Region & History

Rum from Clarendon rarely appears on the shelf under its distillery's name, yet it ends up in many bottles. Clarendon Distillers sits in Monymusk near Lionel Town on the Vere Plain in southern Jamaica, filling mostly tanker trucks and casks rather than bottles. Anyone wanting to know the source of Jamaican rum that carries no distillery name on the label often ends up here.

Sugar shaped the island ever since the British conquered it in 1655. Enslaved people from Africa planted, cut and processed the cane; forced apprenticeship following the abolition of slavery didn't end in Jamaica until 1838. The Monymusk sugar factory began operating in 1901, and the distillery initially belonged to it, since the molasses only had to travel across the yard.

A second hub lies to the north in the Lluidas Vale valley, a basin between mountain ranges in the parish of St. Catherine. Worthy Park has grown sugar cane there for centuries; sources differ on exactly when operations began. Rum production lay dormant from 1962. Construction of a new distillery started in 2005, and in 2007 the first rum arrived with Rum-Bar, an unaged overproof.

Clarendon belongs to National Rums of Jamaica, or NRJ, in which three shareholders each hold a third: the Jamaican state through the National Sugar Company, Demerara Distillers of Guyana, and Maison Ferrand of France. In New Yarmouth, also in Clarendon, Wray & Nephew White Overproof is made. The firm J. Wray & Nephew has belonged to Campari since 2012.

Since 2016, the geographical indication Jamaica Rum has protected the name for the whole island, administered by the Spirits Pool Association. It requires distillation and maturation in Jamaica and permits only water and caramel colouring after distillation, but no sweetening. For rum from Clarendon and Lluidas Vale, this means the same rules apply as for rum from any other corner of the island.