 Hawaii Food and Farmer Series. My name is Stephanie Mock and I will be guest hosting this week's episode for Matt and Justine. Today we have a very special guest with us, Jason Brand, co-owner of Manurele Distillers, who make Kohana Hawaiian Agricultural. So the feature of our series here is to meet about locals who are furthering our Hawaii agriculture, making new products and really bringing these two worlds together for the community and also for research into agriculture and diversifying Hawaii's agricultural scene. So like I mentioned, we have Jason Brand of Manurele Distillers, our local rum makers who make local Kohana rum. So let's take a quick opportunity and meet Jason. Jason, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me Stephanie. Yeah, so our show usually we bring someone on, we interview them, and we learn a little bit about their background, how they got involved in agriculture, how they came to Hawaii, or both, and then we'll talk a little bit more about why you're here specifically today. Okay, so my first question, how did you get involved in agriculture? Sure, a good question. My background originally was in finance and during that time, or while I was in finance, I was living in Tokyo, Japan, and my wife was working in New York, and Hawaii was always our meeting place. So finally we decided to move to Hawaii just so we can see each other. And then when we got to Hawaii we were like, well, how do we become part of this wonderful community? And we thought one of the better ways to do it was through agriculture. And so we started to look at either Hawaii food independence, which we built a very large sustainable farm, and then Hawaii energy independence. And it was in the pursuit of energy dependence, which I did with one of my business partners, that we stumbled upon these Hawaiian cane varieties. And the cane varieties, which we were originally looking for biodiesel, proved to have wonderful Hawaiian stories, legends, and cultural purposes. And that led us right into the world of, I guess, sugar cane growing, and then ultimately run making. And so you're talking, so originally you were looking at sugar cane as a biodiesel, and it realized that maybe it wasn't the best option, but that obviously this heritage crop here in Hawaii, which we could spend, we could spend thousands of shows talking about just the history of sugar cane here in Hawaii and how it made it, what it is today. But you were looking at it as a biodiesel, maybe, maybe not the best. And so you're like, what other uses can we do? And that kind of naturally led you to run. Well, let me tell you a little bit about these canes, because they're very different than what people find on, let's say, Kauai or Maui in terms of the sugar industry. The Hawaiians had sugar cane roughly at the time of the first voyagers reaching the island, meaning they brought the first sugar canes with them. So we're talking almost a thousand years ago. And to give us context in that time period, when people, at least in the United States, think about sugar cane, they're usually thinking about Florida, Louisiana, or the Caribbean. Christopher Columbus brought sugar cane to the Caribbean on his third voyage. So you're talking about the year 1500. So you're talking about 500 years ago versus Hawaii having it a thousand years ago. So the history of sugar cane here is a lot longer. It's just when we think of sugar cane today, and it had a wonderful, depending on your viewpoint, impact on the island's economy and shaping the culture, you're talking more about the plantation date. These sugar canes come way before the plantation, right? What happened during the 1800s, 1900s, when the plantations moved in, they had the goal of making table sugar. And so the Hawaiian canes, and we'll get into them, are very fat. They're very juicy, and they grow not necessarily straight up, but kind of lean over everything that a sugar plantation does not want. They want thin cane, so it's easy to go through the mill, medium juice content, because they're trying to evaporate the juice out to get the crystals. And they wanted to grow straight, so it's easy to harvest. So everything that they don't want. So by it, I guess, by 1900, most of these Hawaiian canes were just gone. And all the Louisiana and Florida and mainland canes is what you find now in the big plantations on the islands, which also are no longer. So we find ourselves in a funny position of after the last sugar plantation closed, one of the larger sugar growers on the island, but we're back to the original Hawaiian sugar canes. The heirloom varieties you're talking about, as opposed to the commercial production monocropping that we saw in the plantations. Exactly. And so if you just look real quick, at some of these, this is a purple can. Most people are thinking of, and this is called mahaula. Most people are thinking about sugarcane as a green yellow cane that they're familiar with from the mainland or even from Maui or Kauai. It's what they're familiar with. You know, it would be more akin to this color. Although this is a lot