Discover St Helena’s Spirits and Coffee Culture
The St Helena Distillery, named after its island home, is the world’s most remote distillery. Not only is this the only maker of spiced rum and prickly pear schnapps between Southern Africa and Brazil, but its products are liquid summaries of the South Atlantic island’s history and environment.
Fancy a taste? Just hop on one of the new flights to St Helena and head into the hills to find the boutique distillery. It is a labor of patience as well as love for the Welsh distiller, who shipped his still, fermentation tanks, and other equipment from Germany, and imports ingredients such as South African grape juice to make wine.
Shipwrecks and Curfews
Established by Paul Hickling in 2006, the St Helena Distillery’s most popular product in the local pubs, which cater to the population of 4500 ‘Saints’, is its spiced rum. The dark spirit is called White Lion – after the island’s most famous shipwreck, the Dutch East India Company vessel Witte Leeuw, which was said to have been sunk by two Portuguese carracks in 1613. More accurately, the ill-fated ship blew itself up during the scuffle, but either way, its cargo of 1300 diamonds was blasted to smithereens and generations of divers still haven’t found any treasure in the silt.
The skirmish was typical of the ruthless competition between the trading fleets that plied the sea route around the Cape between Europe and the Far East. The Portuguese discovered St Helena in the early 16th century and kept it secret from their rivals, but Sir Francis Drake followed, and the British East India Company claimed the island in 1657. The 120-sq-km island received 1000 ships a year until its fortunes declined with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which shifted trade routes north.
During that maritime heyday, life on the island was so tumultuous that St Paul’s Cathedral was built on a hill outside Jamestown due to the island’s capital being overrun with taverns and brothels. As visitors learn on historic tours with Magma Way, several governors incited armed rebellions by attempting to reduce the consumption of alcohol, including arrack once distilled from potatoes. Throughout the 18th century, measures to control the influx of thirsty sailors, homesick soldiers, settlers, and emancipated slaves included imposing a 10 pm curfew, commanding British East India Company employees to attend church, banning the importation of spirits, and asking prostitutes to leave the island.
Today, St Helena is more of a sleepy outpost than a den of iniquity, with less than a dozen pubs and the same number of inmates in Jamestown Prison. However, echoing its former vibrancy, the island’s favorite drink is the Shipwreck, a mixture of spiced rum and Coke. Ask for a White Lion Shipwreck – especially in Jamestown’s Standard Bar, run by Paul’s islander wife, Sally.
Napoleon’s Demise
After the British Crown took over management of St Helena from the British East India Company, the Brits began a long tradition of exiling troublesome adversaries to the far-flung island. Consequently, St Paul’s Cathedral houses the graves of British officers who died in the typhoid epidemic that swept two POW camps holding 6000 Boers, sent here during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), and two infant children of Zulu king Dinuzulu who spent most of the 1890s here. There is also a dedicated Boer Cemetery, the last resting place of 180 South Africans, with a memorial listing their names.
St Helena’s most famous exile was Napoléon Bonaparte, who spent the last five years of his life drinking sweet wine and dictating his military memoirs in the grand Longwood House. The celebrated sweet wine was made in Constantia, Cape Town and imported to St Helena on British East India Company ships to console the Emperor.
Various events mark Napoléon’s stay on the island from 1815 to 1821. Paul is aging two barrels of brandy for 2021, the 200th anniversary of the Frenchman’s death, when he plans to release 2000 small bottles. Until then, you can channel the spirit of Napoléon by taking the audio tour at Longwood and the Briars Pavilion, where he spent his first two months on the island, and visiting his unmarked (and empty) tomb.
Prickly Pears and Exotic Imports
Formerly an electronic engineer, Paul learned the art of distillation in Germany, where he was inspired to make a Saint version of fruit schnapps. ‘I asked what fruit we have in abundance here, and the answer was tungi,’ he says. The resulting fruity spirit made from tungi, as prickly pears are known on St Helena, is best enjoyed treacly from the freezer or mixed with orange juice.
Tungi is in many ways the quintessential alcoholic souvenir of St Helena, as it captures the island’s natural and social history. The St Helena National Trust, which offers guided walks to the island’s windblown peaks and promontories, works diligently to conserve the endemic flora and fauna – most famously the wirebird, a thin-legged plover – amid the arrivals on boats from Africa. Incomers have included prickly pears and other succulents, the termites that demolished Jamestown in the 19th century, and the elusive simian-feline ‘Monk-Cat’, thought to be a civet that stowed away on a boat bringing building materials for the 1½-year-old airport.
The word tungi itself, meanwhile, is representative of the Saints patois, a fast-spoken English riddled with slang and contractions that can be incomprehensible to outsiders. Much like their dialect, the mixed-race Saints themselves are products of folk who came from far and wide with the trade winds, tracing their roots back to centuries of incomers including British soldiers, sailors, liberated African slaves, indentured Chinese and Indian workers, and Boer prisoners.
Coffee at a Cost
The distillery’s Midnight Mist Coffee Liqueur is a Kahlúa-like concoction of rum and coffee grown on the fertile island’s rocky slopes. Hand-picked, St Helena coffee beans are among the world’s most expensive, which you can buy in gift shops (£10 for 200g) or taste by the cup at the coffee shop in Jamestown Harbour. Even haughty Napoléon was a fan, drinking a few cups a day and describing it as the only good thing about St Helena.
The beans are considered special because they are pure descendants of the green-tipped Bourbon arabica seeds imported by the British East India Company from Mocha, Yemen in 1733. Limited amounts of this black gold are available abroad, occasionally being offered by Harrods and the Sea Island coffee merchants in London, as well as Starbucks Reserve in Seattle. It’s also possible to take a tour of the cultivation, harvesting, and roasting process at the Rosemary Gate plantation.
The Capital in a Canyon
The final product in the distillery’s fluctuating range of spirits is Jamestown Gin, the world’s only gin made from the infusion of rare Bermuda juniper, which grows on St Helena. The spirit is named after the island’s capital, which uniquely occupies a canyon with roads climbing the rocky sides to the lush hinterland.
Named in turn after King James II’s reign, Jamestown’s most famous feature is the 699-step Jacob’s Ladder, built in 1829 to transport manure up and send goods down. Tackling the vertiginous staircase is a rite of passage for visitors, while Saints can all share stories of sliding down its railings on the way home from school or trudging up after a few Shipwrecks in Jamestown’s pubs.
Make It Happen
Airlink flies from Johannesburg to St Helena Airport on Saturdays, with midweek flights from Cape Town resuming. Most Western nationals do not need a visa to visit St Helena; however, you must pay a £20 immigration fee and show your medical insurance and return flight. St Helena and British Pounds are both accepted on the island, but there are limited credit and debit card facilities available. Renting a car is the easiest way to explore the area. Accommodation options include Jamestown’s Consulate and Mantis St Helena, as well as Bertrand’s Cottage at Longwood and Richard’s Travel Lodge in St Paul’s. Reach out to the distillery to arrange a tasting experience.
