T.D.L

Trinidad Distillers Ltd, TDL for short, is the rum distillery of the bitters house Angostura, the only rum distillery left in Trinidad and one of the largest in the Caribbean. So Angostura is both a rum company and a bitters company, and it makes the two at the same site.

The distillery exists because of the bitters. For decades the company simply bought rum to make them, until it bought so much that building its own distillery made sense. Trinidad Distillers opened around 1949.

Under its own name TDL makes the aged Angostura range, from the 1919, built on the old Fernandes vintage rum, through the 7 Year to the extra-aged 1824. Yet the brand-name Angostura rum is only a sliver of output: most is local rum like Forres Park, White Oak and Royal Oak that stays in Trinidad, plus large volumes of bulk rum for blenders worldwide.

The RumX community finds the 1919 vanilla, caramel and honey, the 7 Year raisin, caramel and milk chocolate, and the 1824 woody and honeyed with a touch of smoke. Next to the house range, independents like Swell de Spirits and Spirit Gallery bottle aged single-distillery Trinidad rum.

Column: because the distillery was built to feed bitters, there was never a reason for heavy pot-still rum, and TDL went column from day one. That makes its rum a rarity among the English-speaking islands, a continental style of Spanish heritage. Its columns, built by the German firm Gebr. Herrmann according to Angostura, make a heavy rum off the stripping column alone and a near-neutral light rum off all five columns, then marry them.

In the early 2000s TDL tested a Vendome still, but the results were not what it expected and the still went to St. Lucia Distillers. The profile is gentler and cleaner than that of the island's other legend, the closed Caroni, but it comes from the same Trinidad column tradition.

Yes: Angostura aromatic bitters is a rum infusion, made at the same site in a single room of huge tanks. The botanicals, things like orange peel, gentian, cassia and cinnamon, arrive in colour-coded bags that even staff cannot identify, are milled beyond recognition and steep in rum for hours, before the infusion is blended with sugar and caramel. Trinidad customs does not inspect the shipments, the recipe is guarded like Coca-Cola, and the result is bottled at 44.7 percent.