messageinabottle

Message In A Bottle: The Story Of Old New Orleans Rum
BY LAUREN THOM
FB News Staff Writer

NEW ORLEANS-- Ask any Louisiana native if they’ve ever had Louisiana sugar and you’ll
likely get a definite, quick response. However, try asking someone if they’d ever had distilled
rum from Louisiana and you’ll probably get a few scratches on the head.

If you could bottle up the passion that the
makers of Old New Orleans Rum have for
rebuilding New Orleans and producing a true
Louisiana inspired rum, you’d have a city
back on it’s feet and an intoxicatingly good
molasses based spirit. While the former
is a work in progress, the latter is a
present reality.

The Big Easy is known for its drinking
problem. From go-cups to drive-thru
daiquiris shops, it seems only fitting that
New Orleans would be the home to the
only rum distillery on the U.S. mainland.
But the process of opening the distillery
was about as complicated as the rum
distillation process itself.

The Big Easy got its namesake for being
“easy” for certain things, but for Celebration
Distillation, the parent company of Old New
Orleans Rum, the path to production in the
Big Easy was anything but easy. The laws
after Prohibition made it very difficult both
legally and financially to start an alcoho
l beverage production business, then throw
a catastrophic hurricane in the mix and you’ve
got a decathlon of a problem.

Ben Gersh, General Manager of Celebration Distillation says Hurricane Katrina set them
back so much that recovery seemed impossible. “We worked so hard for so long and
we were worried that all might be lost,” Gersh said.

The Old New Orleans Rum warehouse, located on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans, had
over six feet of water after Hurricane Katrina. Upon learning of the damage, the distillers
immediately thought there was no way to revive the 12-year-old operation. After all, rum
distillation is a three-year process and there was just no way to recover after losing the aging
rum. Old New Orleans Rum was sending an SOS to the world.

When the distillers arrived back to the warehouse after Katrina
to assess the damage, they learned that all of their machinery
had been ruined. However, while walking around the water-
stained walls of the warehouse, the distillers were in for
another surprise. They came to find that the barrels of aging
rum had strangely not been affected by the storm.
“The aged rum came back above the flood,” Gersh said,
“We were shocked. “We realized at that moment we were
going to make it. “Then our passion expanded and all of a
sudden it wasn’t just about bringing our product back, it was
about bringing the city back too.”

The first post-Katrina bottle of Old New Orleans Rum was
hand-bottled in January 2007 within those same water-stained
walls of the warehouse. In the last eight months, Celebration
Distillation has sold more bottles than it had in almost ten
years of production. The end of the summer will mark the
beginning of an era for Old New Orleans Rum. In August they
will be distributing their product to nine states across the
country and will see a three hundred percent increase in
production. You’ll need more than a go-cup to bottle up
that success.

Perhaps the diligence of these distillers should send a messageto the rest of the city in its
effort to rebuild: don’t give up. In irony of their story, the definition of distillation is to “extract the
essential elements of something.” Ironically, the makers of Old New Orleans Rum never lost
sight of the “essential elements” of their operation, even after Katrina damage had “extracted”
their dreams from becoming a reality. The makers of Old New Orleans Rum are not just
distillers by profession, but also distillers by character.

A bottle Old New Orleans Rum is more than just a bottle of booze, it’s a bottle of belief and a
sobered-up dream come true.

On the web: www.neworleansrum.com

HOMERUM. Inside the Old New Orleans Rum
warehouse distillery.