CRAFT by Under My Host® Issue No. 16 Made in America: Part I | Page 49

arcane. He saw an opportunity to learn how to grow sugarcane and to,
“make rum, like Grandpa always talked about and to bring back an authen-
tic, unadulterated product.”
Vonk bought land in Richland, Georgia and started growing cane.
Armed with a hand-made pot still, he received a distilling license as
Richland Rum. At first, he viewed his pursuit as avocational and en-
joyed protecting his project and process from commercial pressures.
Richland Rum sold finished rum for the first time in 2012 - thirteen
years after Vonk first put cane in the ground.
The climate of southern Georgia dictated that Richland’s entire crop of
heirloom cane needed to be harvested within its short harvest season at
the end of the year. Since harvested sugarcane expires in hours, Rich-
land addressed the challenge by evaporating the juice into a condensed,
storable syrup, which could be distilled throughout the year. Vonk
asserts that their syrup retains all of its natural sugars, which distin-
guishes it from molasses, where the natural and desired sugars have
been separated and harvested, leaving the sucrose-depleted molasses
behind.
Richland was the first American example of “Single Estate Rum,” de-
fined by a single producer growing, fermenting, and distilling their own
sugarcane into rum. Their Old Georgia Rum is a creative expression of
their agricultural terroir, made with a distinctly different process than
molasses-based rums. Evaporating cane juice into syrup however, also
sets it apart from traditional agricole, distilled directly from fermented
cane juice.
Richland’s farm has grown from less than a quarter to more than 180
acres of sugarcane. Their Single Estate Old Georgia Rum is sold at both
of their distilleries in Richland and Brunswick, Georgia and is distribut-
ed in 15 states and nine countries.
Another voice supporting Vonk’s assertion that all syrups are not cre-
ated equal is Charles Poirier, of Poirier’s Cane Syrup in Baton Rouge.
Poirier was inspired to revive the lost art of growing cane into syrup
after reveling in his father’s stories about Poirier’s great-great grand-
pa, a syrup-maker in Cypress Island, Louisiana, who passed in the early
1940s. Back in the day, only the wealthy could afford refined, white
sugar from the mills. Rural folks used cane syrup as their all-purpose
sweetener. The four or five families that made up a rural community
would bring their cane to the farmer who could mill and cook the cane
into syrup “on a third,” keeping a third of the bottled yield for his ef-
forts. In 2002, Poirier started making syrup on the weekends in his
15-gallon cracking pot, just to share with friends and family. Eventu-
ally, some came into the hands of someone in the food industry who
loved it so much they shared it with chefs around the country, and as
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