- So when you think of rum, you'll always think
of pirates or beach.
Rum has always had that connotation or that reputation.
We want to push the needle further.
You know how people enjoy single malt?
It has that sipping culture— that's what we hope
to build for rum.
With Luisita Rum, we want to show the consumer
that it can be enjoyed as a sipper as well,
not just in cocktails but as a sipper.
- Hi! I'm John Go. I work with an importing
and distribution company called Grand Cru.
So our purpose is to make more niche
and boutique brands available locally.
I think Filipinos drink so much rum
because it's a very accessible spirit.
Like, we're a tropical country.
It's easy for sugarcane to grow in a tropical country.
We have Tanduay which is, I think,
one of the biggest rum producers in the world.
So the different brands of rum you can find here
in the Philippines are Clairin, Flor de Caña,
Doorly's, Tanduay, and of course, Luisita Rum.
For me, what makes a good rum is it has to have texture
and flavor.
- In Tarlac City, Philippines, the first and only
single estate rum in the country has been crafted
from soil to bottles since 2016.
Inspired by a deep fascination with wine,
father and son duo, Nando and Paco,
have been meticulously creating Luisita Rum with the vision
of producing a premium, farm-centric wine of the tropics.
- They know what it's all about.
- I believe so. Yeah. We have explained.
Cheers, pop.
Wow. The ----- stuff is really good.
- Oh, wow. It's really good.
- Yeah. I haven't tried this one in a while
but it's delicious.
Of course, the bird.
- This is the bird I was telling them.
- Philippine hawk-eagle.
- Yeah. 2136.
What's important with the brand is that we really stick
to the core value, right?
So we're trying to make a spirit that you can really
be proud of, something that's done
in the classic, traditional way of making
a world-class spirit,
and there are certain things you cannot compromise on
and you have to stick to that.
- The three most popular ways to make rum
is the Spanish style, the English style,
and the French style.
The most familiar style we have here is Spanish style.
Luisita is different from other rums made
in the Philippines because, one, they're single estate,
so all of the molasses they use all come from the sugarcane
in their land which gives them more quality control
with the raw material and also gives a higher chance
to expressing terroir.
So it's essentially grass to glass.
- Luisita actually was founded in 1881—the estate.
It was founded, at that time, the Philippines, our country,
was a colony of Spain.
So it was put up by a company called Tabacalera.
So Tabacalera was involved at that time,
they were the biggest tobacco traders in the world.
So the original plan of that company
was to plant tobacco here in Luisita,
but they found that the climate was not suitable
for tobacco farming.
So around... some time in the early, well,
the third of the century, early 1900s,
they shifted to, okay, let's start planting sugarcane.
So in 1927, our family, we had no stake here in Luisita.
My paternal great grandfather, actually he and his siblings,
they had a sugar mill further up north
called Paniqui Sugar Mill.
So it closed down already some time in the 90s,
and they actually had a rum at that time.
And this rum was being sold and really prevalent
in the market after the war.
Looking at the history as I started, like,
asking stories from relatives and looking at history books,
I slowly realized that rum making
is actually, not in our blood, but we've been doing it
for a long time without us even knowing.
So here we have what we call a sandy loam.
Actually, they called it Luisita soil,
they gave it its own designation.
And this kind of soil, it's easily workable,
high in organic matter.
When you have good soil, everything else follows.
So the philosophy is always just focus
on the ground.
So with sugarcane farming, and any farming really,
you have to be very observant, take care of the soil,
and that is actually 99% of the battle.
- Our farming improves every year.
We don’t just plant sugarcane; we also take care of the soil.
Crop rotation is necessary, or adding organic matter
to restore fertility because the soil
has become acidic.
If your soil isn’t good, your production
won’t be good either since the sugarcane won’t grow well.
- Once you take care of the soil, the process
is setup seed beds,
so these would be nurseries where we grow specific varieties
that we pinpoint to specific soil type.
Sugarcane is actually not grown from seed
but we propagate it from the stalk itself.
There are eye buds in the sugarcane plant,
so sugarcane is actually a grass,
you plant it, and then it grows from these eye buds.
Come harvest time, we cut it by hand
in the first plant, and then we also use
mechanical harvesters now.
- What they do is load everything onto the truck first,
then later, they reverse it to pick up the scattered ones
and load them as well.
For example, they can load up to 10, 15, or even 19 tons.
But right now, they haven’t reached 19 tons yet.
