St. Nicholas Abbey (Distillery)

Partly: the White Rum, the 5 Year and the 5 Year Single Cask are distilled on the estate, while the older age statements were distilled at Foursquare and aged at the Abbey. The label always tells you which is which. Distillation runs on a copper hybrid still named Annabelle, a pot still with an eleven-plate column.

St. Nicholas Abbey is the only distillery on Barbados that works from its own cane syrup instead of molasses, the island's only pure batch producer, and every bottle is filled, corked and engraved by hand. The estate presses its own cane and reduces the juice to syrup, using a restored 1890s steam mill and an evaporator fired by the cane's own bagasse. The syrup keeps for months, so the distillery can run all year.

It makes a tiny fraction of what Mount Gay or Foursquare produce, perhaps one or two percent. The whole operation fits in a single building, and the bottles show it: heavy engraved glass, filled by gravity, sealed with corks cut from estate hardwood and finished by hand. It is rum as a craft object, and for most drinkers the appeal is as much the place and the hand-finished bottle as the liquid.

The coral-stone great house dates to about 1658, but the distillery is modern and was founded in 2006. For centuries the estate grew sugar, passing through the Berringer, Nicholas, Dottin and Cave families, who gave it the name St. Nicholas Abbey. Sugar ended in 1947.