Brugal

Andrés Brugal Montaner left Catalonia as a young man and first settled in Cuba, where he picked up sugar and rum. He moved to Puerto Plata on the north coast of the Dominican Republic in 1888 and founded the company that still bears his name. Brugal only began ageing its rum in 1920, and built its first distillery in the 1930s; today's plant dates to the 1990s.

In 2008 the Glasgow whisky house Edrington bought a majority of Brugal, making it a stablemate of Macallan and Highland Park. 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 family's fifth generation of maestros roneros, including Jassil Villanueva Quintana, who in 2015 became the first female master rum maker in the country.

Brugal is a molasses rum, distilled clean on two Spanish multicolumn stills to around 95 percent, a very light spirit by design. Distillation happens at Casa Brugal in San Pedro de Macoris in the south, then tankers carry the spirit north to Puerto Plata, where the maestros age and blend it. The old warehouse is famously colourful: cask hoops were once painted red, yellow, blue or white to track how many times a barrel had been filled.

Brugal says about 85 percent of the flavour comes from ageing, which is why the range is read through wood. The double-aged 1888 goes from ex-bourbon into sherry casks; Leyenda reverses that, spending most of its life in sherry wood. Below them sit the Añejo, Extra Viejo and XV, plus the rare no-age-statement Papá Andrés released in tiny annual batches.

Brugal is everywhere, and the 1888 is its most-reviewed bottle on RumX, though the community rates it as solid rather than spectacular, in the low 7s. The clear favourite is the sherry-rich Leyenda, which reaches around 8/10. As a Spanish-style, gently sweetened rum, Brugal trades the high collector scores of Jamaica or Guyana for smoothness and reach.