The Column Still’s Influence on Rum’s Evolution

The column still has been an integral part of rum making for nearly 200 years. Today, the vast majority of rum made around the world is made with column stills, and many revered distilleries include column distillation in their repertoire. However, column distillation wasn’t universally well-received early on. Even today, some people think that column distilled rum isn’t quite as good as pot-distilled rum. With that backdrop, let’s look at how the column still has shaped rum making. See this earlier story if you’re not familiar with pot and column distillation basics.

For its first two hundred years, rum was made in crude pot stills on small Caribbean sugar estates. Each estate had a small sugar mill, boiling house, and a distillery that used molasses and skimmings from the boiling house.

Two distillations were required to get the rum to a sufficient alcoholic strength. After each distillation, the pot stills needed to be cooled, drained, and cleaned. This was a time-consuming process, so a typical estate might only make around 20,000 liters of rum annually.

A Turning Point

The industrial revolution of the 1800s radically changed the Caribbean sugar and rum industries. Steam-powered engines and advances in sugarcane processing enabled a large sugar factory to perform the work of many estates.

Concurrently, the early 1800s saw the first continuous distillation devices from inventors like Celier-Blumentahl, Coffey, and Derosne. These devices, also known as column stills, could operate nonstop for many days and were more energy efficient. A spirit distilled using a column still costs a small fraction of the same spirit if pot distilled.

Originally intended to make European spirits like whiskey and brandy, column stills appeared in the West and East Indies as early as the 1830s. Unlike labor-intensive pot stills, continuous distillation was much better suited to handle the flood of molasses coming from industrial sugar factories.

The initial adoption of column stills was slow, however. They required skilled operators and frequent maintenance, a challenge in the far-flung colonies. There were also concerns that column stills could make flavorful rum. As a result, Barbados did not have a column still until 1893, and Jamaica held out till 1960.

These feelings weren’t limited to rum making. The purpose of the landmark 1908 Royal Commission on Whisky and Other Potable Spirits was to ascertain if column-distilled malt spirit could be called Scotch whisky. (The verdict: Yes.)

Spreading through the Caribbean

While the British were slow to embrace column stills early on, the Spanish and French colonies had fewer qualms. They didn’t make rum in earnest until the 1800s, and they often purchased the latest technology, i.e., column stills.

On Cuba, a lighter style of rum making was taking shape, which column stills were well suited to make. In the French territories of Martinique and Guadeloupe, a new type of column still known as a “Creole column” took shape. It combined the usual two-column configuration into a taller, single column well-suited to distilling at lower alcoholic strengths. The creole column is synonymous with rhum agricole.

Multicolumn Rum

In the 1900s, an evolution in column distillation technology further transformed rum making. The traditional two-column setup gained additional columns (Aldehyde and hydroselection) specially tailored to remove certain components and further “purify” the spirit. Such stills are known as multicolumn stills and can be configured to distill from very heavy to very light rum.

Many distilleries now blend two different distillates. The first is a “heavy” rum distilled using a single column still. The other is a light, multicolumn-distilled rum. Puerto Rican and Cuban rums are emblematic of this style.

The highly versatile column still may be the most versatile tool in the rum maker’s toolkit, capable of making both highly flavorful rums as well as very light rums preferred by many consumers. Without column stills, rum would be less diverse and more expensive.