Time to wrap up with the two distilleries that I visited in Barbados:
First up was Mount Gay where I went alone because the other two that I was traveling with were not geeky enough to pay just over 100€ for the tour. There was one couple from California on the tour with me that had a decent interest in rum, the other seven were more into whisky or booked the tour because of how big rum is in Barbados.
It didn’t start too well with the shuttle being 45 minutes late and me standing in the rain. But I had some time to dry on my way there where I could also see how big the WIRD is. They opened their visitor center shortly after I left the island. We arrived at a beautiful building as already shown by @MoparRules in his great report.
After a thorough safety instruction (very different from Foursquare and SLD) we got our helmets and were guided through the distillery. There is not too much that I could add to what MoparRules wrote. The smell of molasses was the best here of the three distilleries that I’ve visited and it was great trying the molasses they are using for their standard and single estate releases.
It’s a beautiful, well-maintained estate with a focus on sustainability that I support.
But I still had mixed feelings about my visit due to some different reasons:
- Nothing will beat the special tour at SLD of course, but it was still very touristic. Not many technical details, more a looking at things and roughly knowing what they are used for.
- I’ve heard good things about the guide Tina, but we had someone different. Our guide was more focused on his jokes than the rum part of the tour and at times I had the feeling that I had more general rum knowledge than he.
- The tasting was led by a very passionate woman and was great. While the selection of rums was nice (Silver, Eclipse, Black Barrel, XO, and the Origin Series Volume 1+2) I didn’t enjoy them as much as I thought. I am a huge fan of the XO which still is one of my favorite rums, but I don’t like the other standard releases that much. And the Origin Series was interesting, but the Virgin Oak and the Copper Column ones were a bit of a letdown for me. Also, I would have loved to try the Black Barrel Cask Strength or 23_01 Bn_Qa, which was not possible.
While writing this I am noticing that I am running out of time, so Foursquare will have to follow in yet another post. I’ll end this one with a couple of pictures. I suggest comparing the Pot Still in the middle to the pictures shared here: Barbados in a Nutshell - #23 by MoparRules. They didn’t fix the retort yet.
The oldest part of the distillery that’s still used to produce rum is the cooling circuit.
Small still for trial runs
Labelling of casks
SD is the column still. Grade A stands for barrels used for the first time by Mount Gay. Interesting was that they also have things like Grade B51, which means that they are using the cask for the second time and that it held water for 51 days until it was filled with rum again. You could also buy their casks for 6 to 12 USD, but I didn’t even bother looking at shipping costs
