Hawaiian Rum Travels Part II

Kunia, or Kunia Camp, as it was once called, was originally the plantation village for a Del Monte pineapple operation. These days, the plantation is home to several agricultural startups, including Kō Hana. As you pull into the property, you can just barely see the top, curving roof of an old Quonset hut. The hut was built in 1959 and served as the General Store for the Del Monte plantation. It was completely refinished in 2015 and now serves as the Kō Hana Tasting Room. It is here that I meet Jennifer Sandage (JS), Assistant Manager of the Tasting Room and the guide for this morning’s farm tour and tasting. 

JS: In Hawaiian, Kō means cane and Hana means work. Our name actually means the work of the sugar cane. The way we do that here at Kō Hana is we make agricole style rum, using the fresh pressed juice as our main ingredient. We differ from traditional rums that use a sugar by-product, like molasses.  We are going to start our tour by trying a little of the beautiful sugar cane juice. 

Jennifer pulls out several short pieces of cane from a refrigerator and feeds them into a beefy, table-top crusher. The machine pulverizes the cane, sending the spent pulp in one direction and the fresh juice into a cup. Jennifer then pours each of us a sample. The liquid is milky white, the aroma is very floral and the taste is a combination of bananas and coconut water. 

The next stop on our tour is the Cane Garden. Just outside of the Tasting Room, Kō Hana has planted samples of the 34 Hawaiian heirloom varietals they have collected. The variety of varietals is stunning, from milky white to yellow to reddish-purple. Jennifer points out a couple of varietals that are used in rums that we will soon taste. There is Kea, which means white in Hawaiian, because it has a white waxy finish. Next is Mahial’ula, ula meaning red, has a red stalk. Jennifer then points to Manulele, a purple cane, that was the first cane that Dawson and Brand used in their early experiments in 2014.

We leave the garden and start the short hike to the cane fields. The Del Monte plantation had about 3,000 acres at one time. When it closed in 2006, the land was sub-divided and leased to several start-up companies. One is Kunia Country Farms, where Kō Hana partner Jason Brand has an ingenious aquaponic lettuce farm. Large tanks hold tilapia fish and the water from those tanks is used to spray and fertilize the roots of gourmet lettuce. They are currently harvesting 5,000 heads of lettuce a week. 

Just past the lettuce farm, the cane fields begin. It is impressive to see these colorful, 15-foot plants, towering over you. Up ahead, three workers are feeding cane stalks into a large crusher on wheels. Next to the crusher is a large, spherical tank. After the stalks are crushed, the pulp or bagasse is thrown in a big pile and the juice is pumped into the tank.

JS: We like to harvest and crush on-site because we use all aspects of the cane. We will strip the leaves from the stalks and use them as a natural weed mat. All these pieces of black plastic you see here in the field were from the Del Monte days. They would use large sheets of plastic for their weed mats. We will compost all the crushed cane and return all those nutrients back into the soil. Out here in the field, it might take us several hours to crush a day’s harvest. To prevent wild yeasts and bacteria from taking over, we inoculate the juice here in the field with our proprietary yeast, giving it a jump start on fermentation. 

On the way back to the Tasting Room, we pass the distillery buildings. The smaller building has the 25-foot column of a continuous still extending through the roof. The second building has two hybrid pot stills. The first consists of a 600-gallon pot connected to a column with four plates. This was the main still for several years. The newer still is larger, it has a 1300-gallon pot, with two columns, each with ten plates. So many stills, so many questions!

From here we move back inside for the tasting. Kō Hana has two core products and several special releases. The first core rum is Kea, their un-aged white rum. Every batch of Kea is made from one heirloom varietal, each with its own flavor notes. Koho is the aged version of their rum, having been rested in barrels for 2 to 3 years. 

We line up at the bar and Jennifer begins to pour.

JS: Kea means white in Hawaiian. Kea is our white rum. After it comes off the still at 160-proof, we are going to rest it for 90 days in stainless steel tanks. The resting period gives all the components time to merge. Then we will bring it down to 80-proof (40% ABV). Today we are tasting Kea made from the Pilimai and Mahaiula varietals.

After a chorus of oohs and aahs, Jennifer moves on to Koho.

