A piece of 19th Century technology will ensure one of the East Kimberley’s most iconic products remains one hundred per cent locally produced.
Hoochery Distillery owner Spike Dessert said a Columbian-built sugar crusher imported from South America last year would allow the company to crush locally grown sugarcane for its renowned Ord River Rum.
The crusher would be used to make sugar juice and molasses which would then be used to produce white rum and brown rum respectively.
“I could buy molasses from Queensland at a much cheaper rate, but then it’s not honestly Ord River rum,” Mr Dessert said.
The Kununurra distillery has been operating for the past three years on stocks of molasses produced before the Ord sugar industry collapsed in 2007.
Mr Dessert said the same type of crusher, which has a throughput rate of about 1 ½ tonnes per hour, was used extensively in northern Columbia where a micro-sugar industry had been operating for hundreds of years.
“This crusher here has changed very little in the last 150 to 200 years,” he said. The crusher is powered by a two-cylinder 1948 Southern Cross motor.
Mr Dessert said it had taken about seven months to build the crusher which would be used to crush Ord Valley sugarcane.
He said the company would grow about two hectares of sugarcane each year to produce enough juice and molasses for rum making purposes.
The first white rum produced using the crusher would be available next year, while Ord River Rum produced using the new machinery would be available in about three years.
The Hoochery is the oldest continually operated legal still in Western Australia.
By NATHAN DYER
