Bayou Rum: A Craft Distilled Made in Louisiana

Louisiana is an ideal place to produce rum due to its abundant sugar production. Here, you can find all the ingredients needed, from the steamy, sultry climate made for maturing smooth rums to the abundance and quality of the raw material.

Bayou® Rum is one of the crafts distilled from locally grown, fresh Louisiana sugarcane. The Bayou® Rum Distillery opened its doors in Lacassine, LA. It uses traditional methods with state-of-the-art technology, from fermentation through distillation, maturation, and bottling.

The local terroir helps the brand’s master blender, Reiniel Vicente, make Bayou’s range particularly special. Vicente has a long experience in the industry. Since 2013, he has impressed the founders of Bayou Rum with his rum-making know-how and expertise.

At Bayou, everything is made in pot stills, one batch at a time, from locally sourced molasses. From the beginning, the brand has partnered with MA Patout & Son, the oldest family-owned and operated sugar mill in the USA. This sugar mill saves the batches of richer molasses with more fermentable sugar. Then, it sends them to the Bayou to develop their spirits.

They pasteurize molasses to make sure it is as pure as possible before yeast is added. This yeast comes from a strain of wild yeast found on sugarcane and is grown in a lab. We then distill every batch by hand using copper pot stills and age it into 200-liter bourbon and sherry casks.

The second distillation in the pot still is where the essence of Bayou Rum is crafted by hand. “In the first hour of starting the still, they taste the spirit every 10 minutes to define where to make the cut. Once they have the heart, and the best spirits they can obtain, they dilute them to 60%–65% ABV and then select the right casks.

Moreover, Bayou’s stablemate, Kentucky Owl Bourbon, provides all the required wood. Thus, they get the freshest Bourbon barrels with a high degree of control. Then comes maturation, which, like the use of local sugarcane, stamps a real sense of provenance on the rum. At Bayou, the angels gulp down 6–7% of the maturing stocks of rum each year, and because it is so humid in this location, the rate of evaporation of water is slightly above that of alcohol. 

The purest expression of the rum is the unaged Bayou White, which shows the real spirit character on which the aged expressions build complexity through the wood. Bayou Reserve uses a blend of barrels between two and five years old, which brings excellent smoothness to the spirit. Above this sit Bayou’s single-batch rums, which are treated to a particular type of barrel for their entire maturation.

These single-batch rums are aged in rye whiskey barrels and red wine casks from Napa Valley. The brand has released three- and five-year-old expressions of the latter. At the top of the range is the Bayou XO Mardi Gras, which spends a year in Pedro Ximénez sherry casks after five years in Bourbon barrels.

They are making high-end, high-quality spirits. This is why Bayou Rum has earned its title of “#1 Craft Rum in America.” Currently, Bayou Rum is available throughout the USA. Among the Bayou’s expressions you can enjoy are:

• Bayou White
• Bayou Spiced
• Bayou Reserve
• Bayou Single Batch #3
• Bayou Xo Mardi Gras
• Bayou Pink
• Bayou Single Barrel #2

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Featured image source: Bayou Rum®