Bristol Spirits

The mission of Bristol Spirits is to seek interesting rum. With careful production and long maturation, the true quality and style can be seen from the many varied rums that they select and bottle for the enjoyment of rum lovers the world over. It is a true experience to explore the range of Bristol Spirits products. They are classic and natural and often only rough filtered.

Meet John Barrett
John Barrett is the managing director of Bristol Spirits. In many generations, his family has worked in the vine and spirits industry. John started by importing port wine to the UK and later he continued with cognac, where he shipped the cognac to UK to let it mature there. In the 1800s one found out that the cold and more humid climate in UK has a positive influence at the maturation process.
After some time, John began trading rum and whisky. John (re)discovered some of the small rom producers at the Caribbean Islands and he began buying single casks and imported them to his own cellar in Wickwar outside of Bristol. Today he has new and bigger cellars in Liverpool where he mature his rum.
When John receives his rum he finds the right barrel to mature the rum in. He only bottles small amounts from different producers – therefore his products are not mixed of thousands of casks from different producers.

More about Bristol Spirits
Bristol Spirits is classic rum. It is single vintage. By that means that Bristol Spirits does for rum what malt whisky has done for Scotch – premium, small batch. Every bottle is dated with vintage year. If it says 1998 that means that every content in the bottle is distilled in 1998. It is important to Bristol Spirits to tell in which year the rum is distilled and where in the world plus which distillery it is from.
It is a basic principle that Bristol Spirits only bottle small lots of rum about three or four casks. They seek small quantities, sometimes only single barrels from a single distillery or a single estate or even a single still to show rum in its true unblended form. Therefore, the list of Bristol products continually changing. When Bristol Spirits became more and more widely known they began to experiment with finishing the ageing in different casks such as new French oak, ex-Bourbon white oak and casks that had previously held Port and Madeira.