Sourcing Sugar Cane

We make Montanya Rums using sugar cane that comes directly from a family co-op of cane growers in a 50-square-mile region of Louisiana, near Lake Ponchatrain. It is 100% family grown, non-GMO and certified American grown.

The cane is harvested into 6” billets in the fall (starting around October 1st) and transported just a few miles away to the Lula Sugar Mill in Belle Rose, Louisiana. There, the cane is pressed and turned into unrefined raw sugar and molasses.

The crew at Lula pack both the unrefined sugar and its accompanying molasses separately into 1-ton totes and ship them to Montanya Distillers; the cane never goes to the refinery or enters the commodity market. We also know the people who own the land, grow the cane, harvest it, and mill it. They are salt of the earth farmers and millers, and you can meet some of them on the blog: Isabel and Will Thibaut and Gene Adolph.

A Family Affair

Montanya Distillers founders Karen and Brice Hoskin with Mike Daigle, now retired, a sixth generation family owner and cane grower of the Lula Sugar Mill.

“By purchasing our sugar cane directly from Lula before refining occurs, we are able to use a cane product that requires much less energy to make, which retains more of its natural flavors, which keeps the complex molecules that we want for our rum, and which is not exposed to sulfur dioxide, flocculants, calcium hydroxide (slaked lime), and phosphoric acid. ”

— Karen Hoskin, Co-owner and Co-founder of Montanya Distillers

In 2014, the Hoskins visited Lula Sugar Mill.

The Lula Sugar Mill generates its own power, boiler combustion and compost from sugarcane biomass (called bagasse) and has a very strong commitment to conservation and community support. The facility returns the water the mill uses to the watershed cleaner than it came in. There is no pre-harvest burning, which is a wide practice in many places and leads to both water and air pollution (Karen covers this topic in depth in a 2019 Rum Revelations interview). We have also met and know the mill owners and operators, and we have spent time in their facilities and cane fields in person.

Historically we purchased our sugar cane from Hawaii from HC&S, a family-owned cane producer primarily based on Maui, via C&H Company in California. This was a commodity product. It came to our attention in 2012 that the C&H processing facility in California may have been using Mexican cane as the Hawaiian supply diminished. Because Mexican sugarcane may be a GMO crop and the production process does not meet our standards for environment, harvest and growing practices—and because we consider ourselves to be an American Rum made with American-grown cane—we had to make a change. We are so grateful to have found the Lula Sugar Mill and its family of growers.

Want to learn more about sugar cane?

Check out these articles featuring Montanya founder and owner Karen Hoskin or the links below:

Rum Revelations: Geeking Out About Sugar Cane

The Cocktail Wonk: The Montanya Files