Foursquare (Rum)

The Foursquare Rum Distillery (and Heritage Park) is located in the south of Barbados. It is owned by the Seale family, whose 5 generations of rum-making expertise have followed since 1820. It is one of the oldest trading houses in Barbados. At the time, Reginald Leon Seale, like other traders, was prohibited from selling rum directly to consumers under Barbados' excise duty law. His solution was to establish a distribution business in Bridgetown in the early 1900s: it is the birth of the R. L. Seale brand. From 1962 to 1993, rums from ESA Field and Alleyne Arthur, including Old Brigand, Taylor's Falernum and Doorly's completed the company's portfolio. In order to effectively consolidate the multiple brands, it was decided that ESA Field and Old Brigand would focus on the local market, where they had always done well, while Doorly would become an export brand. In 1995, under the influence of Sir David Seale, the family bought a sugar factory whose oldest building, dating from 1636, was decrepit. His intuition paid off and this site became Foursquare Distillery.

Today the distillery has a three column still which it uses for lighter rums and a modern pot still for more complex rums, which are always distilled from fermented molasses in small batches (usually 112 barrels) and tropically-aged. The rums are aged in small ex-Bourbon American white oak barrels in big open-walled warehouses, most of which come from a distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee.