Admiral Rodney

Four rums, all from St Lucia Distillers, all at 40%, and each named after a ship from a single naval engagement.

Royal Oak is the entry point of the four and the most approachable. Princessa follows. Formidable steps up in weight and oak. Monarch sits at the top of the range.

What makes the set worth buying together is that they are variations on one house style rather than four unrelated rums. St Lucia Distillers runs both pot and column stills and blends across them, and the differences between these four come mostly from cask make-up and time rather than from different base spirits.

That makes them an unusually clean vertical to taste through, in the same way the Doorly's range is from Barbados.

St Lucia sits between Martinique and Barbados in the Windward Islands, and its rum sits between them stylistically too: fuller than a Bajan rum, less vegetal than a Martinican agricole.

If you already drink Foursquare or El Dorado, this is the obvious next island.

Princessa was one of the eleven bottles we picked in our rum roundup for 2024, tasted against the Barbados and Guyana rums it sits between.

History

George Brydges Rodney was an admiral in the Royal Navy, and the ships this range is named after fought under him at the Battle of the Saintes in April 1782, in the waters between Guadeloupe and Dominica. The engagement broke a French fleet and is the reason his name attaches to Caribbean rum at all.

St Lucia itself changed hands between Britain and France fourteen times, which is why the island has French place names and drives on the left.

Sugar arrived in the seventeenth century and rum followed it. The modern industry consolidated in 1972 when the island's two remaining distilleries merged to form St Lucia Distillers, based in the Roseau Valley.

The distillery is unusual in the Caribbean for the range of equipment it keeps: two pot stills, a Coffey still and a column still, which lets it produce styles from very light to very heavy in one place. Most Caribbean distilleries have one still type and one resulting house character.

Molasses is the base, and ageing is tropical, which means it works considerably faster than it would in Europe.

How to drink it

All four are strong enough in flavour to sip and gentle enough at 40% not to need water. Use a tulip glass, serve at room temperature and leave the ice out.

Royal Oak and Princessa are the two that also mix well. An Old Fashioned built on either, with a dash of Angostura and barely any sugar, is an excellent drink and a good way to see what the rum is doing.

Formidable and Monarch are better neat. Expect dried fruit, baking spice, toffee and a little smoke from the pot still component.

If you are tasting all four in one sitting, go in order and use small measures. The differences are real but they are not enormous, and a heavy pour of the first will flatten the rest.

For food, aged rum and dark chocolate is the easy pairing. Aged rum and a strong hard cheese is the better one, and almost nobody tries it.