Article written by Margaret Swaine.
There are rum producers on many Caribbean islands that offer fun, unique and informative tours, tastings and activities such as blending your own rum, making rum cocktails or combining spices to make a spiced rum.
Here are three islands with standout rum experiences.
St. Nicholas Abbey Distillery has a 350 year history in Barbados
Barbados is considered the birthplace of rum. Its name was first coined in the taverns of Bridgetown, where life was rumbustious! Settled in 1627, with sugar cane production by 1637 and rum shortly thereafter, Barbados is also blessed with rum’s other vital ingredient: pure, clean and abundant water, naturally filtered by the coral that makes up its land mass.
The island still plays homage to its heritage. The Barbados Food and Rum Festival runs from October 24 – 27 this year and showcases the island’s mixology prowess with demonstrations and tastings from top mixologists and distilleries.
THE BIRTHPLACE OF RUM (Barbados)
Rum tours explain how sugar cane is crushed and used to produce rum at St. Nicholas Abbey Distillery
Barbados has an abundance of rum shops, about six to every square kilometre and is home to historic distilleries such as Mount Gay, Foursquare, West Island Rum Distillery and my favourite St. Nicolas Abbey. The Warren family purchased St. Nicolas Abbey Distillery on Barbados in 2006 to ensure its 350 year old history was well preserved for future generations. At the plantation you can tour the great house, a Jacobean mansion built in 1660 to view the antiques spanning its centuries of history, watch a home movie circa 1935 of early island life and lunch at the Terrace Café. You can also visit the boiling house, rum distillery and surrounding gardens. When I visited I purchased a bottle of their rare 10 year old rum and had my name engraved on the elegant glass decanter.
THE ‘JOY’ OF RUM (Jamaica)
Dr. Joy Spence was the first female Master Blender; pictured here in the fields of sugar cane at Appleton Estate.
Jamaica is home to the wonderful Dr. Joy Spence at Appleton Estate. In 1997 Joy became the first female Master Blender in the spirits industry and a tour and tasting led by her is special indeed.
The distillery is in the picturesque Nassau Valley in St. Elizabeth in the interior of the island. When I visited, Joy met our small group and began our tour by taking us up the hillside to gaze upon the over 4,000 hectares of sugar cane fields owned by the distillery. This single estate in a small circumscribed geographic area makes Appleton one of the few rum brands in the world to claim a “terroir”. As part of the tour we got to grind the juice out of some sugar cane and sample the result. We also tasted the syrupy mixture of sugar crystals and molasses. We toured the distillation area with its pot stills and continuous stills; a hot part of the plant filled with the aromas of molasses. We cooled down in the aging cellar, stacked with old barrels and intriguing smells of its own.
Then of course it was time to sip the range of rums. Joy called her seminar “The Joy of Rum” – pun intended.
HISTORIC RUM MASTER PROGRAM (St. Kitts)
The Old Road Rum Company at Wingfield Estate in Old Road Town. The Boiling House, one of the recently excavated historic buildings.
In 2023 the Kittitian RumMaster program was launched on January 19, coincidentally my birthday, so I just had to sign up. St. Kitts is the home of the oldest surviving rum distillery in the Caribbean, a recently excavated and restored distillery found on the 18th century sugar cane plantation owned by a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson, the third US president.
General Manager, Bon Jovi took me around to learn about the rum that first flowed from the Old Road Rum Distillery in 1681. I saw the preserved aqueduct which brought water to the distillery and the old lead stills. At the boiling house, I visited the underground tunnel where slaves shovelled sugar cane fibre onto a fire whose heat travelled under cauldrons that kept the cane juice boiling. I was finding this RumMaster tour to be a fascinating history lesson and a great way to tour this small 29 kilometre long island.
No rum tour is complete without tasting! General Manager, Bon Jovi leads the tasting at Old Road Rum distillery.
My next stop was at lively Spice Mill Restaurant on Cockleshell Bay, a beautiful drive to the southern end of the island, where owner Roger Brisbane introduced me to his Hibiscus Spirits products. As part of the RumMaster program, he had me make my own version of spiced rum adding extract of vanilla, orange, ginger, clove, cinnamon and black pepper to a base of hibiscus infused rum and sugar syrup. Then under his tutelage he had me make two classic rum cocktails which of course I got to drink.
Article and photographs by Margaret Swaine. Margaret Swaine has visited over 136 countries as a journalist covering wine, spirits, restaurants, golf, spas and travel
She spent over two decades as the wine and drink columnist for both Toronto Life and Chatelaine magazines and for 16 years she wrote a weekly column for the National Post newspaper under “Wine Picks” and then “Forks and the Road”. For years she wrote the spirit and cocktail columns for Zoomer magazine and for six years was the spa columnist for Best Health magazine. She also penned the bi-weekly column Global Gourmet for Travel Industry Today and the spirit columns for Wine Align.
Her current work includes the Global Getaways column for Kawarthas Magazine and travel features for Travel Life, Zoomer and Bold Magazines.
