Hello everyone!
Today I wanted to share with you the visit of the distillery Savanna that I did last week. I will attach a few pictures of the visit, the content of the tasting and some Q&A I did with a person working there
I hope you will enjoy 
To start, we are asked to leave all personal stuff in lockers (no jewels, no bags, no phone or camera lose in)
They accepted phones and camera that were with a lanyard or in a pouch
The intro was a video presenting a bit the site linked to the sugar factory of Bois Rouge and the mastery of rum they built over the years with a nice display of notable bottling they did :
We put hardhat on and we properly start the visit.
The beginning is the reception of the sugar cane. The harvest is done from mid July till December and the factory is working 7 days a week, 6 days of production and 1 day of maintenance and cleaning of the machines.
When we did the visit, the harvesting didn’t start yet so we didn’t visit the sugar factory since it was not operating
The conveyer for sugar cane :
Then we went all the way to the entrance of the distillery starting with the fermenters :
Then after we went to the distilation part, that area is considered ATEX so we could not have electronics turned on for that part so I could not take a lot of pictures
I still managed to take one from afar where we see their potstill used exclusively for the very elusive HERR mark :
Very surprisingly, I could not see the Savalle.
When I asked about it, they mentionned it has been decommissioned recently and replace by a new column in stainless steel but the inside is made with copper
Continuing the visit, we visited one cell of their aging facility, the cell#1 (it was also ATEX so no pictures)
They start to experiment with blends in barrel before aging then aging the blend rather than blending after aging (the Art of Rum Repy is the first bottle they released with that method)
They also have a massive oak tun used for the making of their Metis which is a blend of lightly aged traditional rum (around 1 year in the tun and 4 years old rum aged in regular Cask)
Back to the shop for the tasting
The tasting consisted in the following rum : intense, creol 52 all in white
We did a small break in the rum tasting to try some sweet products like spreads, molasses syrup and some candies made with rum
Back to the rum with the aged ones (Metis, 5 years and Le Must)
To finish, they proposed some grand arome (Lontan 57 and Lontan straight 74.9 
)
After the regular tasting you could ask to try other rums they had open so I tried aswell the HERR 57, Herrline 2 and the Art of Rum Repy
In the shop, a rare sighting, so many Herrline 2 at the same spot
During the visit, I asked a few questions about their process (Paraphrasing the answer rather than transcription)
Q : “Do you use wild yeast?”
A: “We are developing the yeast in our lab to tweak the fermentation to our need, we are mainly using yeasts used in high fermentation beers like lambic, so all yeasts are selected and not wild strains”
Q : “Is the yeasts used in the fermentation are the same for all the marks and the difference is in the fermentation or the yeast is different for each mark?”
A: “The cocktail of yeast is designed specifically to each marks to bring more flavors desired in those, as for the fermentation time is goes from 24h for our traditional, 48h for the Agricole, Grand Arome is between 5 and 7 days and for the HERR it can go up to 14 days”
Q: “Are you using dunder and muck in the fermentation for the grand arome and herr?”
A: “We are using dunder in the fermentation but not muck”
I made sure to take a bottle of their One Rum exclusive to the distillery and the tax free of the airport that I’m really looking forward to open and try
Overall, the visit was very nice and very insightful.
I can only recommend it if you go to La Réunion even for people that don’t particularly like rum, it was very interesting
Thanks for reading,
If you have any questions let me know
Loïc