Foursquare Rum Distillery

Foursquare Rum Distillery stands on a former sugar plantation in the parish of Saint Philip, in the south-east of Barbados. The estate has a long industrial history, and sugar was worked here for generations before the modern distillery arrived. Production began in 1996, built on the bones of a sugar factory that had closed in 1987.

Foursquare is owned and run by the Seale family through the firm R.L. Seale & Co. Its public face is Richard Seale, a fourth-generation distiller who has become an outspoken figure in rum. He is known for two things above all: a traditional Barbadian house style that blends pot and column rum, and a firm position against additives.

Under his direction Foursquare has built a strong reputation among enthusiasts for rums that are aged, blended and bottled with nothing added to flatter them. That reputation rests on the aged expressions the distillery has released over the past two decades, which have drawn attention well beyond the Caribbean.

The Seale family's involvement in rum predates the distillery by decades. R.L. Seale & Co. Ltd was established in 1926 by Reginald Leon Seale, Richard's great-grandfather, as a rum merchant and blending house. For much of the twentieth century the family blended and bottled rum rather than distilling their own.

That changed in the 1990s. David Seale, Richard's father, acquired the Foursquare estate and converted the disused sugar factory into a distillery, with production starting in 1996. The move gave the family control of the whole process, from fermentation and distillation through to ageing and bottling.

Richard Seale took the house into its current form. He pushed the distillery towards fully aged, unadulterated rum and towards clearer labelling of what is in the bottle. Over time he has become a leading voice in wider debates about how rum should be defined and described.

Foursquare makes rum in what is often called the traditional Barbadian style, which blends two kinds of distillate. The distillery runs two double retort copper pot stills and a modern twin-column Coffey still. Pot distillation gives a heavier, more characterful spirit; column distillation gives a lighter, cleaner one. Blending the two is central to the Bajan approach, and it is the foundation of almost everything Foursquare bottles.

Foursquare's rums tend to be dry rather than sweet, which follows directly from the no-additives approach. In an aged expression you can expect notes that come from the barrel and the blend: oak, vanilla, toffee, dried fruit, banana, and a firm, slightly spicy structure. The pot-still component brings weight and a fruity, sometimes leathery depth, while the column component keeps the spirit clean.

Because nothing is added to round off the edges, Foursquare rums often read as more austere on first taste than heavily sweetened rums. Drinkers who come from sweeter styles sometimes need a moment to adjust. For those who enjoy the structure of a good aged spirit, that dryness is the appeal. Higher-strength bottlings, some at cask strength, carry the flavours further and reward a drop of water.

Foursquare bottles across two broad tiers. There is a core range of accessible, widely available rums, and there is the Exceptional Cask Selection, a series of limited aged releases that has built the distillery's reputation among collectors.

The Exceptional Cask Selection, usually shortened to ECS, is a run of aged single blended rums released in numbered marques. Each carries a Mark number and a name, such as Zinfandel Cask Blend, Criterion, Dominus, Sagacity, Nobiliary, Detente and Redoutable. They differ in age, strength and cask type, but they share the house rules: aged in the tropics, no additives, and blended from Foursquare's own pot and column spirit. Because they are limited, individual marques can be hard to find once a release sells through.

Alongside the ECS, Foursquare produces year-round bottlings, including the family's Doorly's range. The names and details of limited releases change over time, so the table below is a guide to the shape of the range rather than a fixed catalogue.

Foursquare rums are made first as sipping rums, and the aged expressions reward being drunk neat or with a little water. That said, a good Barbadian blend has a natural place in classic rum cocktails, where its dryness and structure hold up well against sugar and citrus.

An aged Foursquare works cleanly in a rum-forward stirred drink. In a Rum Old Fashioned, sometimes called the Old Standard, the rum's oak and dried-fruit notes sit comfortably with a little sugar and bitters, and nothing has to fight added sweetness in the spirit. In a Daiquiri, a drier aged rum gives a sharper, more grown-up version of the drink than a sweetened one would. For longer serves, a Barbadian blend suits a Rum Punch or a Dark 'n' Stormy, where its backbone comes through the mixer, and it can add depth to a Mai Tai.

As a general rule, save the rarer Exceptional Cask Selection bottles for the glass on their own, and reach for the core range when you are building a cocktail.