St. Nicholas Abbey (Distillery)

The estate goes back to 1634, and its coral-stone great house was built around 1658. For centuries it grew sugar, passing through the Berringer, Nicholas, Dottin and Cave families, who gave it the name St. Nicholas Abbey. Sugar ended in 1947. In 2006 the Barbadian preservation architect Larry Warren bought the estate and brought distilling back, and his son Simon runs the rum today.

St. Nicholas Abbey 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.

While the rest of Barbados works from molasses, St. Nicholas Abbey presses its own cane and reduces the juice to cane 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 is also the island's only pure batch producer, with no column still at all.

Distillation runs on a 600-litre copper hybrid still named Annabelle, a pot still with an eleven-plate column, built by Arnold Holstein in Germany. The White Rum and the 5 Year are distilled here, from 2013 onward. The older 10, 12 and 18 Year bottlings were distilled at Foursquare and aged at the Abbey, and the label always tells you which is which.

The RumX catalogue here is small, a handful of bottles and a few dozen ratings, which fits a distillery this size. The estate-distilled 5 Year Single Cask leads the community scores at around 8/10, ahead of the standard 5 Year and the White. For most drinkers the appeal is as much the place and the hand-finished bottle as the liquid.