Saint Lucia Distillers

The modern story begins with Denis Barnard, who built a distillery at Dennery on the east coast in 1931. 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 family bought out Geest for full control in 1993, and named the merged company's first rum Denros, an acronym of Dennery and Roseau. Denros Strong Rum still lives up to its name at 80 percent.

This is the engine of the house. 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. Two yeast strains, A and B, complete the palette: eight distillates in all.

With no cane industry left, almost all the rum starts from imported molasses. 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.

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. It was sabotage, meant to destroy evidence of fraud, and it gutted the admin block and most of the blending house, setting the company back years. But barrels crammed into makeshift rooms during the rebuild were forgotten and rediscovered older than planned, becoming the beloved nine-year Forgotten Casks. Two new warehouses opened in 2021 to ease the space crunch for good.

The community's everyday anchors are the Chairman's Reserve Forgotten Casks, the most reviewed St. Lucia rum on RumX, and the entry Chairman's Reserve Original, with the Chairman's Reserve 1931 and Admiral Rodney Extra Old as the aged step up. The highest scores belong to the independent single casks: the Velier Warren Khong 2010 at 9.0/10 and bottlers like Nobilis and Blackadder near 8.9/10. SLD also makes the private Elements 8 brand.