fatter than what they're looking at. But you can see we showed you purple that's yellow. This is actually Manu Lele Sugarcane. The namesake company. This was the first sugarcane we found. And it came from a botanical garden. So we found 22 of the 34 heirloom varieties that we grow, and they've all been genetically tested. We work with one of the lead ethnobotanists at University of Hawaii. We work a lot with some of the lead scientists from Hark to the Hawaiian Agricultural Research Center, which are the former sugar scientists from the plantation days. And those two bodies or universities have really helped us identify and expand our collection. We found about 22 varieties of the 34 growing in the Tanuku Gardens and found the rest through nature walks. So it was really just walking, wandering through fields. Sugarcane is a grass. So it will grow. You know, it's very forgiving. It's a very forgiving plant. It'll grow and we would just have to look for these canes and then eventually identify them. But you know, we saw purple. We saw yellowish green. This is purple and yellow with stripes. Here you have one that's, I guess purple with yellow. It's a little bit more green. And here is interesting. You can see how these nodes are much tighter than here. And this says that this cane experienced a bit of a water shortage, right? So it was stressed in this phase of its life. Another neat thing, if you don't mind me keep talking. No, please do. That's why we brought you on today. Another neat thing about the sugarcane is for those who don't know sugarcane, you can see right here, the cakey or the little baby plant is coming out of the node. So it's coming out right out of the knuckle. So when this sugarcane wants to reproduce, it's going to lay down these stalks are 14 feet tall. So they will lay down. And then when it hits the ground, the cakey is going to kind of grow. So it self spaces, right? And then it'll keep laying down and keep growing. Eventually, one of these nodes will actually send out a chemical and kill the other one. So it doesn't overcrowd. This is a cane. This is one of the more powerful canes that we found. This is called Laocona. You can see it's white and green. The leaves of this plant have a white stripe in it. And it's Hawaiian name means to bender to break. And it is used that this is a neat story. Manu Lele means flying bird in Hawaii. And there was actually tales of a love story. I love ceremony or a love spell that a kahuna priest can enchant Manu Lele Sugarcane fly away to fly away and bring in the love of another. And there were three Hawaiian canes that could bring in love or create kind of bonds of connection. And the antidote was Laocona or death. The strongest antidote. Or at least the one if you had to choose one. But those are neat legends and stories that we found as we were researching these canes originally for energy. But when you started to see one how old they are and two for Hawaiians sugarcane juice was used in all their tribal tattoos. Right. It was ash in the juice of a sugarcane. Sugarcane was used in almost every Hawaiian medicine. Sugarcane leaves were used in wallpapers of the houses. There was a time where command man mandated that sugarcane is grown outside of almost every Hawaiian house. So that if the military came through, there was basically Gatorade or pick me up without you have to drink. Sugarcane was a superfood in the sense of if there was a drought, it was one of the last plants to die. And so it stored the most juice content. So it was a life-saving plant in that respect. And so sugarcane, like many other Hawaiian plants, really became a big part of the society, the culture and the way I guess this world was shaped. But again, it wasn't until recently and it took us six years to find all these canes again, genetically test them and kind of build, I'm not sure if it's the largest collection of Hawaiian sugarcane in the world, but I would guess that we now have the largest collection of Hawaiian sugarcane in the world growing in Kunia right now. And so on your farm then in central Oahu, do you grow all 34 varieties or varietals? Yes, so we grow all 34 varietals. We plant out some more than others. And when we get to the rum section, we'll explain why, but it has to do with when we make rum, we only make rum out of one of the 34 varietals at a time. Okay, so this is very different than most people in the world of sugarcane who just take sugarcane and turn it into rum or they take molasses and turn it into rum. So in the tasting room, and now we're off of farming, but you can sit down and actually try three different bottles, which is three different sugar canes and taste the way just the sugarcane changed the rum and taste the differences in sugarcane. And I'll come back to that in the next segment. So you were talking about your farms in central Oahu and Kunia, specifically. How many acres do you have? So in Kunia right now, we have 21 acres soon to be 27 acres planted. And we are trying to get to about 100 acres. I won't say by the end of this year, although magic happens, it'll be by