They’ll harvest more.
Once loading is done, they transport it
to the central mill.
After that, they go to the ticket booth,
and it’s ready for milling.
- The first time I met Boss Paco was when we planted
at the nipa hut.
You were hauling, feeding, and even removing big stones
from the hut.
You were there too, right?
- Yeah, I was cutting as well.
- Me too. That’s why I know this job very well.
- I saw you cutting at Hacienda Bantug, sir,
with Boss Juan. They climbed up there.
- 47 trucks.
- Yeah, that’s it.
- 2015.
- He also experienced what they’re doing now.
He hauled, climbed the ladder— everything.
- Actually, I wanted to be a lawyer.
So growing up, even in grade school,
my father was a lawyer, so I thought, okay,
I want to be a lawyer.
And I tried it out, spent three months
in his law firm in his little cubicle...
And I'll be honest, I didn't have fun.
So I talked to him and I said, "Okay.
I don't think this is for me."
He sent me here.
"Okay. Try it out in Tarlac."
I thought I was going to be a farm manager right away,
you know?
Like, okay. Top position, here we go.
And apparently, my first job was to cut sugarcane.
I don't know if it was planned, that maybe he wanted me
to have the hardest job so that I'd go back and say,
"Okay. I'll be a lawyer."
Maybe it backfired.
Probably did.
I fell in love with it and I still really remember that.
So I look back on that now.
At that time, it didn't make sense to me.
It's a difficult job.
But now that I look back on it, it gives me confidence
in myself that, okay, I really love this,
'cause I wouldn't have done that, I wouldn't have...
and I'd do it again.
And it reminds me that I'm passionate about it.
When I cut that cane in 2014, 2015,
I didn't go home, I never left this place.
So I've been here for 10 years now.
Almost 11, actually.
So here in Luisita in Central Luzon,
we actually have the biggest fleet
of mechanical harvesters and we're really pushing
to mechanize the industry,
at least for sugarcane which is what we're involved in.
The reason being so that the labor now can transfer
to jobs that cannot be mechanized.
So it's really bringing them to where the human touch
is required.
Once that cane is harvested, it's now sent here to the mill
and it's dumped.
So we have a special technology, we lift the truck up
and the special technology is called gravity.
The cane falls down from the truck.
- This is what we call mill processing—
how we position our trucks before dumping them into the mill.
There are two areas to prevent delays in processing.
As soon as one truck finishes, the next one follows,
keeping the dumping process continuous.
The sugarcane gets leveled— unlike before,
when dumping was uneven.
But once it passes through the equalizer,
it gets properly aligned.
Then, it goes through the mill, where the crushed sugarcane
is squeezed, extracting its juice.
These trucks come from different places—
Victoria, Nueva Ecija, Pangasinan, and Gerona.
Various locations supply us.
- So once that cane is dumped, it goes through a series of,
they call it a Unigrator.
To keep it simple, it's a lot of cane knives crushing it.
Inside the mill, you can just imagine
it's a sugarcane juicer but in a large scale.
The cane is really now squeezed,
we extract as much juice as we can,
and that juice now gets sent to the boiling house.
It's heated up, we evaporate as much water
as we can, really to concentrate the sugar content
in the sugarcane juice.
But inside the mill, that cane juice now goes
to the boiling house and whatever's left over,
'cause 78% of that sugarcane stalk
is actually fiber,
and that fiber is now really crushed
and we send that now to the boiler.
And in the boiler, it's burnt and that generates steam,
that steam is now sent to our turbine generators
to generate power.
So everything you need for sugarcane factories
and the sugar industry is almost, there I say,
carbon neutral because the energy required
to process the sugarcane and the sugar is also in the plant.
So that part is...
I'm always amazed by that.
We call it bagasse—that fiber.
It's now burnt, and then, of course,
people now think, "Oh, you're throwing pollutants
into the atmosphere."
So what we did, again, going back to taking care
of the soil is we put a, they call it a scrubber,
so it's just water jets that shoot into the chute,
the chimney, and now all the particulates fall
to the ground and it's called mill ash
which is very high in potassium and other trace elements—
molybdenum, all of that good stuff.
That mill ash now we apply it back into the field.
So again, it's a closed loop system.
So that's what happens with the fiber.
The juice, which is now in the boiling house,
once it hits the clarity that's needed,
the bricks that's required, we send that now
to the evaporators where more water is evaporated.
