– photo by Ania Bronetzki, a photographer from Québec, Canada
Sipping cocktails and enjoying the cool sea breeze in a lounge chair, set amidst picture-perfect beaches – this is what the quintessential Caribbean holiday looks like. The Caribbean islands are known for producing some of the world’s top quality rums that are used in these cocktails. Jamaica – the land of Bob Marley and Caribbean’s third largest island has a history of rum-making that goes back centuries.
The first ever distillery in Jamaica – Appleton Estate is located in one of the three main valleys in Jamaica – Nassau Valley. The estate together with its sugarcane cultivation spans over 4600 hectares of land and has its own sugar factory.
The official documentation of Appleton Estate shows 1749 as the year of its foundation, which makes it the second oldest rum producer in the world after Mount Gay Distilleries in Barbados. The distillery has been producing rum for over two and a half centuries now and can produce up to ten million litres of rum per year, of which about 80% is exported outside Jamaica.
The primary ingredient required to make rum is sugarcane. Appleton Estate grows its own sugarcane and uses molasses – a thick sticky liquid, obtained by removing sugar crystals from boiled sugarcane juice in their rum-making process. After fermenting the molasses using yeast, the rum is distilled and left to mature in American white oak barrels. The longer the rum stays inside the barrel, the smoother it becomes.
“The beautifully complex and aromatic Appleton Estate rums are produced on our estate, which makes it one of the few rums in the world to claim a terroir and the only rum in the world that has a terroir as unique as the Nassau Valley. At the Appleton Estate, the production of our rums is a craft. Every step in the process is carefully managed, from the selection of the varieties of sugarcane that are grown on the Estate, to the natural culture of yeast used in fermentation, to our unique distillation and blending methods.”
