Distillerie du Simon

Le Simon distils HSE (Habitation Saint-Etienne) and, until recently, Clement, but it makes no rum under its own name. In distilling circles it is a ghostwriter: the stand-in parent and keeper of two cherished names. When those brands' own distilleries closed, their stills were physically moved to Le Simon, completing what The Rum Tour calls a merger 130 years in the making. What you taste as HSE is, in fact, Le Simon.

Holmex, the Yves Hayot family company: Yves Hayot bought Le Simon in 1971, and he was the elder brother of Bernard Hayot, whose GBH owns Clement and J.M, which is why Clement was long distilled here. The distillery itself is much older. Emile Bougenot built it in 1862, an engineer who ran nine sugar refineries and owned Le Galion, the island's last working sugar mill. For its first 70 years it was a sugar factory making molasses rum on the side, switching to agricole in the 1930s. Under Hayot it took over Clement's distillation in 1989 and HSE's in 1994, which made Le Simon one of the island's largest distilleries under the Holmex banner.

Yes: HSE is distilled from fresh cane juice at Le Simon under the Martinique AOC, then trucked north to the original Habitation Saint-Etienne at St Stephen, where it is brought to strength with water from the Lezarde river, aged and bottled. The brand is known for an adventurous range of finishes, single malt casks including Islay, sherry and sauternes among them, and that cask-finish range is the accessible way in. Old vintages such as the HSE Hors d'Age 1960 and single casks like the HSE Single Cask 2003 are the step after; the community finds the 1960 woody, with leather and brown sugar, and the 2003 nutty, spicy and vanilla. Habitation Saint-Etienne was the island's top seller during the lean 1950s and even inspired a Patrick Chamoiseau story.

On three or four column stills, depending on the source, each with its own job: one came from Habitation Clement for Clement's rum, another is the original column from St Stephen and distils HSE, and the rest handle products for the local market. Rum comes off at around 70 to 71 percent. The distillery owns no plantation, sourcing cane from farms across the south, and ferments with baker's yeast over 24 to 36 hours. With no warehouses, every drop leaves this quiet plant by the sea to be aged elsewhere.