Foursquare Rum

6/22/18 -

It's almost inevitable that any product of exceedingly high quality and finite quantity finds a rapturous audience. It's just a shame that New York's honeymoon with Foursquare rum couldn't have lasted a little longer before all the "Pappy of Rum" articles started showing up. Suddenly, just as Foursquare was acquainting rum lovers with its phenomenal range of aged Caribbean spirits, they vanished, snapped up in a puff of hyperbolic smoke. So now we only get a handful of bottles and there is more hype surrounding Foursquare's limited availability than what's actually in the bottle, which is unfortunate, because the liquid is beautiful.

Rum as a spirits category is full of compromises, and Richard Seale of Foursquare has set himself apart in his total dedication to his vision and ethos. The Seale family has been in the rum business since the 1920s, but predominantly as blenders, buying up rums from various Caribbean distilleries and releasing them as proprietary brands. It wasn't until the mid-1990s, when Richard Seale purchased and restored a defunct sugar factory on the island of Barbados, that he  started distilling on a combination of pot and column stills.

All Foursquare rums are "pure", without additions of sugar, caramel, liquid tannin, or any other additives that are prolifically used in commercial rum production. The age statements are genuine, none of this "Solera 23" business, where a miniscule fraction of the rum might be 23 years old, but most is young, adulterated spirit. The releases are priced fairly (though the secondary market is going a little crazy), especially taking into account the angel's share (loss of spirit due to evaporation from cask) which is about 8-9% in the Caribbean, compared with only 1-2% in continental Europe.

I won't be the person saying Foursquare is the Pappy Van Winkle of rum and you should run out and buy all the bottles you can. I'll urge you to give Foursquare the merit it deserves based on the incredibly high quality of work they are doing, and the passion they bring to the rum world in the attempt to create and market honest spirits. Oskar Kostecki