No Outlaw’s Product
Small-batch rum-making at the edge of St. Martin Parish
Jean Baptiste rested rum (left) and silver rum (right)
St. Martin Parish covers a lot of ground, stretching from the same latitude as Baton Rouge at its northernmost point all the way down to practically Morgan City at its southernmost point, across prairies and rolling hills, it’s true there are only a few, across bayous, lagoons and bald cypress swamps, and one of the best perks of writing about this place is how I have been taken into some of its more unexpected and unexplored corners. This August it brought me to that little bit of Broussard at the far western edge of the parish, where a small rum distillery is tucked away like a buried treasure.
Swapping out my smartphone map for an old, rolled-out paper one, and imagining my truck as a schooner, it was just like discovering a hidden cove. Wooden barrels filled the space—some whole, some in pieces. A giant bag of cane sugar, literally a ton of the granular gold, sat sparkling beside tubs of dark molasses, the air heavy with the scent of both. Symbols wrapped around beveled bottles of amber and clear liquor, hinting at something older, and maybe even sacred . . .
There are stories here—of sinker cypress, of bootlegging, of spirits made in the shadows—yet what Jean Baptiste distills today is no outlaw’s product, but small-batch, award-winning silver and aged rums—liquid expressions of the fertile landscapes of St. Martin Parish itself.
Tim Westcott, President and CEO of Jean Baptiste Spirits, walked me through the distillery as he walked me through the process of turning cane sugar and molasses into rum, and the smile on his face let me know that he found more than a little mischief and adventure in all of this. After all, who among us has never dreamed of being a pirate or a sailor-at-sea?
Sugarcane
How did you get into rum?
Actually, I started making beer first. I’ve been making beer since I was probably twenty years old. We used to go to Bandstand—we were kids in St. Martinville—and everybody would steal my Budweiser. The Real Superstore was open around that time, and I started going over there and buying all this Japanese beer and Australian beer and German beer. That way I’d know when somebody was stealing my beer. Then I wound up liking it, and I wanted to know how to make it. So I started practicing making it. I bought a beer brewing kit and then eventually, you know, it leads into distilling. Because if you distill beer, you get whiskey . . . minus the hops. You don’t put hops in it. To make rum, you make a beer from sugar cane—a sugar cane beer—and then you distill that. And that makes rum.
But my family’s been making rum for generations. My grandmother used to make it. My great-grandmother in St. Martinville. She lived behind where the Canal station was, right across from Al’s Maytag. And he told me a bunch of stories about her. He said how she used to make the rum on the back porch and sell it on the front porch. She had seventeen children to feed. Her husband had died, so she was a widow. So that’s how she did it. She sold rum.
What would she have used as her main ingredient to make rum?
She used sugar cane as her base ingredient. Molasses and sugar. She would make it behind her house. She grew up on a sugarcane farm, and her husband grew up on a sugarcane farm, too. So they both knew how to make rum. They probably picked up the molasses as a byproduct that people were trying to get rid of, because molasses is a waste product in some ways, and then you mix it with a little bit of regular sugar. But back then, molasses had more sugar content. Now they’ve gotten more efficient at it, so it’s less sugar content in the molasses. Then we do add some of the raw sugar back in to kind of recreate what they had back then.
The stencil that’s used to label the oak barrels
What grade of molasses do you use? And where do you get it from?
We’d like to get all of it from LASUCA, the sugar mill in St. John, but we can’t because they have a spout that’s twenty feet high. It’s eighteen inches big, and it’s made for filling up 18-wheelers. And we fill these three hundred gallon plastic totes, so they wouldn’t be able to do it, so we have to get our molasses from Cajun Sugar in the Loreauville area. But we get our raw sugar from LASUCA. They load it up in big sacks for us, a couple thousand pounds apiece. The grade of molasses we use is blackstrap, which is the lowest grade, you know, after they’ve got as much sugar out of it as they can. But it still has a lot of flavor and all the minerals and everything in it, and they would just add back the raw sugar.
