Touting Rum's Terroir, Mount Gay Has a New Single Estate Series
October 25, 2023 –––––– Shane English
Most whiskies, along with champagne, cognac, tequila, and some other spirits, are governed by strict regulations on where and how they can be produced. Those rules have benefited drinkers enormously—particularly people with a thirst for drinks knowledge—as they usually know exactly what they’re getting. But rum has always been a bit of an outlier in this regard: While there are certainly great rums out there and some do tout their origin story, most of the time it isn’t so clearly stated.
Mount Gay has long been among the leaders in expressing its sense of place, and now it has doubled down with the recently unveiled Single Estate Series, a new line of terroir-driven rums that celebrates Barbadian rum from cane to glass. This release traces Mount Gay’s history in St. Lucy, Barbados back to 1703, as its sugar cane and molasses are both from the Mount Gay estate.
The Single Estate Series idea started back in 2015, when Mount Gay purchased 324 acres of the Old Mount Gay estate, giving it the ability to tend to its own cane and make its own molasses. This was a return to form for the oldest-working rum distillery in the world—it’s been centuries since Mount Gay made rum was made from estate-grown sugar cane.
"This has been an adventure for the whole team,” said master blender Trudiann Branker. “We learned to farm sugar cane, we learned to mill sugar cane. We created Barbadian molasses that, for the first time, was not just a byproduct of making sugar, but was the product’s focus.”
In the first year of farming, the distillery harvested 42 acres of cane and 62 acres in the second year, resulting in 13 and 23 tons of molasses for Mount Gay distillers Michael Absalom and Reynolds Hinds to distill in pot stills before handing the unaged rum to Branker to watch over its maturation. The first batch, 23 01, was distilled on copper pot stills from cane harvested in 2016 and 2017 before being aged in bourbon barrels.
Those details matter, not just as fun facts, but as a way of providing provenance beyond what the word “rum” on the bottle conveys. Rum is a pretty a loosely regulated category in the U.S., mainly guaranteeing that the spirit in the bottle was distilled from the “fermented juice of sugar cane, sugar cane syrup, sugar cane molasses, or other sugar cane by-products.” So this is a bold move from a major producer that highlights the craft behind a spirit that’s far too often treated as a simple mixer. (This one, by the way, is meant to be sipped neat, although cocktail use is not discouraged.)
This level of detail and transparency sets Mount Gay’s Single Estate Series apart from many other producers—even Mount Gay’s other releases like Eclipse and XO offer less information about the blends in each bottle. And among rums that do provide a solid amount of information about their spirit—Plantation’s vintage line of rums from across the Caribbean and Fiji, or Renegade’s array of unaged, terroir-driven rum, for example—Mount Gay’s Single Estate Series still stands out.
Going forward, each year Mount Gay will release a new Single Estate rum, with this first batch offering 1,200 bottles at 55% ABV, and retailing at $400/700 ml. It hits the shelves across the country in November.