JS: Next is Koho, which means to select or choose. We will take our distillate down to 118 proof and put it in a variety of barrels for 2 to 3 years. This sample is from the Ko Kea varietal and was aged in American Oak and bottled at 90-proof. 

Now Jennifer brings out the special releases. First, we sample Koa, an aged rum that has spent additional time in special casks made from Koa, Hawaii’s most famous endemic hardwood. It gives the rum an interesting reddish hue. This Koa is made from the Kea varietal and is bottled at 100-proof.

The next special release is Kila, which is the Hawaiian word for strength. Kila is only bottled at full cask strength. The proof is variable and handwritten on the label. Today’s sample was made from Mahai’ula cane, aged in American Oak and bottled at 118-proof. 

The last limited release I tasted was a 100-proof version of Kō Hana’s white, unaged Kea. This comes in a special etched, numbered bottle and is made from Manulele cane. 

These last two, higher proof offerings were definitely my favorites and I had a bottle of each shipped back home. The white makes a perfect Tí Punch and the Kea is a wonderful sipper. 

As I was checking out at the counter, Jennifer was nice enough to introduce me to Robert Dawson (RD), one of Kō Hana’s founders. We talked briefly and I mentioned that “Got Rum?” had interviewed him several years ago and that I would like to do an update article. He was needed in the distillery, but gave me his card and told me to contact him if I had more questions. And did I have questions! 

MK: For those of our readers that are not familiar with your discovery of Hawaiian heirloom sugar cane varietals, can you tell us how that came about?

RD: I moved to Hawaii in 2008 with my wife and son and immediately decided to switch gears professionally. I ran a technology consulting business, but I wanted to do something more tangible. Hawaii’s rich agricultural history intrigued me and I started brainstorming ways to tie agriculture, tourism, and consumer products together in a way that would create something new in my adopted new home. That journey led me to the Hawaii Agriculture Research Center (HARC) where I was introduced to the vast number of plants grown in Hawaii by two of the world’s great experts in the field, Stephanie Whalen and Bob Osgood. Their vast library of reading materials going back 150 years set in motion the path that became Kō Hana. As I studied sugar cane growing in Hawaii, I learned that sugar cane was already here prior to contact with the West. The earliest Polynesian settlers brought it to Hawaii in their voyaging canoes and it held very significant cultural, medicinal, and spiritual values for them. At this point I did not know that it wasn’t grown commercially, but it quickly became apparent that if I wanted to start a business using these amazing canoe plants, I would have to start farming. The good people at HARC guided me initially. They told me where I could find the different varieties of sugar cane on Oahu and I went to collections all over the island. At the Waimea Botanical Gardens, while asking for samples from their excellent collection, they told me I needed to meet a guy named Noa Lincoln. Noa grew up in Hawaii and was working on his Doctorate in Ethnobotany with a focus on Hawaiian plants including sugar cane, called Kō in Hawaiian. We met and became friends with shared passion to find all the varieties of Kō throughout the islands. His hard work and guidance were instrumental in building this company from the ground up, literally. At the same time, I met my business partner, Jason Brand. He had also moved to Hawaii in 2008 and our children went to kindergarten together. I told him about my plans and we became business partners and built the business together.

MK: You and Noa Lincoln collected all these varietals and start growing the cane. Now you have enough stock to create cuttings to plant a farm. How did you end up in Kunia?

RD: The property where we built our Tasting Room just happened to be the semi-abandoned Del Monte general store across the street from the HARC offices where I was gathering research for this project. Del Monte had closed its business in Kunia entirely by 2006. The general store was the center of the agricultural village in Kunia. It had a post office, barber shop, grocery store and lunch restaurant. The building and surrounding land were a mess when I came upon it, but it immediately caught my eye and I thought it would be a perfect place to build the distillery. Working with HARC, we leased the property and spent years bringing it back to life.

MK: You started with 30 acres in Kunia and now you have 300 acres?

RD: That is correct. We have four separate locations. The vast majority of what we grow is on the North Shore, in Haleiwa and Waialua. Of the 300 acres we have, 260 are up there.

MK: That would bring up the question of terroir. If you were to plant the same varietal at all four locations, could you have different results?