We have a recipe we use to do that. Some other people that do it, they’re able to use, like, the first press of the molasses, which has a lot more sugar before it’s been stripped down a couple different grades, but we don’t have access to that right now. Eventually, we’re gonna start using the cane juice, and we’re gonna make an old-fashioned type of rum that used to be made in St. Martin Parish and Louisiana—called tafia—that was supposedly the best, but it went out of fashion right after the Civil War. It’s a lot easier to make too, but it has a little grassier flavor, a little raw flavor to it.
Award-winning rum bottles
So it’s been in your family for generations, and when did this operation come into being?
We started Jean Baptiste Rum about eight years ago. I used to work for Chevron. I retired from there, and my son Brennan got his MBA from UL [University of Louisiana] and I told him instead of going into the oil field, come work with me. I started the business, and we’ve been working on it for about eight years, but we only came to market about a year ago. We wanted to make it perfect, so we have been playing around with it, and it took a little while.
What goes into perfecting the process?
We used to live in River Ranch, and in front of the houses you have these big garden walls that are like six feet tall. You have no backyard because that’s where the garage is, so I used to practice making it over there in River Ranch, and all these people were jogging in front of my street, and they’d all smell this rum that I’m making. Trying to look over the fence to see what I’m doing. But I had a little six gallon still and a six gallon plastic bucket, and I practiced with that. I just made it for my own use. And I’ve been making it like that for at least twenty years, trying to find different recipes, seeing what works the best. Then when we came over here, we had a good recipe. It was really good. Everybody loved it. But when you scale it up from six gallons to 620 gallons, you think you just multiply it by a hundred and it works out. It doesn’t. So we had to change things around. Took several months to get it right. The temperatures are different in a bigger batch. Mixing it up is a lot different. So there’s things we had to learn because we weren’t professional distillers or beer brewers. We just did as a hobby.
Mixing tank (left) and fermenting tanks (center and right)
So the still is 620 gallons?
That’s the size of the mixing tank and the fermenting tanks. The still is only 150 gallons. So it’ll take four batches to go through one fermenting tank. We bought a lot of stuff from the beer industry because a fermenter is a fermenter, you know, whether it’s fermenting beer or rum or anything, it works the same. And we bought our mixing tank from Campbell’s Soup. They used to make V8 juice with it. It’s basically a 600-gallon blender with a big propeller, and it just mixes everything up. So it’ll work on rum, it’ll work on V8 juice, or anything.
Can you describe the basic process of how you get from sugar and molasses to rum?
We start out by making something called the wash, which is basically like a beer, but it’s called wash in rum terms. It’s the molasses, sugar and water, and then we add yeast and mix it up, and it turns into sort of a beer. It’ll get up to . . . probably ours gets up to about nine percent alcohol, whereas a regular beer is like four or five. So it’s a little bit stronger. Then after it ferments—it takes three or four days at least—you put it in the still, and the still concentrates it, basically, so you go from nine percent alcohol to 105 proof. Everything we do is different than everybody else, for one reason or another, but a lot of people will try and distill it to the highest point possible, the highest proof possible, almost making like a vodka, which is a hundred eighty proof. We don’t do that. We keep it at the lowest point possible because we want a lot of flavor. So we go to like 105 proof. We distill it one time. And then we put it in the barrel at around 103 proof. There’s two different schools of thought. When you go into higher proof, you’ll get more out of it, because by the time you add the water in it, to proof it down, your product expands more. But ours has a better taste because we add less water to it.
Tim Westcott, President and CEO of Jean Baptiste Spirits LLC
And the rums are aged?
One of them is. Our rested rum is aged just under a year, six months to a year. Depends when we put it in. If you put it in right at the beginning of summer, it’s a little bit less because the heat helps. But if you start it in the winter, it takes a little longer.
How many different products do you have?
Right now we have two that are online, but we have a couple more that’s coming out. We have a two year and a four year also. And then we have another one that’s aging in wine barrels from the Fredericksburg wine country.
Where are they available for purchase?
Right now you can get them at Total Wine. You can get them at Chops in Broussard. Marcello’s on Johnston. If you go eat at Poor Boy’s Riverside, you can get it over there. A couple of other places. We’re slowly getting out there.
The still separates and concentrates alcohol from the fermented liquid
[We enter the bottling room.]
