St. Nicholas Abbey rum is small-batch, hand-crafted and made from a heritage sugar cane variety grown on its own plantation.

St. Nicholas Abbey’s 400-acre estate has over 225 acres of sugar cane fields and the 350-year-old Great House is one of just three mansions built during the reign of King James 1 of England remaining in the western hemisphere.

The hand-harvested sugar cane is crushed during the short Barbados crop season, between February and June in St Nicholas’s 1890 steam mill to create a syrup commonly known as ‘sugar cane syrup’. also sometimes called ‘honey’ it is stored to enable year-round rum production. Uniquely, St. Nicholas Abbey Rum is the only rum produced in Barbados from cane syrup, rather than molasses.

Located in the Barbados highlands of St Peter, St. Nicholas Abbey employs the traditional pot still, batch distillation method with a rectifying column. Called ‘Annabelle’, St. Nicholas Abbey’s combination pot still and distillation column produces a superior light rum spirit which is aged at 65% in used American oak bourbon barrels.

Barbados’s famous calcium-rich, coral-filtered water, which helps to give the island’s rum its unique character, is fed by the Abbey’s well and mill pump to the distillery.

The aged rums are hand-bottled in their unblended form straight from every single barrel into glass decanters individually etched with an image of the St. Nicholas Abbey great house and individually engraved with the bottling dated and numbered. Visitors at St Nicholas Abbey can also get a personalised message engraved onto a bottle. The decanter is sealed with an estate-grown, mahogany-capped cork.

Visitors to St. Nicholas Abbey can take a tour of the great house, heritage railway, distillery and bottling plant. Visitors over the age of 18 may also enjoy complimentary rum tasting during their tour.