RD: We have seen that already. Kunia is in central Oahu, higher elevation, fairly dry, easy to control moisture and things like that. Kunia is far from the ocean. At the North Shore we are obviously very close to the ocean. The salt breezes are blowing on the cane all the time. We know there is an actual difference in everything we do down there, there is an actual salinity to it, just from the salt air. The prevailing winds blow all the time and you can see the mist blowing off the ocean, particularly in the winter, when the big waves are up. You see a blanket of sea mist coming up over where we are in Waialua, which is very much at sea level. Haleiwa is more on a slope. 

MK: You only make rum from one varietal at a time. How many varietals were you and Noa Lincoln able to find and how many have you harvested to make rum so far?

RD: We have experimented with 11 different varietals of Hawaiian Kō at this point. Eventually, we want to make at least small batches from all 34 varieties we have acquired.

MK: You have all these different variables: different varietals, different farms, different soils, different climates, different seasons, different years. With all these variables, do you try to keep fermentation and distillation as consistent as possible?

RD: Yes, we do. For example, this year has been much wetter than last year and it’s really had an impact on our yields. We try to maintain our processes and those processes have been developed over time.  We have now come to understand that different canes distill slightly different and we vary our heart cut based upon that. We understand that Mahai’Ula, for example, is a very rich and robust, I would almost say earthy, cane. The juice of it tastes very different than Kea, which is grassy and sweet and tastes like sugar cane. Mahai’Ula has a much earthier and wet moss taste to it that’s in the juice itself. That character makes us distill it much differently. Kea is so semi-neutral that we can distill it at a pretty low proof to get a lot of flavor. The most recent Mahai’Ula that we got in, not only is it very earthy, but it is low brix, which is unfortunate. We didn’t have a good yield on it and the brix on it is around 14-1/2, which is almost the cost of making rum at that point. The energy costs almost make it not worth doing. It doesn’t have that much sugar, but it has a ton of juice and a ton of flavor. We tend to distill it at a higher proof, otherwise it is just overwhelmingly strong. What we try to do is to create what we call Hawaiian Agricole, which is our style, which is a single varietal using heirloom cane where we can highlight the nuances and differences without them swinging so widely one way or another. 

MK: I don’t think people really appreciate how much goes into making agricole rum. Can you give us an idea of yields. If you were to go out and harvest an acre of cane, how much weight would that be and how much juice would you get?

RD: Right now, we get about 25 tons per acre. We extract juice at around 70%. In other words, we get about 70% of that weight in juice. So, approximately 4,000 gallons per acre. 

MK: When I was on the tour, Jennifer showed us the crushing machine. Are you still harvesting by hand or have you gone to machine?

RD: We are. Until we bring in the new equipment, everything is hand harvested. We are getting a mechanized harvester that will cut the cane into 18-inch sections called billets. That style mill that you saw in the field is a small crusher with a single set of three rollers. It is designed to be hand-fed long cane. The mill we are getting is conveyor fed. We will be able to just dump those 18-inch billets right on the belt that goes into a pre-shredder and a 3-stage juicing process. That will take our 70% yield right now up to over 90%. If you touch the waste matter that is coming out of our mill right now, it is still a little damp. The machine we are getting, the output is like sawdust. It gets every bit of juice out of the cane. That won’t be until probably August when we will start doing the mechanical harvesting. It won’t be any reduction in farm staff, it will mean different jobs for different people. In order for us to scale right now, we will keep all of our same crew, but we will have more people to do maintenance, more people to do field expansion and all the things that fall through the cracks. Farm labor is really hard to find; qualified farm labor is just not what people do anymore. Right now, we cut and harvest cane 5 days a week. Once we go mechanized, it will be 3 days a week and we will only be cutting every other week. Until we scale up, during those down times, we will be able to check the fields. It is easy to check 15 or 20 acres of drip tape. It is a lot harder to check 200 acres. You need drones, you need huge ATV’s to drive through and really look and make sure there are no dead spots. The equipment we have on site can do what we want to do as far as making rum and the volume we want to make right now. Now it’s all about getting the farm mechanized and operational to do this much juice. We are talking about 26,000 gallons a week. And that will all be done in 3 days. Imagine that. You are literally going to haul off 26,000 gallons of juice, which is like a small swimming pool every 3 days.

MK: You cut the stalk, but because this is a grass, it grows back?

