On Friday evening, bartender Christian McDonald was experimenting at the Callwood Rum Distillery in Cane Garden Bay.
“I don’t know too much about it, but I’m experimenting with it,” Mr. McDonald said of the local liquor. “I want to get people’s feedback on it.”
The rum, he added, was surprisingly light and smooth.
Distillery staff often hear such comments from first-time customers, said Melonee Callwood, whose family operates the business. In part because sugarcane is the main ingredient, she explained, most of the distillery’s varieties are easy on the palate.
“You can make rum from different things — corn, maize — but we make ours from sugarcane: locally sourced sugarcane,” said Ms. Callwood, who started learning about rum making when she was 7 years old.
Making rum
The process begins in March when the Callwoods harvest sugarcane from around the distillery.
“You squeeze the cane, get the juice and put it to ferment, and afterwards we cook it from a copper pot,” she said. “As it boils, the alcohol turns into a vapour.”
The vapour is then collected in a copper pot and transferred into a cistern, where it cools off and becomes rum.
The liquor is decanted into glass bottles or a wooden barrel.
“It comes off like moonshine,” Ms. Callwood said. “If you want to get really drunk, this is what you take: It knocks you out real fast.”
For added flavour and colour, the rum is aged in the barrels that line the walls inside the distillery. The longer it stays in a barrel, the darker and smoother it becomes, she explained.
Family business
Few distilleries in the Caribbean even remotely resemble the VI’s lone distillery, which operates on a small scale and produces mainly for retail, said Ms. Callwood.
The business is still family owned, and the building has remained much the same for some 400 years.
“We just try not to do too much modification to it. It’s the same coral walls since the 1600s,” she said. “The most we change is the galvanisers on the roofs. As for the barrels, we reuse them over and over. Some we use for as long as 20 years.”
Though Ms. Callwood works full-time at the distillery, she doesn’t see it as a job, she said.
“It’s a family tradition and I love doing it. I let the guys do the hard men’s work, but I’m here for most of it,” she said. “I just think it’s great that you meet new people and get to tell them about your history and where you’ve come from.”
Working there comes with the added benefit of having an endless supply of rum, Ms. Callwood joked.
“I like them all,” she said. “The flavour just depends on my mood and the day really.”
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