Santa Cruz rum was the commercial name for the rum of Saint Croix in the Danish Virgin Islands, one of the most important spirits in the nineteenth-century American bartender’s toolkit. It began appearing in the United States in the 1790s and by the 1820s was, along with Jamaican rum, the leading type of imported rum in the American market, a staple in cold Rum Punches and in so-called fancy drinks such as the Knickerbocker. See rum, Jamaican; Rum Punch; and Knickerbocker.
Unfortunately, while the heavy, aromatic Jamaican style of rum is well understood, Santa Cruz rum is one of the spirits world’s deeper mysteries. It had a reputation for purity and strength (it was often sold at well over proof), but beyond that precise information on how it was produced is scarce and fragmentary, and detailed descriptions of its characteristics are rare. Modern sampling of rare specimens surviving from the nineteenth century reveals that it tasted nothing like the light, clean, rather anodyne spirit made on the island today: medium-weight, bright and grassy, it had plenty of hogo but also a delicacy not found in the full-throated Jamaican rums of the day. See hogo.
What evidence we do have about its distillation suggests that this delicacy was due to the exceptional cleanliness of the island’s distilleries and their use of only molasses and skimmings for distillation, without the additional dunder used in Jamaica or resorting to the column still as in Guyana. See molasses; skimmings; and dunder. Both of those things would mean fewer bacterially produced esters in the rum than in Jamaican rum and its imitators. See esters. (The skimmings set it apart, on the other hand, from the pure-molasses Medford rum that dominated the lower end of the American market.) See rum, Medford. There is also some evidence that, as the island’s sugar industry began to struggle in the early twentieth century, its distillers began basing their rum on pure cane juice or cane syrup.
In 1916, the United States purchased Saint Croix and two other islands from Denmark. By then, rum production there was already in decline: the island exported less than 200,000 liters that year rum, half of the figure for 1903. Part of the decline was due to internal reasons, but it was also due to the fading American interest in rum and the diversion of what interest there was to newly introduced Cuban and Puerto Rican rums. Three years later, Prohibition switched the remaining distilleries to making non-potable bay rum. With repeal, distilling was reestablished, but the rum made, now in column stills, had little resemblance to the earlier style. See column still.
An Invalid [pseud.]. A Winter in the West Indies and Florida. New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1839.
Burton, R. H. “The Distillation of Rum.” The Sugar Cane, December 1, 1875, 626.
By: David Wondrich