RD: Correct. But because these are not commercial canes, there was not a lot of data on how long you could do that. You have to eventually replant. A cut of the cane is called a ratoon; that means you cut the cane and it regrows. I have heard that in some parts of the world, you can get 10 ratoons, you would replant every 10 years. Again, we are growing heirloom canes. We find now some of the varietals need to be replanted as soon as 3 years. That first year we get good rich sugar content, let’s say 18 brix. We found that in the second year, we might get 20 or even 22 brix. The second year is better than the first, which is actually typical of sugar cane. The first regrowth, the first ratoon tends to have your best yield. The third year, you might go back to that first year and then it slowly decreases to where you might only see 14 brix. Some of the problems we are having with our Mahai’Ula is that we are in our fifth year, our fifth ratoon and we have never done it before. No one has ever grown ten acres of Mahai’Ula before and cut it every year and see what happens. So, we are having to learn. We think we may have to replant every three years. We don’t have to replant Kea but every five years. Every different varietal has a different character and characteristics that we have to be mindful of. There are so many variables in what we do. 

MK: The biggest problem with cane juice is that every bacterium and wild yeast on the cane and in the field wants to eat it. Jennifer explained that you are adding yeast to the juice in the field. That’s such a smart idea.

RD: We started inoculating in the field and it has made such a difference. We decided what the heck, let’s just teach the farm hands this is how much you add and it’s brilliant because not only are you inoculating it from all the wild yeasts and bacteria, but the pumping into the tank vessel is adding so much oxygen into the yeast wash that it couldn’t be happier. And it is warm out there, so between the heat and the oxygen, we are really getting it started. By the time it hits our fermenters, we see super active bubbling going on. 

MK: You have cut the cane, brought it to the distillery and now it is fermenting. You mentioned 24,000 gallons of fermenting capacity. That sounds like a lot.

RD: It is a lot. We have yet to approach filling those, but in August we will. In August we will have all of those active. We are typically filling our fermenters between one and two thousand gallons. They are 3400-gallon fermenters but we are not filling them all the way because we are not getting that much juice in any given day. We are over capacity in our fermenters.

MK: You have cut the cane, crushed it, fermented the fresh juice and now you have a wash to distill. What has been the progression of your stills?

RD: Our company was really a bootstrap entrepreneurial venture. Jason and I started with just the two of us sharing expenses. We eventually brought in outside investment, but it was small for what we were trying to do. So, I looked for a bootstrap still maker and found one in Steven Cage of Cage & Son’s. He was just starting out back then, too. So far, he has built four stills for us. Our first still was a 500-gallon pot with a 4-plate column and it was designed with his assistance to create something that could make the agricole style we were after in a single pass, rather than multiple runs. At the time, I think this was one of only two stills he had ever built of that size. He has been our go-to still maker ever since. We phased out the original 500-gallon pot for a more efficient 600-gallon unit and then built a 1,300-gallon pot with two 10-plate side columns, which is now our primary still. Once the farms are fully online by the end of this summer and we are harvesting 6,000 gallons of fresh cane juice a day, we will change our process and start using the continuous still Steven built for us and do a two-stage process. We will use the continuous column as a stripping still and the 1,300-gallon pot as a spirit still. Cage & Sons has been a great partner for over 10 years now. He has grown with us and I think he can build anything we need.

MK: His website describes your continuous still as “a Continuous stripping column, capable of distilling 3,200 gallons of wash to low wines in 8 hours or less.”

RD: So that was the design, one fermenter per day. Then we will distill it again, because that is only bringing it down to low wines. Let’s say it was a 10% wash, we run it through the continuous still and we will bring it up to a 60% wash. Then we would put that in the big pot still to do the spirit run. The yields will be much higher, because we are starting with a much higher alcohol wine, which means it boils faster. The size of your cuts is going to be the same. You are probably going to get between 43 and 52% yield. But you are starting with 50% alcohol and not 10%, so, you get five times more production and it’s much more energy efficient.

MK: What proof is the rum when it comes off the still(s) and at what proof does it go into stainless steel tanks or barrels?

RD: Because we grow our own cane and the varietals vary so much in flavor and sugar content, we don’t distill every varietal the same way. A low Brix cane tends to be funkier than a high Brix one. To even them out we might distill as high as 170 proof for part of a low Brix run, while we might never get above 160 proof on a high Brix run. When doing barrel runs, we could be distilling in the 140s. Again, the decisions are sensory and we have learned the sweet spots over the last 10 years of doing this. So, the short answer is 140-170 proof for rum making. We barrel at 118 proof.

