WORLD’S OLDEST HAITIAN PURE CANE RHUM

EXPLORE BOUVIL

What Bouvil is

Bouvil is clairin — the rhum Haiti makes for itself. One family, in one commune, distilling under their own name since 1850. Seven generations. For most of that time it never left the island. Nothing about the way it is made has been modernised, and that is exactly the point.

❋ Indigenous cane

Madame Meves cane, grown in one Haitian commune and cut by hand. Pressed fresh — never reduced to molasses. 4.4kg of fertiliser per hectare, against 125kg for Martinique’s benchmark agricole.

❋ Wild yeast

No commercial yeast is ever added. Fermentation starts with whatever is in the Haitian air and runs for 48 to 72 hours, not the twenty of industrial rum.

❋ Hand-made stills

A hybrid pot-and-column still, built by hand by the family. Small batch, slow, and worked around the clock by the people who live beside it.

❋ Nothing added, nothing taken out

Bottled unfiltered at 42%. No colouring, no sweetening, no rectification. 478–500 g/hLPA of esters — the character stays in.

One island. One family. One way of doing things — and you can taste all three.

From cane to bottle

Everything happens in one place

Bouvil is grown, fermented, distilled and bottled in Haiti. Under Haitian law, clairin must be both fermented and distilled on the island to carry the name. Bouvil has never done it any other way.

PURE CANE

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PURE CANE 〰️

Common questions

  • Clairin is Haiti’s own style of rhum. It is distilled from fresh sugarcane juice rather than molasses, fermented with wild yeast, and by law must be both fermented and distilled in Haiti. It is one of the last cane spirits in the world still made the way the whole category was made before industrialisation.

  • Industrial rum starts with molasses, the by-product left after the sugar is taken out. It is pitched with commercial yeast, fermented in closed steel for around twenty hours, distilled in continuous columns to 94% ABV, then filtered, coloured and blended to a specification. Bouvil starts with fresh cane juice, ferments on wild yeast for 48 to 72 hours in open vats, is distilled in a hand-made hybrid pot still, and is bottled exactly as it comes off.

  • Neat, at room temperature, is how it is drunk in Haiti. Beyond that: four ingredients maximum, fresh lime, cane sugar, nothing pre-batched. If in doubt, a Ti’ Punch. Four serves are on our cocktails page.