Saint Lucia Rum

Saint Lucia's rum brands all come from St. Lucia Distillers: the local Bounty, Chairman's Reserve and the super-premium Admiral Rodney. In the 1990s the island's own market was dominated by imported Mount Gay and Cockspur from Barbados, both seen as a cut above Bounty. St. Lucia Distillers won its home ground back, then turned to the premium export market with Chairman's Reserve and Admiral Rodney. Well-known bottles from these two ranges are the Chairman's Reserve Forgotten Casks, the Chairman's Reserve 1931 and the aged blend Admiral Rodney Extra Old.

One: St. Lucia Distillers, the island's sole rum maker, born in 1972 from the merger of Denis Barnard's Dennery distillery on the east coast and the Geest family's Roseau Bay distillery on the west. Saint Lucia belongs to the British Windward Islands, alongside Dominica, St. Vincent and Grenada, and most distilleries on those islands only ever served their home market. Saint Lucia is the exception.

Saint Lucia rum is almost entirely molasses-based, made from imported molasses, because the island gave up commercial cane around 1962. Each delivery brings 2,000 to 2,500 tonnes, four to five times a year, mostly from the Dominican Republic and Central America. A tanker anchors in Roseau Bay, a diver connects a hose, and the molasses flows about two kilometres through an undersea pipeline to the distillery. A single 15-acre cane field beside the buildings, hand-cut once a year, feeds tiny batches of cane-juice rum, a small fraction of production that widens the blender's palette.

Because St. Lucia Distillers runs four stills that yield eight different distillates, from heavy pot-still rum to light column rum, plus the cane-juice batches, and blending them, much like Barbados, is the heart of its house style. The pot stills carry plenty of character on their own: the large independent single-cask scene, with bottlings such as the Velier Warren Khong 2010, shows how much.

From an arson attack: after the fire of 2 May 2007, barrels packed into makeshift rooms were forgotten, later rediscovered older than planned, and bottled as the much-loved Chairman's Reserve Forgotten Casks. That day masked men stormed the distillery, doused the office files in rum and set them alight, an act of sabotage meant to destroy evidence of fraud. The fire gutted the admin block and most of the blending house, and set the company back years. The happy accident of the forgotten barrels came out of that chaos.