Myers’s is a rum brand founded in 1879 by Fred L. Myers and well known historically for its Original Dark and Planter’s Punch rums. Family-owned for two generations, the brand was sold in 1954 by Fred Myers’s grandson, Eustace Myers, to Seagram’s, who sold it to Diageo in 2000. See Seagram Company Ltd. and Diageo.
Myers’s Original Dark rum is a molasses-based rum sourced primarily from Clarendon Distillery in Jamaica from a blend of pot and column distillates and aged up to four years in white oak barrels. It is made in the style of a traditional black rum, in which caramel, molasses, or both are added back into a rum after distillation, giving it a distinctively dark appearance—darker than could be achieved through aging alone. See molasses and caramel.
In the 1920s, Myers’s formulated and bottled (at eight years old and 48.5 percent ABV) a Planter’s Punch Rum, also in the black rum style, for use in the drink of that name, as served at Kingston’s Myrtle Bank and Tichfield hotels and popularized internationally at the bar of the West Indies Pavilion at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, London. Though there are Planter’s Punches on menus throughout the Caribbean that reflect the local juices, spices, and rums where they are served, Myers’s helped spread the word that Jamaican rum was the rum that belonged in a Planter’s Punch. See Planter’s Punch.
Today Myers’s continues to produce Original Dark rum, Myers’s Legend (a pot still rum aged for ten years), and Myers’s Platinum. It is worth noting that Myers’s is one of the most frequently misspelled brands on menus and in print around the world.
See also rum.
Berry, Jeff. Beachbum Berry’s Potions of the Caribbean. New York: Cocktail Kingdom, 2014.
Cate, Martin, with Rebecca Cate. Smuggler’s Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki, Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed, 2016.
“Visit to Court of West Indies, Empire Show.” Kingston Daily Gleaner, June 18, 1924, 6.
By: Martin Cate