Let's go make a lime on Spice Island.

Carney has been out filming in the West Indies this month, and it's a bit of a long story.

Rum has had some hard punches in the past. According to the spirits industry, for the last five years rum has been going to be the next big thing. This simply hasn’t happened because there has been no innovation. That is about to change.
For over a year now Mark Reynier has had his sights firmly locked onto the Caribbean island of Grenada. There’s little doubt regarding his provenance and success within the mystical world of the spirits, having successfully taken Bruichladdich distillery from the doldrums of Scottish single malt production to place it centre stage on the world map. The ideas and philosophies learnt from the Victorian distillery on Isle of Islay were distilled and provided the model for his next venture in Waterford, Ireland. Within one year and five days, Mark and a new team took a Guinness brewery and converted it into a fully functioning, super-modern distillery of fine Irish single malt whiskey. There, extrapolating ideas tested successfully at Bruichladdich, he works directly with 46 individual farmers, keeping barley separate throughout the entire distilling process from field to barrel to bottle. This pioneering approach of ultimate provenance and traceability means every drop in every bottle being traceable back to the field and the farmer who grew it.It’s not reinventing the wheel, it’s going back to how it used to be. Turning the market on its head and concentrating on the supply chain and the terroir or provenance of the raw materials. Making farmers part of the story. Paying and including them with the respect they deserve. Spending less than competitors on marketing because the story is real. It does not need over-inflated rhetoric and imagery designed at great expense by some well-meaning and expensive agency. That money stays in education and the production of the barley, or in this case, the sugar cane.
So why is our man in Grenada? Simple: a series of fortunate coincidences and long term friendships put Grenada on the map. Mark’s friend and accountant, John Adams, had pestered him to look at Grenada, home of a university friend, whilst looking for a home for his rum idea. The 10-year journey to Grenada was via Figi, Mauritius, Cuba, Jamaica and Saint Lucia. Each step bringing him closer to the Island.
There was only one problem, well actually there are quite a few. Grenada is beautiful, but there is no cane here, or only tiny pockets of it on the fringes of old broken up estates that have a lot of bad memories. Culturally and globally slavery was only abolished legally in 1833. When the waves of this ugly historical turning point were felt in the Caribbean we cannot say, but the great grandparents of today’s farmers still have this opinion that growing cane is a kept man’s job. There is also the logistics of finding, clearing and preparing old neglected farming land. So to change an entire opinion and try to grow cane once again on an island with a poor and beaten down attitude to agriculture was going to be a gigantic challenge. It needed a completely new approach. That’s what this is. Mark hopes to empower farmers as he has done before – on the two other remote, poor Atlantic islands he has worked on - by commissioning world renowned sugar experts Booker Tate. They are working with him assessing the viability of cane production on Grenada and all of the other complex issues that go with building a distillery on a stunningly beautiful Island that has sensitive environmental issues and political ones too.
The decline of the sugar industry in Grenada can be linked directly to the end of slavery.  Without a source of low (or no)-cost labour the industry could no longer stand on its own two feet and other crops requiring less back-breaking work were adopted.  Nutmeg, bananas and cocoa have all had their day since those times, at the expense of sugarcane.  Grenada is the source of the world’s best quality nutmeg and a major proportion of its agricultural exports and GDP are derived from this easily grown and harvested crop.  So why on earth would we want to return to the horrors of the past?
The world of sugarcane has made great strides since the abolition of slavery and, given the right market for the crop, it has become possible to grow it profitably with little of the human cost of the past.  High technology and mechanisation have transformed sugarcane agriculture.  Booker Tate was asked to bring its experience of this new world of sugarcane to the project.  The first step was to find a source of varieties that would serve the goals of the project well.  They would have to grow happily in Grenada’s climate and soils, resist attacks by common pests and diseases and yet produce juice in sufficient quantities and of sufficient quality for the distillery.  A deal was brokered with the region’s leading sugarcane breeding station in Barbados, the West Indies Central Sugar Cane Breeding Station, in which the IP rights and genetic material of eight of the best varieties available would be provided to the project in return for a royalty agreement.  Grenada was a founding member of the breeding station many years ago and this arrangement will see the beginnings of the country being welcomed back to the fold of West Indian sugarcane growers.   We sent this valuable material to Marbleamber Laboratories in Loughborough where it has been multiplied under the microscope and the result is 35,000 perfectly formed sugarcane plant embryos.  These have been gradually moved to Grenada and the babies are now growing happily in a controlled environment mist house at Maran until they are big enough to face the big bad world of the Westerhall nursery.This is where the journey ends for now. Ultimately the young, acclimatised plants will flourish at the nursery and produce enough cane seedlings to propagate 630 acres. What is needed are farmers and landholders who are interested in this project to come forward to express their interest. There will be constructive educational guidance and modern machinery to help produce the best canes possible on the Island.This won’t be a rum you can buy everywhere. This will be a rum with a story. From field to bottle for the discerning global gastronomes. Mark’s vision is to reinvigorate an entire community and make farming a realistic and rewarding journey in helping to create the most complex and compelling new rum in the world.