Daniel André Regueira Santos
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Editor’s Note: Rum is a key ingredient in dozens of drinks found in Latin restaurants and bars. Chicago Cane Cooperative is a tiny producer in this category, but with a calling beyond profit. Ed Avis, publisher of el Restaurante, interviewed Chicago Cane Cooperative co-founder and head distiller Daniel André Regueira Santos, who is the son of Cuban immigrants.
How did you and Sean Ellis Hussey come to launch a rum company, based in Chicago no less?
Our partners at the time were PhD candidates at Northwestern, and Sean and I just kind of hit it off. One of the things that we started nerding out about was our interest in spirits and beer and drinks and whatnot. We also talked about our activism and how we were involved socially or politically. That was the context for us starting this thing.
Around that time I read a book about the history of rum in Cuba, and it goes through the history of Cuba and the history of rum in Cuba at the same time, since they're pretty interlinked. That book turned me onto the idea of making rum as a hobbyist. The obsession started there and it snowballed into where we are today.
So you made the rum in your basement or something?
I was literally just doing it at home on the kitchen stove. Pretty clandestinely. Very moonshiner. I was fermenting in buckets, which I was doing up until I went professional with it. Then I bought a literal pot. People say “pot still.” And you imagine the big copper ones, right? This was a literal pot that you closed and had a copper tube coming out the top and a condenser, and that was it.
You’re fermenting molasses?
Most rum that you drink, like 95 percent, is made from molasses. And the only ones that aren't are made from sugarcane juice. They’re very different products. Molasses is a waste product of the sugar refining process from sugarcane.
When did your hobby lead to an actual business?
In 2019, we started putting together outlines and ideas of how we wanted to do it, making really interesting creative stuff. That's a big part of our ethos. But another big part of our ethos is if we were to start a business, we want live our politics, live our values. So the worker ownership aspect was central from the start. We want to be a leader in this way and show people that this can be done and there is a better way to do things.
It's central to start a conversation and reckon with the awful history of sugarcane production and slavery and the colonial Caribbean. And modern day labor practices can also be really awful. There are better ways to do things for the workers, whether they’re involved in making the spirits or selling the spirits at a bar or harvesting the sugarcane.
And when workers have more involvement, they can make molasses or sugar that actually tastes more interesting, rather than just maximizing production. We're trying to put forward this way of doing things, of being worker owned and a worker cooperative. We believe that this is a better way of doing things.
How does the worker ownership work?
A worker cooperative has to be 51 percent owned by worker owners. The way we have ours structured is we have folks be employees for about a year's time, and barring any red flags or anything, they get invited to be a worker owner. Worker owners have voting shares and we all vote on how things are run. We can vote on things as important as profit sharing or as small as where we source things. That's the kind of big picture of it.
Chicago Cane Cooperative rums
So you got ideas rolling in 2019…what next?
In 2020, during COVID, I was laid off from my day job, doing graphic design work at a publishing company. I was just living off unemployment, and I was like, maybe this is the time that I try to make this happen and really go for it. So that was when we really started going for it in earnest. We tried to find our own space, but it became apparent that that was just prohibitively expensive. So instead we ended up working with an existing distillery out in Mount Prospect. So basically it's a manufacturing agreement where I go out there with the distiller and use their equipment to make my recipe and use their facilities, and then we bottle there and bring it into the city and sell it.
Where do you get the molasses?
I got a recommendation from Maggie Campbell, who runs the estate program for Mount Gay. She is super helpful and super nice, and just as soon as I told her the aspirations and aims of our project, she was like, “Oh, I think this is the molasses you'll want to use.” It’s from a really great mill in Guatemala, up in the mountains. They are involved in a lot of community initiatives, and they cooperatively produce the molasses and sugar with the local cane farmers at decent prices for them. So we get really great molasses that's different than the commodity molasses that you'd buy for cheap, and that really shows itself in the rum. Yeah, it's a little pricier for us, but at the end of the day, we're sourcing it from people who care more and are doing more than the commodity stuff is doing for the world, and we're also getting great stuff in the process.
When did you start selling the rum?
We started producing spirits in 2022 and we formally launched in February 2023. At that point we had just the Silver and the Gold (Solera Aged Gold Rum) -- the unaged and the barrel-aged.
How much is available?
It's 400 gallons of fermentation at a time, which gives us roughly a barrel. So we've made something like 2,000 or 2,500 bottles at this point.
What’s selling the best so far?
Generally, we've had even numbers between the Silver and the Gold. I will say for people who are rum aficionados, rum nerds, or even people who are mezcal nerds, the Silver kind of stands out to them. And then folks who kind of lean more into bourbon or whiskey, they go for the Gold, they go for the barrel aged stuff. We just launched Dani’s Tavern Rum in March. It's been very well received specifically by bars. And we have Founder’s Blend, which is combination of our Gold and Silver rums.
Where are your rums available?
We’re self-distributing in the Chicago area, and we’re working on other areas. I think New York is going to be live in July, and then we're working on California, Texas, and Florida. We’re using an online distributor called LibDib.
Can you recommend some cocktails that are well suited for your rums?
Absolutely. I highly recommend the Dani’s Tavern Rum in your classic daiquiri, which is two parts rum, one part lime juice and simple syrup. The Tavern Rum is a blend of our Silver rum and an imported column rum, so you still get the taste of the Silver, but it's not punching in the face as much as the Silver by itself does. But the Silver itself in a daiquiri also stands out, it's excellent. A daiquiri made with the Silver is literally one of the best daiquiris I've ever had in my life. It's fantastic. Another cocktail that uses the Silver is the Melipona, which includes grapefruit juice and honey syrup.
El Presidente cocktail
The Gold lends itself to more bourbon, aged type of cocktails. An example is El Presidente, which includes Grenadine, Curaçao, and blanc vermouth.
So what’s next for you?
Right now, just kind of hitting the pavement, trying to get in more accounts here. We have a lot of small mom and pop accounts, but the next thing is to try to hit the bigger ones, music venues, stuff like that.
Great talking to you, and good luck!
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