Good news first. The Rockley Still is refurbished and going to be put back into production very soon!
So this morning I headed south from my west coast domicile to Bridgetown where at the shore north of Bridgetown the production site of W.I.R.D is located. Nice beach, ugly looking factory. But don’t judge from the first impression.
I just dropped in the main office after asking some employees at different gates for the visitor center (which they don’t have).
Luckily, I just came at the right point in time as a tour was about to start.
We got a 45 minutes power point by Andrew, general manager himself, about the history and today’s mission of Barbados‘ largest producer. It was impressive! They have so much historical documents on how the distillery was setup back in the days (originally planned by Georg Stade as a shows case how to produce better rum with special column still designs) through the trade sanctions and prohibition until today’s commitment of the distillery to support the nation and sustainable production and agriculture and environment protection. No profit is allocated to the shareholder (MF) but all reinvested for innovation, better support of the farmers and education of employees. I was quite impressed.
After that, the tour around the distillery started, passing the stills, the warehouse and we ended up at 5 barrels with the opportunity to taste 5 different rums directly from the cask. An amazing experience! All rums where 2 - 10 years old, different styles but all as good that they could have been bottled as single cask bottlings right away reaching 8.2 - 8.8 ratings at RumX (maybe the rum or my excitement is talking now - but the rums where really good). To much text? OK, pictures now…
Thanks for sharing this experience! I really appreciate what WIRD is doing in restoring old stills and doing all this historical work, despite all the negative publicity regarding the Barbados GI. Hopefully, they will be able to deliver the interesting rum they’re producing and not only mainstream Barbados style rums.
The last remaining distillery on our trip is Mount Gay. To get to the production site, one has to book a tour in advance, which I obviously did. The whole organization around the trip was very professional.
On arrival, the visitors were welcome in the nicely restored plantation house, which contains the bar, a library and some historic items.
Tina, our tour guide. She is very knowledgeable, has a great sense of humor and could teach me on how to taste rum. I learned something new! We all had a lot of fun on the tour.
MG sources the whole water used in the production with their own well on the plot. Other then most of the caribbean islands, Barbados is not of volcanic origin but an ancient coral reef that has been lifted 60,000 years ago by tectonic movement. So the whole island consists of limestone which filters water very well. Thus, Barbados has high quality water reservoirs and even tap water can be drunk.
We were guided through the molasses tanks (no pictures allowed) that welcomed us with a heavy and sweet smell (it can be stored days, weeks, years) through the warehouse and the stills and have been given the opportunity to taste different types of molasses.
The smells in the warehouse was amazing.
We are at the end of the tour and the end of our 10day trip to Barbados. The tour ended with a nice tasting and some new lessons (for me at least - “don’t put the nose in the glas, Stefan! Swivel it, the rum comes to you”) on how to taste rum. Really nice is the cask strength Black Barrel!
The trip ended with a nice dinner at a beautiful sea side restaurant serving amazing food. Goodbye!
oldest!
