downtown distillery. “All of our raw materials come from one sugar mill, one sugar farm across the river.”
Slated to open this spring, Cane Land occupies an expansive space at 760 St. Philip St., where raw materials start out in 4,000- to 5,000-gallon tanks of molasses that are diluted with water and heated, then moved to stills units where the sugars in the molasses are fermented into alcohol.
“Perhaps the most unique step of Cane Land’s creation of spirits, though, happens in a large room full of barrels and vats just off the tasting floor, where the spirits are aged,” writes 225 Dine. “Most of the barrels used to age Cane Land’s rum are cognac barrels dating back to the 1980s and imported from Cognac, France, to allow for different flavor variations in the rums. Nearby, two massive blending vats tower over the warehouse—these 150-year-old vats traveled by boat from France and were reassembled board-by-board on the distillery floor by French workers.”
All this comes together to create five different varieties of Cane Land rum, from Red Stick Cinnamon Rum to Parade Argente Silver Rum, plus a whiskey and a vodka. The distillery can produce about 150 gallons of spirits a day, and Cane Land is aiming to being distributing them throughout Baton Rouge in mid- to late-spring. The company hopes to later expand to distribution to the New Orleans and Lafayette markets, and then eventually elsewhere in the state and region.
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