What's In Your Rum Brand?

Introducing the Rum Brand Reference

In these days of increased consciousness of what we buy and consume, articles highlighting rum brand ownership are increasingly more common. Often, they have listicles of brands with a particular hook, including black-owned, female-owned, and family-owned brands. While promoting such brands is a worthy cause, other brands with the same criteria are often overlooked, or relevant details are omitted.

It’s frustrating to separate certain brands’ marketing spin from cold, hard reality. Does the brand really have a long history of making rum, or was it financed by a celebrity or wealthy spirits industry insider with visions of a big payday when a big spirit conglomerate snaps up the brand?

Beyond who owns the brands, who actually makes a brand’s rum is also relevant. Many brands make rum at their distilleries, e.g., Appleton, Bacardi, and Saint-James. However, many brands purchase pre-blended rum to bottle under their brand name. And some brands buy their rum already produced, bottled and labeled at the facilities of another brand. For those interested in the taxonomy of brands, Chapter 12  (“Behind the Brands”) of Modern Caribbean Rum takes a deep dive into the topic, including key attributes for classifying a brand.

I’m not suggesting that some brands are better than others, but if we are to be informed consumers, knowing the brand’s background is useful.

Should you wish to know where your money goes when you buy a particular brand, I’ve made a rum brand reference page to help readers quickly locate the key information for hundreds of popular brands:

You can also access this page from this site’s main menu.

I plan to keep the page up to date, and if I’ve overlooked a particularly important brand or misrepresented some detail, let me know.

Additional Observations

The reference page data is intentionally kept simple and non-judgmental. But with it, we can create some interesting slices of the data. Here are two such slices:

Rum Brands Owned by Diageo

UK-based Diageo is the world’s largest spirits conglomerate, and its rum brands are produced in at least nine countries — three for Captain Morgan alone.

• Bundaberg (Australia)

• Captain Morgan (outside of Jamaica)

• Cacique (Venezuela)

• Don Papa (Philippines)

• McDowell’s No. 1 Celebration (India)

• Pampero (Venezuela)

• Santiago de Cuba (joint venture with Cuba Ron)

• Ron Zacapa (50% ownership)

Caribbean Basin Owned Rum Producers

It’s surprising how many brands are ultimately controlled by European or American companies or individuals. Appleton Estate, the iconic Jamaican rum, is owned by the Italian Gruppo Campari. With that in mind, the list below highlights brands that are ultimately owned by people/companies based in the Caribbean Basin or align themselves with the Caribbean, e.g., Guyana and Surinam.

French and American-owned brands are omitted because the resulting list would be too large. (Martinique and Guadeloupe are part of France, Puerto Rico and the USVI are part of the US.)

• Angostura/Trinidad Distillers Ltd (Trinidad)

• Antigua Distillery Ltd (Antigua)

• Barbancourt (Haiti)

• Bermúdez (Dominican Republic)

• Carúpano (Venezuela)

• Compañía Licorera de Nicaragua (Nicaragua)

• Cuba Ron (Cuba)

• Demerara Distillers Ltd (Guyana)

• Destiladora de Alcoholes y Rones (Guatemala)

• Distillerie de Port-au-Prince (Haiti)

• Foursquare Rum Distillery (Barbados)

• Grenada Distillers Ltd (Grenada)

• Hampden Estate (Jamaica)

• Industria Licorera de Caldas (Colombia)

• Macoucherie (Dominica)

• National Rums of Jamaica (2/3rd Caribbean owned)

• Olivery y Oliver (Dominican Republic)

• River Antoine (Grenada)

• Santa Teresa (Venezuela)

• St. Nicholas Abbey

• St. Vincent Distillers

• Surinam Alcoholic Beverages

• Travellers (Belize)

• Varela Hermanos (Panama)

• Vinícola del Norte (Dominican Republic)

• Westerhall Estate (Grenada)

• Worthy Park (Jamaica)