- This is the pan floor station.
This is the evaporation station, where we remove the water.
We concentrate the juice from 30 brix to 65 brix.
After boiling for 24 hours, it becomes C sugar.
The continuous centrifugal basket separates it.
This is our C sugar, and the remaining molasses
is the final molasses—
extracted here in the boiling house.
This final molasses is then sent to the distillery
for fermentation to produce alcohol.
- So molasses, locally we call it "pulot."
It's all the sugars that can no longer be crystallized.
- Here, we grow the sugar crystals from stage three
to pan numbers four and five.
We monitor their size and color until they reach
the final five-glass stage.
If we test them and no crystals stick
to the glass, it means they’re clean.
- Okay. So the final step or the second check that we have
for the molasses quality would be in the quality
of our raw sugar or our brown sugar.
So by flavor, by taste, I can tell if it's too sweet,
my molasses quality is not that good.
If there's a little bit of bitterness,
a little bit of molasses flavor, sugarcane flavor,
then it's great for distillation.
So right now, this sugar, when you taste it,
based on the taste alone...
No, not yet. It's not just like alcohol
but it's not overly sweet, so you don't want it
to be too sweet.
That means that there's still enough sugar in the molasses
that when we ferment it, we're going to be able
to hit the desired flavor profile for our rum distillate.
So the sugar is now sent to the warehouse for repacking
and you know, to supply the sugar in the market.
But the important part here when we got into making
the rum distillate is the aroma that you smell
when you taste the unaged rum before it hits the barrel.
This is what we look for, this smell, this aroma,
this brown sugar, almost like a crème brûlée
kind of essence.
And then, that's what tell us, okay, this distillate
is good for rum.
Yeah. This reaches the supermarket,
and then some of it we send to become white sugar,
depending on the market.
But this is our contribution to Philippine agriculture.
We focused on fermentation because in fermentation,
that is where alcohol and flavors are made.
- This is where we propagate yeast.
From just 12 liters of lab yeast, we expand it
to a large-scale volume of around 22,000 liters.
The small cultivator contains wort,
which is a combination of molasses—
a byproduct of sugar— along with water, chlorine,
and other nutrients for yeast.
The molasses is sent here for processing.
The wort is aerated to further multiply the yeast.
- So after this fermentation, we got to distillation.
So the yeast, the little animals which are friends,
they consume the residual sugars in the molasses
and turn that into what we know as alcohol,
but in our case, rum distillate.
So rum distillate is rum that has not seen
the inside of a barrel.
It doesn't have an age yet,
but there's already flavor there.
Once fermentation is done, we send it to this 98-year-old.
It was put up in 1926/1927.
Distillery.
So it's a twin column distillation process
designed specifically for rum, or for spirits.
The inside of that is all copper.
We have about 70 copper plates and bubble caps.
I don't want to get too technical.
But basically, to make good rum distillate,
you want the inside of your column still to be copper.
Here you'll see, we call it column no. 3.
So it's our oldest column.
So whatever was in fermentation gets fed first
into the beer still.
And then from the beer still, it goes to the rectifying column.
So the rectifying column is where we get...
we now collect our unaged rum—
so the rum distillate.
In simple terms, the way I like to view it,
I'm playing hide-and-seek to find the flavor.
So if you will notice, there are a lot of tapping points.
So we put a tapping point in each part
of the rectifying column.
So as we go on, every hour we're tasting,
and we find where the good alcohol is.
So it's hide-and-seek.
So sometimes we might get it here,
sometimes we might get it here,
most times we get it here.
So again, it's a sensory experience.
You smell it.
And to make the decision,
it's just like food, if it tastes good, collect,
if you don't like how it tastes, divert it.
After distillation, it's coming off the still
at 95% or even 93% alcohol, that's not...
you can drink it but actually, no,
you cannot drink it, do not drink it.
So that's already rum distillate.
That's already considered rum.
What you do now, what we do is we get that
and we now send that to our blending facility
where we slowly drop the proof or the alcohol percent
to about 62-65% ABV or alcohol by volume.
And once that's done, once you hit the target ABV,
that's what we now put into the barrel.
At least as far as aging is concerned in the bodega,
we find here in Luisita that it should,
given the climate, it takes about two years
to reach the profile that we are looking for.
Now, our oldest batch is eight years already actually.