MK: Now you have spirits and you are aging it. I see you have used various woods for your barrel. The one that sticks out is the Koa wood. How do you find Koa wood, since you can’t just cut down a Koa tree in Hawaii and how did you find someone to make a barrel out of it? No one has ever done that before.

RD: We worked with a very interesting company called Continental Craftsmen and I definitely want to credit them. Seth Gonzalez is the name of the guy who has made our barrels and he is a very talented wood worker. We pull all of our Koa wood, mainly, from the Big Island. That’s where most it is and it is all from fallen timber. We don’t take any fresh lumber. Seth is really good with Koa. He understands the wood well and he is good at looking at the grain. He started from scratch with us and it has been a process. The first barrels leaked like a sieve. Koa is an endemic acacia wood that doesn’t bend well. It is much more rigid than oak, it wants to snap more than bend. He has been steaming it and doing everything he can, but like everything else we do, we took on something that’s really hard and trying to figure out how to do it. I feel like our techniques are good and the barrels coming out now are stable. We would like to go from the 30-gallon barrels that we are using right now to bigger, 50-gallon barrels. We started with a smaller barrel and, again, we are just going to grow into it and learn as we go. Koa rum will always be a boutique product, because there is a scarcity of Koa wood. Maybe it will always be special and you will have to come to the distillery to get it.

MK: You have gone from a barrel house that would hold 200 barrels to a new house that will hold 1000?

RD: That’s correct. Now we just have to fill them. We filled eight barrels last week, so that was a good week. Once we figure this full system out, we hope to fill eight barrels every week. The minimum age of any product we put out is two years, so, we really have to start building up that inventory.

MK: Then it is time to bottle. Kō Hana’s square bottle is very distinctive on the rum shelf. How did that come about?

RD: My concept was that I wanted to do a square bottle, a true cube. Nobody made one, so, we had to go through the process of making our own. The reason for it is kind of interesting. Being in the Pacific, we are the gateway to Asia. I think we have a tremendous growth opportunity in Asia, where rum is under-represented and under-appreciated. When I started this company with Jason, the idea was to use Hawaii as a bridge to introduce rum into Asia. That means starting in Japan where the people have a huge affinity for Hawaii. When I was thinking of packaging, I was trying to create something that was special for what the Japanese would call ‘omiyage’, which is a gift. If you are a Japanese person and you travel, one of the responsibilities you have culturally is to bring back gifts to people who didn’t travel, whether they are your friends or your colleagues. The idea is that if you went somewhere special, you should bring something back and show your friends, family and colleagues what that was. Most Japanese, if they go on vacation for a week, two days will be shopping days, just to buy gifts for friends. If you meet a Japanese business person, they will present you with a business card and they will present it with two hands. If they give you a gift, they will give it with two hands. I wanted to develop a package that worked really well being given that way. It lends itself to being gifted with two hands. That’s really where the cube idea came from.  

MK: It sounds like you guys have accomplished a lot in 14 years.

RD: I could not have done this without Jason Brand. I may have done more of the heavy lifting but he backed it, he made it happen. That’s how we started the company together and we are toe to toe working hard every day. From the beginning I was like ‘You are the banker and here is the idea. Make sure we don’t run out of money and I will make sure we make great rum.’ I could not have done it without Noa Lincoln, HARC and those other people, but particularly Jason, my business partner. I just want everyone to understand that Jay and I built this thing together. Jason started the aquaponic farm before we became business partners. He knew what I was doing and what I was trying to pull off.  While I was literally helping him run air lines on his farm one day, I am like ‘Hey, you want to jump in on this rum thing with me?’ And now, here we are!   

I would like to thank Jennifer Sandage for a great tour and tasting, Tiffany Tubon for her help with pictures and, of course, Robert Dawson for answering my emails, the phone and my many nerdy rum questions.

Well, our family Hawaiian family vacation has come to an end. But wait, there are more Hawaiian Islands and more Hawaiian rum distilleries. I can’t wait to do Hawaiian Rum Travels, Part 3!

Mike Kunetka

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