Saint Lucia Distillers

Chairman's Reserve and the super-premium Admiral Rodney above all, plus the everyday Bounty, the Denros Strong Rum and the 1931 anniversary blends; the distillery also makes the privately owned Elements 8 brand. For a start the community reaches for the Chairman's Reserve Original or the Chairman's Reserve Forgotten Casks, and the aged step up is the Chairman's Reserve 1931 or the Admiral Rodney Extra Old. Independent bottlers such as Velier, Nobilis and Blackadder also fill single casks from the distillery, like the Velier Warren Khong 2010.

A Chairman's Reserve release born from a fire: barrels crammed into makeshift rooms during the rebuild after 2007 were forgotten and rediscovered older than planned, having aged about nine years. The fire was sabotage. In the early hours of 2 May 2007, armed and masked men stormed the distillery, emptied the filing cabinets, doused the papers in rum and set them alight to destroy evidence of fraud. It gutted the admin block and most of the blending house, setting the company back years. The rediscovered rum proved so popular that the distillery has kept the name going, and two new warehouses opened in 2021 to ease the space crunch for good.

Four: two John Dore pot stills, a Vendome hybrid and a McMillan Coffey column still, which with two yeast strains give eight different distillates. The two John Dore double-retort pot stills, one small from 1998 and its much larger sibling from 2005, make the heavy, high-ester rum. The Vendome hybrid, once used at Angostura in Trinidad, adds a lighter spirit with a signature rubbery note that defines many Chairman's Reserve blends. The McMillan Coffey twin-column still yields three marques, light, medium and heavy, drawn from different plate heights. The yeast strains, A and B, complete the palette.

Almost entirely imported molasses, because no cane industry is left on the island; cane juice only goes into small batches. Every few months a tanker anchors in Roseau Bay, a diver connects a flexible hose, and the molasses flows about two kilometres through an undersea pipeline to the distillery, where tanks hold a year's supply. Water comes from the Roseau River and from rainwater, nearly 16 million litres a year treated by reverse osmosis. A 15-acre cane field beside the buildings, hand-cut once a year, feeds the small agricole-style batches, and that cane-juice rum made up around 10 percent of some 1931 releases.

From a merger of two distilleries: in 1972 the Barnards merged their rum business with the Geest family's Roseau Bay distillery on the west coast, forming St. Lucia Distillers, and production moved to the Roseau Valley. The modern story begins with Denis Barnard, who built a distillery at Dennery on the east coast in 1931. The family bought out Geest for full control in 1993.