So once it's in that barrel, the rum distillate
is interacting with the wood, all of that lignin layers
and you really just let time do its thing,
let nature do its thing, and all of these chemical compounds,
alcohol, esters, congeners, they now form inside the barrel
and the taste develops even further.
- Yes, aging is a big factor in rum production.
In the Philippines, because of our warm climate,
our aging process is faster compared
to colder countries where aging takes 10 to 15 years.
- One good thing that came out of the pandemic
is all the barrels that you see here,
we tasted it and we scored it.
We scored it on a rating of one to five.
So this is called the barrel thief,
but this is the real barrel thief.
(chuckles)
So this is our way of testing the barrel
and rum that is inside.
So we make it a point to taste at least...
maximum 30 barrels in one day,
and then we score it one to five based on flavor,
aroma, and then style.
So style would be how close it is to the flavor
or the profile of Luisita Rum that we are looking for.
- How old is that?
- So this one would be...
This is about five years. Yeah.
So you guys asked a while ago what is my favorite way
of drinking Luisita Rum, it's like this,
straight from the barrel, neat.
So this is 65%.
- So Bar By is an architectural firm by day,
and then a cocktail bar at night.
So after working, you can drink.
I started as a guest at this bar.
Then, after sharing a few drinks, it all started—
“Okay, let’s work together.” That’s how it happened.
I think a lot of things happen when people drink
and share stories, and maybe that’s
what happened here.
- Our menu offers a fun twist on classic signatures,
and we also create bespoke cocktails.
Here at Bar By, we use calamansi liqueur
and dalandan.
Our latest addition is Intramuros chocolate liqueur,
along with Luisita Rum and other local rums.
- We use a lot of local spirits and liquors.
One of them is Luisita Rum.
In fact, two of our bartenders visited the farm,
saw the entire process, and now they truly understand
their drinks.
- We highlight local ingredients, produce, and liquors—
products that can compete with international brands.
Right now, I’ll be making the River Valley—
a clarified cocktail using milk punch.
Most rums originate from tropical countries
like Barbados, the Caribbean, and Trinidad & Tobago.
Sugar is a basic necessity in the Philippines,
so we can say that we have the raw materials to make rum.
- With Luisita Rum, we always want to keep
that sense of place.
So we're not going to release a product
that we feel is... will not be worthy
of the name Luisita Rum.
It has to be something we're proud of.
People always ask me that, and it's sort of a crossroad,
"Are you going to go mass market?"
"Are you going to go full production?"
"You want to be in every shelf of the world?"
Of course, a part of you will say yes,
but if I do that and I lose the quality,
that's not the dream for Luisita Rum
because like I said, we want to show the world
that we're capable of producing a really world-class
premium spirit that just tastes really good
and it hits that quality that we're looking for.
- I'm still kicking. Senior citizen.
I'm super senior.
I was born and raised here, and I’m still
in the sugarcane business.
I continue working here, and I’m proud that I was able
to send my children to school because of this.
I hope it lasts.
We teach the younger ones so that when we’re gone,
they can continue the work. That’s my dream.
- I was able to put my children through school.
I supported all of them through this hacienda.
As long as you’re happy with your job,
that’s what matters.
Even at 62, I’m still working here.
- Seeing the fruits of my labor in the market,
knowing that people are enjoying what we’ve created—
it’s fulfilling.
We started this project with the Cojuangcos
when it was still small.
Now, it’s growing, expanding, and I’m very proud
of what we’ve achieved.
My dream for Luisita Rum is for it to grow even further,
for all our projects to succeed,
and for it to be renowned worldwide—
not just in the Philippines.
- So the potential for Filipino rum worldwide
is good because in other parts of the world,
rum is becoming more popular.
Historically, most of the rum come from the Caribbean,
but with the rising trend of rum, other parts of the world,
mostly Asia, they're making more rum.
I think Luisita is a good indicator that the Philippines
can have more craft rum brands in the future.
- It’s delighting to hear people say, “Wow, we’re not just
planting sugarcane anymore— we’re planting rum.”
It's nice to hear because now you're value adding,
of course, and it uplifts the community, it helps them.
Make the most of it and the dream is that
the brand really outlives me.
The driving factor really there would be to create
something that, you know, 100 years from now,
200 years from now, it's still there,
Luisita Rum is still there.
And what I've learned now is that, you know,
the smile is enough.
My dad would smile.
It's already their way of saying that it's a product worthy
of their name, it's a product worthy
of carrying on the name of Luisita.