Doorly

Doorly's is made at Foursquare in St Philip, Barbados, and it is the range that shows what the distillery does when it is not making limited releases. Where the Exceptional Cask series is built for collectors, Doorly's is built to be drunk.

The house style is a blend of pot and column still rum. The column brings clarity and lift, the pot brings weight and texture, and the balance between them is what gives Bajan rum its reputation for elegance. Foursquare is also known for a firm position on additives: no sugar, no colouring and no flavouring are added after distillation, which means the sweetness you taste is cask derived rather than dosed in.

Doorly's 3 Year Old White is aged and then filtered back to clear, which makes it a far more serious daiquiri rum than most white rums. 5 Year Old and 12 Year Old build through the ex-bourbon core of the range.

The two finished bottles are the ones to know. 14 Year Old is finished in Madeira casks, and XO is finished in oloroso sherry casks.

Doorly's XO earned its place in our eleven rums to try, where it is tasted beside the Guyanese and St Lucian rums it usually competes with.

History

Martin Doorly and Company was a Barbadian rum blender, and the Doorly's name has been on bottles since the early twentieth century. R.L. Seale and Company acquired the brand in 1993 and moved production to the Foursquare distillery, which the family had established on the site of a former sugar plantation in 1996.

Foursquare has since become one of the most respected distilleries in the Caribbean, largely through the work of Richard Seale, who has argued publicly and persistently for transparency about what goes into a bottle of rum. His position is that a rum's category should describe how it was made rather than how it tastes after adjustment, and Foursquare's output is built to that standard.

Barbados has a strong claim to being where rum began. The island was producing distilled spirit from sugar cane by the middle of the seventeenth century, and the word rum itself first appears in Barbadian records from that period.

The modern Bajan style, a blend of pot and column still spirit aged in the tropics, is the reference point against which most other rum regions are described. It sits lighter and cleaner than Guyanese Demerara rum and fuller than most Spanish style rums.

How to drink it

The White is the one most people underestimate. It has real body for a clear rum, and it makes a daiquiri with genuine structure rather than the thin, sharp version a neutral white rum produces. Three parts rum, one part lime, one part sugar syrup, shaken hard and served straight up.

From 8 Year Old upward, these are neat drinking rums. Use a tulip glass, serve at room temperature and leave the ice out. If you want to open it up slightly, a few drops of water does more than a cube.

XO is the bottle to reach for after dinner. The oloroso finish brings dried fruit and a nutty edge that sits well with dark chocolate or a hard cheese, and it works in a Rum Old Fashioned if you keep the sugar minimal.

The 14 Year Old, with its Madeira finish, is the most distinctive of the range and worth tasting alongside the XO to see what a different cask does to the same base rum.

For a heavier counterpoint, try El Dorado. For the full picture across styles, browse the rum range or dark rum.