the end of this year, but certainly. Let's be optimistic, 100 acres by the end of the year. But certainly by the end of 2018, we should have 100 acres planted. Oh, that's fantastic. And so with that 100 acres, may I ask how much rum that produces? Is that is that a question that can even ask? You can ask that and it varies by field. Right now we target, and this is on the light side, we don't do, again, we're not a plantation. So we are not trying to over fertilize things and maximize yield per acre. We're trying to be very gentle to the land and harken back and respect the cane and the power that this cane brings. So we are targeting around 30 tons per acre in our production. We've found that, and I think the record in Cunea is north of 100 tons in Asia. And so you have the potential if you really kind of treat cane to get a lot. But right now we're getting about 30 tons per acre. And that'll boil down depending on our juice extraction and how we make it to lots of bottles of rum. Right now in terms of case, this year we'll have about 3,000 cases made only because most everything is going into the barrel health. And so that'll be next year's rum. And so every year you're going to get much more and more Hawaiian agricultural rum produced out of these fields. And the goal of going to 100 acres is really to begin to show what I'll say, you know, this one of the world's class rum, this is one of the finest agricultural rum, certainly that I've ever tasted. So I'll say it's one of the finest agricultural rum in the world to not just Hawaii but to the mainland and then internationally as well. Yeah, I think you've given us a great background of, like I said we could spend a thousand shows talking about the history of sugar cane, but you've given us a really good, brief understanding of, you know, these heirloom varietals, as you call them, that you found 22 in botanical gardens and you found the rest just walking throughout the island, finding those wild varieties again and creating, if you will, a seed bank or grass bank of the 34 varietals and keeping that knowledge going by, you know, commercially producing all 34 varietals so that it can continue and the line can continue. So thank you so much. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll learn more about rum production itself. So we're taking the grass-to-glass approach, we focus on the grass and now we're going to focus on the glass part on their second half. Wonderful. So we'd like to thank Jason Brandt for giving us a quick understanding of sugar cane production on their farm at Manu Lele Distillers in central Oahu, Kunia specifically. And when we come back after our short break, we'll talk about value-added production, agritourism, retail operations of Kohana Rum at Manu Lele Distillers. Thank you. We'll see you soon. We encourage those who are streaming this live to tweet us questions at ThinkTechHI. We'd love to hear from you. Right now we have Jason Brandt, co-owner of Manu Lele Distillers who make Kohana Hawaiian Agri-Kohl Rum. He just gave us a quick brief understanding of the sugar cane production they have on their farm in Kunia, which is in central Oahu. So he was talking about there's 34 varietals and how to commercially produce all of them. So we thought we'd take the grass-to-glass approach and so we focus our first half of the show on grass, the sugar cane itself, and now we're going to focus on the glass. So how it becomes the high-end quality product known as Kohana Rum. So Jason, I'd like to thank you again for being in the studio with us. Thank you for having me. And so we talked about the 34 varietals and I thought, after it's harvested, can you kind of take us to a quick timeline of how it's made into your your famous Kohana Rum. Sure, I would love to. Normally, and at our distillery, we still do everything by hand. So we actually will hand harvest several times a week four tons of sugar cane. And so we will bring that sugar cane and our field is pretty much next to the distillery. We will bring four tons of sugar cane to the distillery and then crush it or juice it right there. And out of that, we'll get roughly 500 gallons of juice. So this is fresh squeezed sugar cane juice. Delicious. Delicious. You almost just want to pour one into it right there and you have a tea punch. But we take that sugar cane juice and mix it or basically introduce a yeast into it. And the yeast is going to consume all the sugar that's in the sugar cane juice. So the yeast is going to eat the sugar and convert it into carbon dioxide, which will be released into the air and alcohol. And somewhere between three days and a week it will be done with its consumption process. Okay. And then the yeast will begin to die off. But what we're left with is basically a sweet sugar cane wine that'll be roughly between six and ten percent alcohol. So you could actually drink it as a wine and it tastes quite good. But I like it better as a rub. You like the rub. So then we'll have 500 gallons of this nice wine, sugar cane wine, that we'll put into our still and begin to boil that wine to