Ditching the Beach, Two Travelers Opt for a Mount Gay Rum Tour
By the time the Celebrity Summit docks in Bridgetown, Barbados, midway through our Southern Caribbean cruise, the Brawny Sherpa and I are serenely in full-on vacation mode. No matter that it is relatively early in the morning; we quickly hop in a taxi and head for the Mount Gay rum distillery tour. It is time for a bit of spirits tourism.
Barbados Is Rum’s Birthplace
What do I know about rum up to this point? Mostly that I like it in beach drinks of the pina colada ilk. What we are about to learn on our Barbados rum tour is this is the land where rum was first invented.
Rum originated in Barbados.
An early lesson on sustainability’s benefits: Molasses from sugar cane production used to be dumped into the ocean as at one time there wasn’t much use for it, our Barbados rum tour guide explains. Somewhere along the way, it was noticed that molasses ferments.
Mount Gay Rum’s Spirited History
In the 1700s, Sir John Gay Alleyne, working with the inaptly named John Sober, helped manage a distillery in Barbados now known as the Mount Gay rum distillery. A deed for the distillery dates it to 1703.
Originally called “kill devil”—because, among other reasons, early versions apparently did not taste all that good—rum contains just three ingredients: molasses, coral-filtered water, and yeast to speed along that fermentation. It’s double-distilled and then stored in oak barrels.
A Mount Gay Rum Review
Let’s just agree that, being in business for three centuries plus, Mount Gay knows how to make the good stuff. Rum comes in clear to amber hues, we learn during the tasting portion of our Mount Gay rum tour. What impacts the color, our tour guide explains, is not the molasses but the barrels in which it is stored. Some of the barrels are charred, giving the rum inside them a deeper color.
“Being in business for three centuries plus, Mount Gay knows how to make the good stuff.”
In a cocktail, the rum should not overpower the other flavors of the drink. We particularly like the Black Barrel, which was introduced in 2013 and has a bold flavor, and the XO, which stand for ‘extra old.’ It is aged between seven and 15 years and tastes quite good neat. It does, indeed, taste good on the first sip, our tour guide suggests and we, within minutes, confirm.
A Barbados Tour for Bashful Adventurers
- Nothing eases ones reticence like a pinch of rum!
- Even if a traveler is not in a socializing mood, there is plenty to see and learn on the Mount Gay rum tour.
- Mount Gay Rum offers various tours, with differing tasting and dining options.
- Rum shops are the coffee bars of Barbados—places where friends meet and chat. More than 12,000 of them exist on the island, according to our Mount Gay rum tour guide.
—Lori Tripoli
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