Brugal

Brugal comes from the Dominican Republic: it is distilled at Casa Brugal in San Pedro de Macoris on the south coast, then tankers carry the spirit north to Puerto Plata, where it is aged, blended and bottled and where the visitor tours are held. The house was founded by Andrés Brugal Montaner, who left Catalonia as a young man and first settled in Cuba, where he picked up sugar and rum. Brugal dates the founding to 1888 in Puerto Plata on the north coast; several historical accounts place that start in Santiago de Cuba and his move to Puerto Plata in 1897. Brugal began ageing its rum in 1920 and today leads the home market.

Mostly the wood, because Brugal takes its flavour from the cask. The double-aged 1888 is the flagship: matured first in ex-bourbon casks, then finished for several years in European oak that held Oloroso or Pedro Ximénez sherry; the community finds wood, spice, vanilla and sherry in it. Below it sit the Añejo, the Extra Viejo and the XV, where the tasting notes mostly read wood, vanilla and caramel, plus the rare Papá Andrés, released since 2013 in small editions. The Leyenda stands apart: the community describes it above all as sweet, with vanilla and brown sugar.

Brugal is a molasses rum, distilled clean in column stills to around 95 percent, a very light spirit by design that gets its flavour in the cask. According to the house, up to 85 percent of the flavour comes from ageing, mostly in ex-bourbon casks, with sherry casks for the top bottlings. The old warehouse is famously colourful: cask hoops are painted red, blue or yellow to track how many times a barrel has been filled.

Since 2008 the Glasgow whisky house Edrington, the company behind Macallan and Highland Park, has owned a majority of Brugal. That brought a rare advantage: deep access to Oloroso and Pedro Ximénez sherry casks, hard to source in the rum world. The day-to-day craft still sits with the Brugal family's fifth generation of maestros roneros, including Jassil Villanueva Quintana, a maestra ronera since 2011 and, according to the house, the first woman in that role in the country. In 2015, at 28, she was profiled as one of the youngest master blenders in the industry.