This is our bottling room, and we have a bottling machine, they use it a lot in the wine industry for wine bottles, but it works the same for us, and you can bottle them six at a time. The rum goes in here, and it comes out through gravity.
Tell me about your bottle design.
Well, we tried to get our bottles during COVID, and nobody would sell them to us. That’s why we’ve been doing this eight years. We’ve had a lot of roadblocks. Nobody would sell bottles to us. They said if we wanted bottles, we had to buy them a million at a time, which is unfeasible for us, at our level. And we found some that said they’d sell to us if we buy 100,000, which is still too much. And then we found these. This is a custom bottle from Germany. It’s actually cosmetic-grade glass.
It has a good weight, a good center of gravity.
It feels heavy. Thick too. And so we got those. That bottle of the silver rum actually won a packaging industry award, the Glass Packaging Institute. Yeah, it won a World Packaging Award. I never heard of that, but they said it’s a big deal. We had an advertising company from Baton Rouge that does a lot of spirits and beer brands do the design of the label.
And then Jean Baptiste, we chose that name because Westcott’s not a Cajun name. I’m three quarters Cajun. Three of my grandparents are Cajun. So I ended up with the non-Cajun name. I got the Westcott. The English, Irish. So a lot of my great, great grandparents who actually worked on sugarcane farms and made rum, their first name was Jean-Baptiste. Like Jean-Baptiste Gautreaux. Jean-Baptiste Theriot. So that’s how we came up with that. And I’m in something in the Catholic Church called the Knights of Malta. It’s like the Knights of Columbus, but it’s 700 years older, and our patron saint is John the Baptist. So I put the Maltese cross on it, too, to tie it all in.
A molasses tote is a large container used for transporting and storing molasses
[We enter the distillery.]
We have a really small distillery in a real big building. We’re actually one of the smaller distilleries in this area. This is the fermentation tank. These hold 620 gallons. And the one on the end is the mixing tank. We’ll pump it over into one of these tanks and ferment for about four days. We used to use this one yeast, and it took, like, two weeks to work. And then we we experimented a lot with the different yeasts, and we found this one that took only four days, but it costs about eight times more. It’s from Europe but the flavor from it was just so good that we went with it even with the high cost.
So your sugar and your molasses and your water goes in the mixing tank.
And then here we add the yeast in the fermenting tank.
Two weeks or four days depending on the yeast.
Yeah, and then we pump it over to the still. This still here is electric. We don’t have a good gas supply over here, so we have electric, and it’s got a water jacket on it. It’s called a bain-marie type still. It heats it up from the water getting boiling. That way it won’t scorch it as much, which really doesn’t make a difference for rum, but for whiskey it’s better that way. And basically the principle of distillation is, you know, for alcohol. Alcohol boils at a lower boiling point than water. Water’s at 212, and alcohol is 160, 165, somewhere around there. So as long as you keep it under 212, you’re getting all the alcohol out, you’re stripping the alcohol.
And here, this is called a hybrid still. Usually they have these plates in here that’ll make it bubble, you know, sort of re-distill it at each one, so you get a higher proof, but we ripped them out. Ours is just almost like a pot still, as it’s called, instead of a column still. And that way you get more flavor through it, but it’s less proof. But the proof it comes out at is good enough for us. It’s high enough. If we were making like a vodka or something, we’d put some of those plates in there.
Barrels play a crucial role in rum making, primarily for aging, which impacts the final flavor, aroma, and color of the rum
How long does the process take?
My son gets up at four in the morning and starts it. And he goes work out at Red’s, comes back over here about seven. And about eight o’clock, it’s warm enough to start distillations. It’s heated up enough. It’s slow with electric heaters. And it’ll run until four to five o’clock in the evening. So it’s like a twelve-hour run. So we can only really do one run a day. By the time you take it and clean it, I’ll get it ready for the next day and everything.
And so it comes up through here.
The top and the vapor goes up through here. This is a condenser right here. There’s chilled water running through it, so it turns the vapor back into a liquid, and then it’ll come through here. This is called a parrot. We have a hydrometer that would be floating out of here, and that tells you your proof. And by the time it gets to the right proof and everything, we’ll go and put it through here. It’s got some screens and stuff, and we collect it in here. We get maybe fourteen or fifteen gallons of rum. It’s not a whole lot.
