Line 44
About Us
Pioneering modern and innovative solutions to Rum and other spirits in New Zealand
Tropical islands, pirates, man o’ wars, sails and high seas. From the mysterious Batavia Arrak of Indonesia, the Clarins of Haiti, through to the rich and heavy rums of Jamaica and the other Caribbean islands, down to the Cachaça of Brazil, Rum in all its variety is a drink in a class of its own.
In early 2020 we began in earnest to conduct experiments that were mostly inspired by the “Lost Papers” of Arroyo. This developed into a relationship that we now have with 2 amazing colleagues in the USA who share the same fascination for the work of Arroyo that we have. We joined forces with Stephen Shellenberger, rum researcher and historian and owner of Boston Apothecary website, and Cory Widmeyer, microbiologist and fermentation specialist, who had been working together to decipher and understand the work of Arroyo. With them, we have opened up Arroyo’s work and have proved that his methods of rum production are indeed cutting edge, producing the highest quality rums at much more efficient levels than the open culture methods traditionally employed to produce Jamaican style rums. We have built on Arroyo’s methods, repeating and adding our own discoveries to them to a point where we now are confidently producing our own rums of the highest quality with high efficiency.
Rafael Arroyo our patron saint
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The beginning of exploration into methodical rum manufacture began with the likes of Karl Micko (late 1800’s), S.F Ashby (1874-1954), Kervegant (circa 1946) and was expanded on by Rafael Arroyo in the same era.
Rafael Arroyo died at the age of 57 on the 16th August, 1949 in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. As an industrial research chemist and head of the chemistry department of the Agricultural Experiment Station at Rio Piedras, he specialized in the industrial utilization of sugar cane molasses and its by-products. The “Proceso Arroyo”, a special process of molasses treatment used in the fermentation stage of the manufacture of rum, is his. He graduated in 1916 from Louisiana State University, where he had majored in sugar engineering. In the U. S. he had worked for Armour and Co., Staier Chemical Co., and the U. S. Industrial Alcohol Co. He joined ACS in 1946.
Most of his work in Puerto Rico was around the manufacture of rum. Ahead of his time, Arroyo developed methods that were on the cutting edge of the current industry, creating rums of the highest quality. The second world war caused some disruption for commercial rum manufacture of the time, and in the course of those turbulent few years, most of his research papers were forgotten about, and as a result much of his groundbreaking discoveries were never adopted by mainstream distilleries. To this day, not many distillers know much of his work, and far fewer practice even a small fraction of what he discovered and perfected over his years in Puerto Rico.
We regard Rafael Arroyo as something of a “Patron Saint” of Line 44. The riches of his studies and writings guide much of what we do. We would not be here if it were not for him.