Shipwreck Rum

Shipwreck is a St Kitts rum built for mixing rather than contemplating, and the range is essentially one base spirit taken in six directions.

Spiced is the anchor and the one most people buy first. Coconut comes in two forms, the clear rum and the Coconut Rum Cream, which are different drinks and worth not confusing: the cream is a liqueur.

Vanilla, Coffee and Mango fill out the rest. The Coffee is the most interesting of them for anyone building cocktails, because it does a job no other bottle here does and it also sits in the Coffee Liqueur range.

These are not subtle rums and they are not trying to be. They are sweeter, softer and more approachable than an aged Caribbean rum, and they exist for long drinks, punches and anything where the rum needs to carry a flavour rather than provide one.

If you want the opposite end of the same island chain, the aged Bajan and Guyanese rums on the site are where to look next.

Flavoured rum is one entry point among several, and five reasons to explore rum points to where to go once the spiced bottle runs out.

History

St Kitts sits in the Leeward Islands and was one of the first Caribbean islands the English and French settled, in the 1620s. Sugar dominated the island's economy for over three hundred years, and the last working sugar factory did not close until 2005.

Flavoured rum is much older than its reputation suggests. Spiced and fruit-infused rum has been made in the Caribbean since at least the eighteenth century, when spices were added to rough young spirit to make it palatable, and rum punch built on citrus and nutmeg predates almost every cocktail in the modern canon.

The Planter's Punch rhyme, one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak, dates from the nineteenth century and is still the best formula for a rum punch anyone has written down.

Rum cream is a more recent idea, borrowed from Irish cream in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Caribbean versions built on aged rum rather than whiskey have their own character: less cocoa, more molasses and vanilla.

How to drink it

Spiced rum and ginger beer with a wedge of lime is the drink these were made for. Build it in a tall glass over ice, no shaking required.

Coconut rum goes into a Pina Colada, and the shortcut version is genuinely good: coconut rum, pineapple juice and a splash of cream, blended with ice.

Coffee rum makes an easier espresso martini than the classic recipe, because the rum brings both the spirit and the coffee. Shake it with fresh espresso and a little sugar syrup and you can skip the separate liqueur.

The Coconut Rum Cream is a liqueur, not a rum. Serve it cold and neat over one large ice cube, or pour it over ice cream.

Keep the cream in the fridge once opened and finish it within a few months. The rums themselves are stable and will keep for a year or more at room temperature, away from sunlight.

For a rum punch that works every time: one part lime, two parts sugar syrup, three parts Shipwreck, four parts pineapple or orange juice, grated nutmeg on top.