evaporate it. And alcohol is a lower boiling point than water. So the alcohol is going to rise first. And so we will go ahead and I guess allow it to move through the process going through our still and begin to interact with copper. And copper is going to begin to pull off for at least chemically remove things like pucil oils and begin to interact with the alcohol vapors. And that's going to then leave our pot still and move into our column still. And there we're going to go ahead and remove more and more impurities that exist through the distillation process or existed in the original cane juice. Stuff that we don't want to drink. Things like acetone or methanol. Flavors that you don't necessarily. You don't like drinking those? No, that's made for nail polish removing it to run our tractors. So we'll remove things that are off-putting flavors and allow flavors that you like. Things like butterscotch, vanilla, banana blossom. I find in my tasting red hot candy, baked cinnamon, rock candy, all tends to come through the distillation process naturally through what existed as a flavonoid in the sugar cane juice itself in the interaction with the yeast. And so once we have these I guess flavors, we'll take the flavors we don't want and move them to the side, keep the flavors we want. That's called the heart of the run. And then continue to distill flavors that we don't think can make it, but maybe we can recycle or reprocess in a different way, but never consume it. And so we take those hearts and then we begin to age. And for a white rum, we will age no less than 90 days. And for an aged rum, it could be years depending on when the barrel and when Mother Nature says it's ready. The beauty of that as a craft distiller is it's ready when it says it's delicious and ready. So we always say we're in pursuit of deliciousness. Okay. I love that. So you're talking about the clear one we see here in our screen is no less than 90 days. And then the different colors are those just different varietals or is it also the aging process or a little bit of both? Sure. So what I brought free here is just a little sampling of what we do. Don't worry, we're not going to be drinking. For those who have to watch this, you should come to the tasting room and you can do this live. This is our white rum. This is what we call Kaya. The Kaya is the Hawaiian word for white. And this is our white agricultural rum. For those that don't know, an agricultural rum versus a regular rum or the rum you generally would find in the well of a bar is different because most rums, 99% of the world's rum is made with molasses. So it's made with the byproduct of making table sugar. And somebody longer ago figured out hey, there's still sweetness in here. I can go ahead and ferment it and make rum. The problem is you're using a byproduct and so most rum you're getting and there are some very good regular molasses based rums but most rums you blend with juice or rum and coke because you're actually trying to hide the flavor of a rum. With an agricultural rum, you're starting with a very high quality product like fresh squeezed sugarcane juice. And you end up having a rum that becomes a sipping rum. Very floral in its bouquet so it smells almost like a sugarcane fuel. Oh my goodness. But there's no sugar in it because the yeast have consumed all the sugar. And so for those that are on Akin's diets or low sugar diets. Advocating for dieters. Great for dieters out there. Much better than beer and wine which have plenty of sugar. So that's whether the white rum would be. It's basically a sipping rum. And rum is going through the same renaissance that I think you saw in vodka's or in tequila's or in whiskey's and gin's where it used to be you would do a shot of tequila and you'd keep looking where's my lime and so. And then through a better use of agave or a better distillation process you now have sipping tequila's again in the world. And the same thing occurred in vodka's. And so rum is going through that renaissance and agricole rum I think is at the heart of leading that rum renaissance. As we get to the brown rums what we call our aged rums this is the same white rum but it's now sat in a wooden barrel. And at the distillery we use a variety of barrels. What we try to do is find a wood that's going to express at least as our distillery thinks about it the essence of the sugar cane that we're actually using to make that rum. Remember we use 34 different varieties and each one has a Hawaiian legend or history to it and so we're trying to identify what we feel when we hear that story and taste the sugar cane as fresh juice taste it again as a white spirit how can we express it as an aged spirit and still maintain in our own opinion the truth about that sugar cane. And it's a fun process it's a very sensory oriented process because you're always tasting and saying I get that feeling I get that Just tasting all day Well you want to get the mana of that sugar cane that power at least as you interpret it. And so it'll sit in a barrel and our barrels arrange from new American oak to used American