Rum is aged all over the world and the varying climates create a multitude of expressions and flavours. When it comes to ageing rum for long periods, it poses certain challenges for producers due to the angels’ share – or devil’s, as it’s known in the Caribbean. In the tropics the devil’s share averages around 8% per year of liquid loss as the process is some two to three times faster than continental ageing. Appleton Estate ambassador Chris Dennis says a barrel “acts like a lung”, breathing in the rum to exchange congeners. “The flavours are manipulated in a unique way, but you lose a lot more. It means you need to build safeguards into place to protect your losses and that is an expensive thing to do.”
When safeguarding the liquid, Appleton master distiller Joy Spence uses marques at the “forefront of barrel management to conserve the vast amounts of ageing stock and to make the most of the intensity and flavour that we get with Caribbean tropical ageing”, adds Dennis. In Jamaica, each batch of rum typically falls within one marque with specific fermentation and distillation methods, giving each one a different character. A marque is commonly defined by measuring its level of esters, given in grams per hectolitre of pure alcohol and often referred to by letter codes corresponding to a specific method of production and the level of esters.
When it comes to using these marques to protect the ageing rum, Dennis says: “Every distillery, specifically in Jamaica, will have 10-12 marques and will be using both column and pot stills which produce that marque with a certain flavour profile. The marques are then aged and later on, before bottling, blended. Marques are like a palette of colour – you’re mixing things as you go and they allow you to have better control of your barrel inventory because you’re doing your blending once the ageing is complete.” To further combat the losses involved with tropical ageing, he says: “Every three years, each barrel is disgorged. We have 350,000 barrels so that’s a full-time team of people emptying out rum and testing it. If we’re checking the liquid every three years, even the old stocks, we have a really good idea of the loss of liquid. If there’s any doubt, barrels are refilled and we can bring the fill level up inside the barrels. For example, if we bring them back up to 70% within the barrels, we’re going to get less evaporation over time.”
In Cuba, rum uses two phases of ageing according to the DOP (Denominación de Origen Protegida), one of the aguardiente (distilled at around 75%) for at least two years in white oak barrels and later carbon filtered, and the other in American white oak barrels.
Christian Barré, chief executive of Havana Club, says: “With drinkers increasingly seeking out aged expressions, we’ve continued to innovate in this space and test the boundaries of maturation with a series of limited editions. We also practise continuous ageing, where the rum is left to age naturally and then partially taken out of the first barrel to be re-aged and blended into another cask for a better and more consistent profile. This process, coupled with the fact that the angels’ share in Cuba is among the highest in the world, means our rum bases are increasingly rare.”
Cooler climes
With the tropics having to combat their losses as a result of high heat and humidity, it’s a different story in cooler, wetter Europe where continental ageing sees a much lower angels’ share. Founder & head distiller at Scottish rum brand J Gow Collin Van Schayk says: “We’re in quite a unique place because we’re on an uninhabited island in Orkney and we’re at sea level, all factors that contribute to the flavour. It’ll be rare that we get a day above 20°C in the summer, and the temperature fluctuates a lot which is interesting – one day it’s sunny, one day it’s snowing”.
J Gow uses a range of casks that provide variations on the angels’ share, such as oak (roughly 2% a year) and chestnut (average 3-7%). “We use bourbon because it’s a popular finish that everyone is familiar with, and it’s easily available,” Van Schayk continues. “Chestnut is our signature and was chosen because it’s more porous so it counteracts the slower maturation associated with the climate. You’re getting more interaction with the spirit, the wood and the air around the cask, but you’re also losing more spirit.”
As demand for aged rum increases it’s interesting to see brands innovating at both ends of the spectrum – to protect their quickly evaporating stock, and those searching for solutions to speed the process up. J Gow is leaning into its use of chestnut and expanding its space to produce more. “We’ve got some of the oldest casks of Scottish rum and we were the second distillery to start in Scotland. We’ll have an eight-year-old next year and we’ve just finished our new warehouse which will give us space for about 400 casks so we can really start upping production as well, which is exciting.
“It was a massive milestone for us to get to three years old and that felt so old, but consumers can pick up an eight-year-old bottle of Appleton, for example, so they’re used to much older stuff. People still look at the numbers and that’s something that we will get to, it just takes time,” says Van Schayk.
Market unity
This poses the question – do we need a unified message in the market for aged rums? David Howarth, founder of independent bottler House of Rum, notes: “Every cask is different due to its placement in the warehouse and the relationship with the climate. A rum that’s aged in the tropics matures a lot more quickly than a whisky that sits in a cask for longer.
“Rum is often defined by its colour. If we take the natural perception that the darker it is, the older it is, the better it is, then of course that’s not true. When you’ve got a rum that’s just been produced from the still, some producers add caramel to make it look older, and it’s not aged at all. There are rums out there that look aged because of the introduction of caramel and actually they’re not, they’re effectively a white rum. I think there needs to be regulation around that. We don’t put the age on our bottles, we put the vintage and the bottling date.”
Among the trade there’s a desire to have clearer messaging on aged rum, as Dawn Davies MW, buying director at Speciality Drinks, says: “I think we have to move away from language that doesn’t help the consumer understand what’s going on in the bottle. People are definitely following that whisky producer mentality, but I think age is an easy sell. If people understand that a five-year-old rum in the Caribbean is almost equivalent to a 15-year-old whisky, and the value is so much better, as long as rum producers don’t start being stupid with pricing, then you have a lot of opportunity with rum in the premium category.”
Davies ultimately wants consumers to better understand the meaning of age statements on a bottle of rum. Despite the fact that Europe is finding ways to speed up ageing to meet the demands of the category, it’s true that consumers associate the bigger numbers with quality.
Given that it’s the temperate conditions of Scotland that allow Scotch whisky to mature and develop steadily over time, perhaps there’s a growing opportunity for Scottish rum brands to do the same – something which many tropical producers don’t have the luxury of, given the extreme levels of devil’s share.
