3 Queens Distillery · Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas
You Won’t Find an 18-Year-Old Rum at 3 Queens
We get the question a lot. Someone makes their way from the cruise ship looking for some rarified, aged Caribbean rum. The bigger the number, the rarer it is…or so they say.
The oldest rum we have here at 3 Queens is 8 years old. But that’s by design. Our 8-year rum is as aged and smooth and complex as anything you’ll find in an 18-year rum from another distillery.
Without boring you too much, the answer is all about size. We only use 30-gallon (113 liter) barrels. Much smaller than the 53-gallon (200 liter) barrels at almost every distillery – bourbon, rum, etc. And that size makes all the difference in the world.
Exhibit A
Feel My Wood
Let’s start with the wood. We age our spirits in smaller, white-oak barrels. Our barrels are virgin oak, charred by an open flame for around 30 seconds. They’re then packed, shipped to us and filled to the top with our rum.
The vast majority of rum distilleries age with a used barrel. For example, a bourbon distillery will age their spirits in a brand new barrel. By law, the barrel has to be new, so after it’s used, they sell that barrel to rum distilleries.
Now, we here at 3 Queens, chose to buy our barrels directly from the cooperage and pour our rum into that virgin wood. And that is the magic.
So not only do we get the benefits of that virgin wood, we also expose our rum to the wood more directly. Smaller barrel means less rum and therefore more of the rum is touching wood. Therefore, the carmelized, toffee and smoky flavor from the charred wood is more intense.
(My wife loves to touch wood.)
In a big barrel, most of the liquid is sitting in the middle, seldom touching the oak. Our rum has no where to hide, most of the rum is resting on the charred staves soaking up all that flavor.
And because our rum is more exposed to the char and barrel walls it results in our rum being darker than rums much older.
So as my wife likes to say, “I married my husband for many reasons, but it wasn’t for his dark wood.” Not sure what she means by that.
Exhibit B
The Caribbean Climate is the Secret
Compounding the enhanced flavors of smaller, virgin barrels is the unique Caribbean weather and climate.
I’ve heard that in Scotland they’ll age whisky for 10, 12 or 15 years. The barrels being aged in the cool, damp climate of the British Isles. Slow and steady.
That doesn’t work down here in the subtropics. While the average temperature in Scotland is around 50-60 degrees, we pretty much average 80 degrees year round.
That Caribbean heat is like a top-fuel funny car when it comes to aging. The higher temperatures makes the rum expand. So it pushes deep, deep, deep into the oak. So deep. And then at night the temperature drops to the mid-70s and the rum pulls back a little. Every day, the rum pushes in and out, in and out. Faster and faster.
And all that pumping extracts a ton of flavor.
What this means in plain terms: a rum aged a handful of years in a small barrel under our sun has done more living, and pulled more from the wood, than a spirit that spent two or three times as long in a cold cellar somewhere far from the equator.
So our 4-year-old, aged rum in a smaller barrel is more like an 8 to 10 year rum from a larger barrel from an industrial rum giant like Cruzan or Captain Morgan.
Exhibit C · The Catch
The Angel’s Share
Another problem with aging here in the Caribbean is the greedy rum angels.
As rum sits in the barrel, it evaporates and slips out through the wood — gone to the heavens, as the old distillers used to say. The angels take their cut. It’s been that way for as long as people have been putting spirits in oak.
In cooler climates this evaporation is slow. Maybe only a percentage or two of the spirit evaporates annually. Down in the Caribbean, the angels are violent and aggressive. We might loose 10%-15% of our spirit per year. By year 5 we are down to half a barrel. By year 8 we only have about a ⅓ of a barrel left. After all that work and time to only have ⅓ is tough.
As much as we love the rum angels, my generosity has its limits. So rest assured, we age our rum to perfection. And our oldest rum has experienced just as much as any 18-year-old bottle.
As they say, “Age is just a number, what really counts is how you handle your wood.”
Come See For Yourself
Feel Our Wood
If you do make it over to Charlotte Amalie in St. Thomas, you’ll have to stop by. As soon as you walk in you’ll see our barrels stacked all over the place. We don’t have a massive barrel room because we are in every sense a craft distillery. Everything we do happens in the same space – distillation, aging, bottling, labeling.
On a given day, we are doing one or all of the things to get our spirits ready for tasting and bottling. So if you want to come check us out, you can stop by on a cruise ship day or give us a call and we can have a private tour and tasting for you.
If you are coming on a cruise ship day, walk down Main Street and then hang a right towards Back Street.
We are tucked away and not always easy to find but isn’t that the fun of it?
The only way to taste our rum (and vodka, gin and coffee liqueur (better than the rest for an espresso martini)) is to visit. And we only sell it here – you won’t find us anywhere else on island. Again, isn’t that the fun of it?
Come taste what’s in our wood.