Jean Baptiste Spirits: Certified Cajun Heritage Distilled into Louisiana Rum

Louisiana has established several programs and designations to promote agricultural products that are made, grown, or processed in the state through its Certified Louisiana Logo program. These designations include Certified Louisiana, Certified Creole, Certified Craft Beverage, Certified Farm to Table, and Certified Cajun. To qualify for the Certified Cajun logo, a product must be representative of the culture of people generally of Acadian descent, and at least 50% of the product must be made, grown, produced, manufactured, processed, or packed in Louisiana. Jean Baptiste Spirits meets these criteria. Founder Tim Westcott's family has deep Cajun roots, despite his Irish surname, and the distillery sources its molasses and sugarcane within a 12-mile radius of its Broussard facility.

After a long career supporting the oil industry, Tim Westcott drew on his homebrewing experience and nearly 200 years of family tradition to establish Jean Baptiste Spirits, focusing on one of Louisiana's principal agricultural products: sugarcane. The brand is named after Westcott's seventh great-grandfather, Jean-Baptiste Honoré d'Estréhan de Beaupré, a pioneering sugarcane producer in mid-18th-century colonial French Louisiana. This Jean-Baptiste was also a close friend of Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, often called the "Father of Louisiana." At the time of his death, he was reportedly the largest producer of tafia, an early, relatively crude form of cane spirit. According to Westcott, Jean-Baptiste's daughter, Marie Marguerite Destrehan, and her husband, Étienne de Boré, inherited one of his sugarcane farms. In 1795, de Boré perfected the process of producing granulated sugar from sugarcane in Louisiana. These innovations helped make sugarcane profitable as a commercial crop, encouraging planters throughout the state to cultivate it on a larger scale.

The distillery currently offers two expressions of rum, both developed through recipes and production processes refined over time through meticulous experimentation. Westcott experimented with different yeast cultures and varying proportions of molasses and sugarcane in the mash bill. Ultimately, he determined that traditional Norwegian farmhouse Kveik yeast offered the optimal combination of flavor and fermentation performance. He also adopted a blend of molasses and sugarcane rather than following the more conventional approach of using molasses or cane sugar alone. Because blackstrap molasses has a relatively low sugar content, adding cane sugar helps provide the fermentable sugars needed for the mash. Both ingredients are sourced locally: the sugarcane comes from the Louisiana Sugar Cane Cooperative (LASUCA) sugar mill, while the blackstrap molasses comes from the C. S. Steen Syrup Mill.

Following a fermentation period of seven to ten days, the resulting wash is reportedly drinkable on its own, a characteristic Westcott discovered during assignments in Southeast Asia. Despite this, the wash proceeds to distillation, where it is brought to 103 proof using a small hybrid pot still. The resulting spirit is clarified through a bed of crushed pecan nutshells before being reduced to 82 proof and bottled as Jean Baptiste Silver Rum Select. This is unlike any silver rum we have tasted. Its character is closer to that of a rhum agricole, with pronounced herbaceous qualities and some grassy notes. The finish is clean, making it a highly approachable rum.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the distillery was still in its infancy, used oak barrels were in short supply. However, J.T. Meleck Distillers, a local rice distillery, was able to provide Westcott with approximately a dozen used barrels that had weathered to varying degrees. Some leaked heavily, prompting Westcott to draw on a family tradition. He remembered his grandmother describing how the inside of barrels could be coated with molasses. The molasses penetrated the wood's fibers and helped solve the leakage problem. The results proved so beneficial that coating the barrels with molasses became a standard practice at the distillery.

This process contributes to the production of Jean Baptiste Rested Rum Reposée, which begins as the Silver Rum Select which is then rested for five to seven months in the molasses-coated barrels. The rum is then finished for at least another month in specially made, lightly toasted Louisiana bald cypress casks. Before bottling, it is brought down to 86 proof. This rum evolves gradually in the glass; it begins with the sweet, herbaceous character of Silver Rum Select before transitioning to subtle baking spices and pronounced dried-fruit notes. The additional maturation and cypress finishing create a distinctive expression that makes this an excellent sipping rum.

The final detail worth noting is the distillery's distinctive, cosmetic-grade bottle, another product of the supply challenges experienced during the COVID-19 era. This substantial bottle is topped with a Maltese cross, whose eight points symbolize the eight Beatitudes. The cross is associated with the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John, an order formally dedicated to Saint John the Baptist.  The current label includes the harvest year, although Westcott plans to introduce more non-vintage releases as production increases.

Cheers.