Where is the still from?
This is actually a Chinese still. It’s a less costly one. The really nice ones are all copper and everything. Those are half a million dollars. So we started out with these. But what I tell people is, Campbell’s Soup has probably ten million dollar equipment where they make chicken gumbo. But either one of our moms could make a better gumbo in just a basic aluminum pot.
It all comes down to the product.
Exactly. What does it taste like? But one day we’re going to get a nice copper one too. It’ll make it a little bit better. It goes into the holding tank. If we’re making the silver rum, we’ll let it sit in here for about three to four months. Sort of air it out. That way it doesn’t have a real bad bite to it. It’s a little smoother. So it’ll stay in there for a couple months and if not we use it and put it into barrels, and it’ll stay in there for six to twelve months for the rested rum.
Label for Jean Baptiste rested rum
[We walk over to the barrels.]
This here’s a little experiment we’re doing. Nobody makes cypress barrels. In the old days, they had a lot of cypress barrels around here. We actually had tried to find someone to make them. They wouldn’t do it. We go to these rum events all the time, like Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans and all this, and we went to this one Rum Congress with all the best rum distillers from the US, and they asked us, “What’s the difference between Louisiana rum versus rum from Rhode Island or New Jersey or wherever?”
We said, “One thing that’s different is that they used to age the rum in cypress.” Every single person in that room said we were crazy. They said, “That cypress is gonna make it taste terrible.” Because it’s like a pine kind of wood. So I said, “Well, we haven’t tried it yet, but from what I heard from my great-grandmother, that’s all they used to use.” So we started cutting up, just as an experiment, cutting up little pieces of cypress and throwing them in the collection tanks. And it was great. Yeah, so it worked out good. Actually, the head of the Distilling Institute, who told us it was gonna be terrible, came over here about two months ago, and we let him try it. And he said, “Man, I eat my words.”
Your great-grandmother knew what she was doing.
Right? So now we’re trying to do it with a cypress barrel, so it’s more authentic, you know, instead of just throwing a piece of cypress in there.
So would you need a lot of barrels?
We need a few but what we’re gonna do is . . . it’s hard for people around here, or anybody, really, to make the staves, you know to get the right curve to it and everything. But to make the heads . . . anybody could do that, any decent woodworker. So we’re gonna make some hybrid barrels and have cypress on the head and then regular oak on the sides, so it’ll be a little mix of the two. We got somebody working on that now.
I hadn’t thought about that. I guess barrel-making is a lost art.
Yeah, making these kind of things, it’s more complicated than you think. You gotta get it just right. We even took a few of them apart. It’s just hard getting them back together.
Label for Jean Baptiste silver rum
What do you look for in a rum? What’s your ideal rum?
I look for flavor overall. If I want something light without flavor, I’ll get a vodka, which is almost flavorless. But a rum has to have a good flavor. And I like rums with distinct flavors, too. You don’t want to drink twenty rums that taste exactly the same. You want something a little bit different.
That’s how I feel about scotch. If I’m drinking scotch, I want a distinct flavor. When I visited the Talisker distillery in Scotland, what I understood about scotch is that it’s an expression of the land. You know, it’s like a distillation of . . .
The terroir.
Right. And I can see how it fits into, you know, this particular part of the world. You’re making something that’s going to be different from anywhere else. Because the place it comes from is different from anywhere else.
We had the Rum Society of Louisiana over here a couple months ago, taking a tour of our place. And they said that the rums from New Orleans all have a sort of different taste. The ones from around the False River area, theirs tastes a little bit different too. And they said the Acadiana area tastes different also. They could taste the difference.
[Westcott points to a collection of sawn cypress pieces.]
That’s some cypress that I was going to use for the staves. There’s a guy who mills wood and stuff, and I’m going to try and get him to get me some sinker cypress. We want to do that as a novelty thing. Make a couple of barrels with sinker cypress heads on them. Just for a different story. We could say that the wood sat underneath the Atchafalaya Basin for 100 years, and now it’s making rum.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to drink that?
Jean Baptiste Rum is available for purchase at Total Wine, Marcello’s Wine Market on Johnston, Chops in Broussard, and Poor Boy’s Riverside.