The World’s Top Rums Are About to Face Off in St. Barth

The bottles are getting ready for St. Barth.

The Caribbean Rum Awards St Barth are getting close, with some of the world’s top rums preparing to come together on the French Caribbean island for the region’s premier celebration of rum.

The annual Caribbean Rum Awards St Barth bring an international field of rums to St. Barth for blind judging, tastings, parties and culinary events — with one of the biggest prizes in the rum world at the center of it all.

The World Championship.

The World’s Best Rums, Judged Blind

The Caribbean Rum Awards bring together the two great universes of Caribbean rum: molasses-based rum and rhum agricole, the fresh-sugarcane-juice spirit that has its deepest roots in Martinique and Guadeloupe.

Across the competition, the field ranges from white rums and aged expressions to XO bottlings and some of the rarest, most expensive bottles being produced anywhere in the rum world.

Then there is the World Championship.

It’s a special field of Uber-Premium expressions, bringing together extraordinary bottles from different rum traditions in a single blind showdown.

That can mean an aged agricole from Martinique facing an exceptional molasses rum from elsewhere in the Caribbean, along with other rare prestige expressions representing the highest levels of their respective distilleries.

The bottles are tasted blind. The judges don’t see the labels, the packaging or the brands.

It comes down to the rum in the glass.

That format has helped make the World Championship the signature event of the Caribbean Rum Awards — and produced some remarkable results.

Martinique Comes In as the Reigning Champion

Last year, Rhum Depaz Cuvée Prestige XO took home the World Championship, earning the top crown at the Caribbean Rum Awards in St. Barth.

It was another major victory for Martinique, whose agricole producers have enjoyed a remarkable run in the competition.

Trois Rivières Triple Millésime, the previous World Champion, finished second last year, giving Martinique the top two spots in the final standings.

Leading the molasses side was Dos Maderas Luxus, the celebrated aged rum built around spirits from Barbados and Guyana.

It was exactly the kind of field that has come to define the event: rare rums, very different traditions and bottles that almost never find themselves together in one blind tasting.

A previous edition saw Trois Rivières take the World Championship after facing a field of eight ultra-premium rums, a competition Caribbean Journal chronicled in its look at the world’s best rum and Martinique’s remarkable championship run.

Now another championship field is getting ready.

Rum Week in St. Barth

The judging is the centerpiece, but the Caribbean Rum Awards have grown into something larger: a gathering of the rum world in St. Barth.

Distillers, master blenders, brand executives, rum experts, chefs, bartenders, collectors and enthusiasts come together across the island for a series of events built around Caribbean rum.

There are tastings. There are beach parties. There are rum dinners and special pours of bottles you rarely encounter outside a distillery or serious collector’s cabinet.

And there is St. Barth itself.

The island has always been an essential part of the event, with rum experiences unfolding across its hotels, restaurants, villas and beaches rather than inside a traditional convention setting.

That has included events at some of the island’s signature hotels, including Rosewood Le Guanahani St Barth, Le Barthélemy Hotel and Spa and Les Îlets de la Plage.

It gives the week a character very different from the typical spirits competition.

You can taste an extraordinary aged agricole during the judging and then find yourself talking to the people who made it later that evening over dinner or at a beach event.

That proximity between producers, judges and rum lovers has become one of the signatures of the Caribbean Rum Awards.

Why the World Championship Is Different

There are plenty of spirits competitions around the world.

The World Championship in St. Barth is something else.

The field is deliberately concentrated at the very top of the rum category, with rare Uber-Premium bottles representing dramatically different approaches to sugarcane spirits.

Some begin with molasses. Others begin with freshly pressed sugarcane juice.

Some spend years developing in tropical aging conditions. Others come from carefully assembled blends or exceptionally limited casks.

Their histories and methods can be completely different.

Then they arrive in St. Barth, the bottles disappear from view, and the judging starts.

That’s the fun of it.

A famous label has no advantage. Neither does an extraordinary bottle design or a reputation built over generations.

The rum has to win in the glass.

The Next Champion Is Coming

That question will soon be answered again.

The next group of exceptional bottles is preparing to face off in St. Barth, with the Caribbean Rum Awards once again bringing together producers and rums from across the region and the wider world.

There will be agricoles. There will be molasses rums. There will be bottles that are extremely difficult to find and expressions created to represent the very best a distillery can produce.

And somewhere in that field is the next World Champion.

Rum companies interested in participating in the Caribbean Rum Awards St Barth can email rum@caribjournal.com.

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