oak to French oak to barrels that might have been used to make pork or sherry or cognac We just finished a rum and it all sold out very quickly that was used in a scotch distillery from Scotland and it added a big peaty smoky flavor to the rum which was quite interesting So for those people either like whiskey and bourbons it's leaning that way although I find an aged rum much more flavorful than an aged scotch or whiskey that's again my opinion but uh I have to agree with you I went to the farm a couple of days ago and I did a tasting and I really like to grab rums better personally The aged rum But they're all good They're all good obviously So we obviously I don't want to taunt our audience but oh look at these wonderful rums that we you can't drink through the TV So can you talk a little bit about how people can find Kohane rum or can they come to your farm? Sure so we now it took us a long time to get here We now are open seven days a week from 10 am to 5 pm located in Cunea and we are at the old Del Monte Plantation in fact we took over the Del Monte General Store in Cunea Camp So it's a very old building a 60 year old building that was once the U.S. Post Office the barbershop for the community a supermarket for the community a feed store it had a restaurant all when we had plantations on Oahu Del Monte left the island a little over a decade ago So we refurbished this into what I'll call modern agricultural architecture but if you go to KohaneRum.com you can go ahead and book a tour right on the website and then you can come see the distillery for yourself Nice so you can actually take a tour in that historical building you were talking about and kind of see taking the heirloom or the historical aspect of it and turning it into something kind of new that harkens back to plantation age that's fantastic So can you talk a little bit about the retail operation that you have there So we talked a little bit about the tours but what are people going to see on the tours and do they have a chance to buy some Sure Right when you walk into the building you start your tour with a fresh glass fresh squeezed sugarcane juice and this is to begin and you'll see it get juiced right there in front of you this is to begin to change the visitor's mindset away from whatever they were doing before and you're now entering basically the world of sugarcane and from there you'll start a tour on our aquaponic deck and begin to look because our neighboring farm is a big aquaponics farm a little bit about farming in cunea in general we have a nice platform that's 12 feet above cunea so you can see really wide and for those that don't know where cunea is we're smack in the middle of the island basically right in between the two the east and the western mountain ranges so it's a nice bread basket to look at and beautiful views all the way down the diamond head and Pearl Harbor with both mountain ranges to your left and right but from there after you learn a little bit about aquaponics farming we'll move you into the sugarcane garden and there you'll begin to learn about all the varieties that we have the legends of each one and can actually compare and contrast right there how they look how they look differently how they behave differently and where they fit into society early it's from a thousand years ago from there you'll move into we have very large windows at a distillery sitting just outside of where still is located and be able to actually see the process kind of going forward in terms of rum getting made and everything getting made quickly shoveled off into this tasting room which I think is really nice and beautiful so that you can try all the rums that we have in front of you and that's really the tour but also there there's local gelato Kohana Rum Gelato especially made for us in town we have chocolate bars because we do make a chocolate honey rum liqueur using local chocolate and local honey and then that local chocolate gets converted into a rum soaked chocolate bar or we have this is local honey used in that rum chocolate rum liqueur and then we'll barrel age this honey in one of the barrels after we bottle one of the aged rums and so we're trying to constantly marry ourselves to other farmers local Hawaiian agriculture and then value added or process it in something that tastes good that people want to really consume that's fantastic thank you so much for joining us today Jason so that concludes our show today I wish we could keep you on longer and we could learn more about Kohana Rum and Mauna Lele Distillers but I'd like to thank you again thank you for having me yeah we were just joined by Jason Brand the co-owner of Mauna Lele Distillers who make the famous Hawaiian Agar Kohl Rum called Kohana with a variety of different types from clear to brown they also have a ton of diversified options at their farm including tours retail operation sugar heirloom sugar cane production as well as tastings of the local rum that they make so again we had Jason Brand of Mauna Lele Distillers this is Think Tech Hawaii Hawaii Food and Farmers series uh Hui Hau