Business & Technology

Two oil company landmen have an off-hours business in Broussard as the Rank Wildcat Spirits Distillery, crafting a rum they named Sweet Crude.

The Advertiser reports that 26-year-old Cole Leblanc welded the still together, and 35-year-old David Meaux — who also is a lawyer — dealt with all the paperwork.

They monitor the distilling, they bottle and label the rum, and even went to a sugar refinery and shoveled 1,600 pounds of raw sugar into huge barrels to bring back to Broussard.

The hundreds of hotel rooms planned or under construction in Shreveport-Bossier City might be missing their intended clients.

The Times reports hotel operators had counted on guests in town for business in the Haynesville shale oil field.

But a slowdown of natural gas production has cut into room nights.

More than 1,300 hotel rooms are in final planning phases or under construction in Shreveport-Bossier City. An additional 169 rooms have gone into operation this year in Bossier City.

First-time claims for unemployment insurance in Louisiana for the week ending Aug. 4 increased from the previous week's total.

The state labor department figures released Friday show the initial claims increased to 3,216 from the previous week's total of 2,988.

For the comparable week a year earlier, there were 4,033 initial claims.

The four-week moving average, which is a less volatile measure of claims, decreased to 3,240 from the previous week's total of 3,426.