Oxbow’s Olivia Stewart is running a rum production focused on homegrown ingredients

Olivia Stewart was working in the art world in Manhattan when the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down.

Instead of staying in chilly New York during the period of uncertainty, she and her now-husband decided to take a road trip back home to Louisiana in search of warmer weather. But what she found was a new career.

At the time, her father was running the business now known as Oxbow Rum Distillery, an extension of the Pointe Coupee Parish sugar cane farm and sugar mill that has been in her family for generations. But according to Stewart, he was operating with limited knowledge of the spirits industry.

With experience bartending and working for a cocktail company in New Orleans, combined with the pandemic pushing her home, Stewart says her father saw an opportunity to pass management onto her. So Stewart left New York behind and stayed home to help
the family.

“It was just drinking from the fire hose, fight or flight, sink or swim and figure it out as you go along,” Stewart says of getting into the business. “There were some people, some consultants, to help me with the fundamentals, but it really was trial by fire over the past six years, and honestly, I feel like I’m just getting the hang of it in a way.”

Today, Stewart leads Oxbow Rum Distillery as its president, a role that oversees all different departments of the business including hospitality, marketing, sales and production.

“[My favorite part of the job] is the sense of carrying on a legacy in a different way for my family’s business,” she says. “I’m fifth generation, and it is very exciting to be able to share it with more consumers and more of the public through something fun like rum.”

Oxbow is one of the few brands in the country that owns its whole process from start to finish, which is its point of differentiation among other brands and gives Oxbow a competitive advantage, Stewart says.

“Even though we’re not on the farm, I consider us a farm distillery,” she says. “We source everything from my family’s cane farm and sugar mill, just 20 miles away. So we’re really an expression of that crop and of the sugarcane industry, which is so important to Louisiana.”

Oxbow produces two brands: Oxbow Estate Rum and False River Spiced Rum. Between both lines, the distillery boasts seven craft products ranging from barrel-aged rum to small-batch white rum. But out of all the options her company produces, Stewart’s go-to is the Rhum Louisiane Unaged Agricole.

“I personally love the unaged because you can’t hide behind anything,” she says. “What you are tasting is straight from the still, and it is an expression of our sugar cane and our terroir out there in Pointe Coupee Parish, and it just tastes like home to me. … It’s just such a pure expression of what we’re doing here.”

And while she says her industry has been experiencing “headwinds,” Oxbow’s distribution sales in Louisiana are actually up 20% year to date over the same period last year. Oxbow’s reach goes beyond the Boot, too, as bottles are also sold in Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina. Stewart teases that Oxbow will be launching in Texas in 2027.

“That [20%] means we’re really investing in our home state and winning there,” she says. “Our goal is to really become a prominent rum brand—a prominent American rum brand, a national brand—and so we’re taking careful steps in reinvesting in the field sales and marketing to make sure that we continue on that path.”

This article was originally published in the October 2026 issue of 225 Magazine.