Hampden Estate Distillery

Distillation: batch
Source Material: molasses
Major Brands: Hampden Estate, Rum Fire
Estimated LAA/year: 1.4 million
Founded: 1753
Ownership: private

Introduction

Of all of Jamaica's distilleries, Hampden Estate remains the closest to what it looked like a century or more ago. Its majestic pot stills, dunder tanks, muck pit, picturesque tropical grounds, and beautiful great house make it an essential pilgrimage for Jamaican rum enthusiasts.

Hampden lies within the lush Queen of Spain valley in the Trelawny parish. It was a sugar plantation by 1753, and distillation likely soon followed. By 1779, the Hampden great house, which overlooks the estate grounds, featured a ground-level rum store. For its first 250 years, the estate changed family ownership only once. During those many decades, the estate produced and sold unaged rum in bulk; there was no aging nor any Hampden Estate branded rum.

Hampden Estate was in financial distress at the turn of the twenty-first century, and in 2003 the Jamaican government assumed ownership of the estate. Jamaica's minister of agriculture noted:

Hampden factory was archaic, and it appears the owners were not re-investing, and as such, the estate was not profitable.

After a legal battle with the prior owners ended in 2009, the government sold Hampden to the Hussey family, who operate it as part of Everglades Farms Ltd. The Husseys own numerous businesses in Jamaica, including hotels, horses, and pharmacies. The estate purchase also included Long Pond's sugar factory, but not the Long Pond distillery.

The Husseys set out to raise Hampden's profile and profitability. A first step was launching the Rum Fire brand while continuing their bulk rum sales; they also began putting down rum for aging. In 2018 the Hampden Estate brand launched in partnership with La Maison & Velier. Previously, any aged rum labeled as Hampden Estate would have come from an independent bottler.

In 2020, the Husseys made additional investments in distillery capacity, including the purchase of two new pot stills, which increased the distillery's capacity to at least 1.4 million LAA annually.

On the estate grounds is a small family graveyard where several of the estate's prior owners and family now rest. Of particular note is the grave site of Dermot Owen Kelly-Lawson, Hampden's owner in the early twentieth century. His initials, DOK, are also the name of Hampden's highest ester marque, with an ester level of 1,500-1,600 gr/hlAA.

Distillery Operations

It's impossible to miss Hampden's entrance—a long, photogenic drive lined with king palms. The driveway leads through lush tropical grounds and past a small cemetery and great house.

Fermentation

Hampden prepares its mash in a large, dimly lit room crisscrossed by wooden beams and walkways. Shards of sunlight stream in through gaps in the roof; a knife can slice the humidity. The walls are covered by a layer of dark fungus.

Sunk into the ground, two large wooden vats churn a thick brown liquid—molasses and other ingredients undergoing mixing to make mash. The intensity of the unpleasant aroma is off the charts. Hampden is rum-making as it was centuries ago—gritty, sticky, and smelly.

Hampden's fermentation relies on airborne yeasts. Those omnipresent yeast and mold spores, fostered by the rich terroir of the fermentation area, create a stew of acids, alcohols, and esters that makes Hampden's rum unique. Power-washing the distillery to make it tourist friendly would destroy the unique terroir and flavor that's been cultivated and stewarded over hundreds of years.

Hampden's heavy rum wash consists of dunder, along with molasses, water drawn from a nearby dam, and cane acid. The molasses is sourced from the Caribbean Molasses Co. and is not pasteurized or clarified before use. Hampden makes its cane acid with estate-grown sugarcane.

After all the ingredients are mixed in the in-ground cistern, then the mash is pumped to one of the open-air cedar fermenters in an adjoining room. It takes between eight to fifteen days to finish primary and secondary fermentation.

In between rows of vats is a trough—Hampden's muck pit. Muck is both a toxic goo and secret sauce for making ultra-funky, high ester rums; it's described in Chapter 6.

Hampden's muck is not one of the initial mash ingredients, nor is it used for all the rum made here. Instead, it's added to heavy-rum wash after the alcoholic fermentation completes but before distillation. The muck induces a bacterial fermentation that creates a different set of organic flavor compounds. Such bacterial ferments may take up to an additional two weeks to complete.

Distillation

Hampden's still-house is in a long, open-sided, two-story structure. On the upper level is a row of colossal double retort pot stills. The six pot stills come from three countries: Scotland, the US, and South Africa.

In order of installation, they are:

John Dore (1960)	9,000 liters	(2,000 Imperial gallons)
Vendome (1994)	22,700 liters	(5,000 Imperial gallons)
Forsyths #1 (2010)	22,700 liters	(5,000 Imperial gallons)
TNT (2016)	22,700 liters	(5,000 Imperial gallons)
Forsyths #2 (2020)	22,700 liters	(5,000 Imperial gallons)
Forsyths #3 (2020)	22,700 liters	(5,000 Imperial gallons)

All the stills, save one, have kettles of nearly 23,000 liters, matching the pot stills at Appleton Estate and Clarendon. Heating is by internal steam coils rather than direct firing.

A typical distillation pass takes approximately seven hours. The lees from the retorts are saved for later use in the Cousins process, a method of making extremely high ester distillate, up to 5,000 gr/hlAA.

After the Hussey family purchased Hampden in 2009, they began aging rum in ex-bourbon casks. Hampden's angel's share is in the six to seven percent range, and every three years, barrels of the same age and marque are consolidated to reduce evaporative losses. Currently, more than two thousand casks are aging, although that number is expected to grow substantially, as a warehouse capable of holding five thousand barrels was recently constructed.

Each marque is aged separately prior to blending. The majority of Hampden's rum is still sold as unaged bulk rum to merchants like E&A Scheer. A small bottling line on site will soon be replaced by a larger operation.

Sidebar: John Crow Batty

Part of Hampden lore involves an amusing historical anecdote. In times past, distillery workers (illegally) snuck away with the distillation's heads and tails, full of undesirable and potentially unsafe congeners. The locals who consumed it called it John Crow Batty.

In Jamaica, a John Crow is a vulture, while batty is slang for ass. That is, "rum" tasting like a vulture's ass. This style of rum is still sold in Jamaica today, with Hampden's Rum Fire and Charley's J.B. from Wray & Nephew as prime examples.