Mhoba Rum

Founded in 2015 by Robert Greaves, MHOBA—meaning sugarcane in the local siSwati, or Swazi, dialect—is a craft distiller of field-to-bottle cane juice rum made from estate-grown sugarcane. In just a few short years, the distillery has garnered a reputation as the most acclaimed rum distillery in South Africa and one of the most exciting rum producers, period.

MHOBA Rum Distillery is located in Malalane, Mpumalanga, between the Makhonjwa Mountains—a mountain range known for having some of the oldest exposed rock on Earth—and South Africa’s first and largest national park, Kruger National Park. Mpumalanga is one of South Africa’s primary sugarcane-growing provinces, and the Greaves family has been farming sugarcane at the foot of the Makhonwja Mountains since the 1980s. Sugarcane drives the economy of the region; the municipality where the Greaveses’ sugarcane is cultivated, Nkomazi, is known for its exceptional sugarcane, and the town of Malalane is home to one of South Africa’s largest sugarcane mills.

Robert relocated from Johannesburg to Malalane to help with his family’s farm and mining businesses during the 2008 global financial crisis. He began exploring the idea of establishing a craft rum distillery that would use molasses produced from the family’s estate-grown sugarcane.

Unfortunately, when he reached out to the local mill to procure some of his molasses, he learned that the processing was done on such a massive scale that it was impossible to identify or separate molasses from individual sources. So instead, he chose to use his sugarcane to create a cane juice rum in the style of cachaça or rhum agricole. Robert dove deeply into the world of rum and experimented with small, home-distilled batches of his own. He then combined elements of producing these cane juice spirits with techniques used to create high-ester Jamaican rums, resulting in something remarkable.

Robert, a mechanical engineer, designed and built nearly all the equipment at the MHOBA distillery, including the cane mills, pot stills, and the furnace used to heat the stills. Besides ensuring that every piece of machinery operates exactly to his personal specifications, this bespoke approach allows him to quickly make repairs and modifications. One such modification saw the stills’ reflux columns shortened after finding the additional column length and copper contact was stripping too much flavor.

The 400-hectare Greaves estate grows four varieties of sugarcane using organic practices and harvests by hand from one field at a time, rotating fields regularly. Because of a unique microclimate, the distillery can harvest throughout most of the year and is thus able to distill year-round without needing to pause between harvest seasons.

Once cut and detrashed, the sugarcane is crushed using a hammer mill, and the crushed cane is loaded into a custom hydraulic mill that presses out the juice with roughly sixty tons of force. This batch-based process is slower than that of standard roller mills but is significantly more effective at fully extracting the juice.

The freshly pressed cane juice is then open-air fermented using only ambient yeast for a minimum of six days and, depending on the season and the marque, up to four weeks. For high-ester marques, the distillery uses dunder and other Jamaican fermentation techniques, such as the Cousins Process—a method invented by chemist Herbert Henry Cousins to create high-ester rums by re-esterifying the lees from previous distillations.

Robert designed MHOBA’s three pot stills based off the Nixon-Stone reflux still blueprint—a popular design for home distillers. The stills are made of stainless steel with copper lining, and a reflux column with an offset head allows for high-proof single distillations. Rather than making traditional live cuts during the distillation process, runs are cut multiple times, briefly rested in glass, and select cuts are combined until the final blend is achieved. Proofing is done using magnesium-rich water extracted from a natural underground reservoir, which is filtered to remove salts.

In keeping with the field-to-bottle ethos, MHOBA even manufactures their own bottle labels and cardboard boxes for shipping. The distillery continues to experiment and push boundaries with even greater ambitions on the horizon, including a proper muck pit and organic certification of their sugarcane fields. This producer is one to watch out for in the coming years.