Dark and Stormy – Gosling Rum Travel Video Duration – 4.30 minutes Gosling’s Rum A Bermudian history Travel Video Search for the Good Life Charles, when did your family first come to Bermuda? Charles Gosling Managing Director, Gosling’s Limited In 1806. And what were the conditions under which they arrived? Ah, well, they had been at sea for I guess around about a 120 odd days. They were on their way over to the Americas and they were stuck in convoys, they were, had issues in doldrums in the wind and they finally arrived in Bermuda in the early part of August, in 1806. Kind of like most tourist visits, a little bounce here, see what opportunities there were and that after having been at sea for that length of time, their charter had run out, they had no choice but to actually set up camp in Bermuda. How then did it evolve into a rum business here in Bermuda? Wines and spirits were a very strong part of it and being a sort of northern bit of the Caribbean, we’re actually proud of saying that we’re not part of the Caribbean but everyone just thinks that we are, so we are. And the Caribbean is, it’s known for its rum. And, we had some very good contacts with the British Caribbean, major rum producers Guyana, Jamaica, Barbados and it just became natural that we would be providing rum. We would like to consider ourselves a little bit like Cognac, a bottler or a whiskey maker, but they might not necessarily own the distilleries, but it is through the way that they make their blends that they make so many, which is distinctive and with our rums, we feel we have something very very distinctive. Andrew Holmes Brand director, Gosling’s Rum Welcome to our blending facility where we put together all the different components that make up our world famous Gosling blends. This is the batch of Black Seal that’s just been finished and ready for bottling. You have to have a smell of this. Mmm, it smells so good. Delicious Now, once that final blending has been completed, some will go into bottles and be sold island wide as Gosling’s Black Seal rum, other will go to the barrels where it’s aged for the Goslings’ family reserve of old rum. It’s Gosling’s Black Seal rum. It is dark rum, a black rum, originally just on draft; people would bring their own bottles then and ask for the old rum, as it was referred to then. Then, finally we were able to get second hand bottles from UK officers’ messes and those were champagne bottles and they were corked. And in order to differentiate between the different products, they used different colored sealing wax. Green sealing wax was American whiskey and black sealing wax was the old rum. And eventually, people started, rather than asking for old rum, they’d say “give me that black seal, there”. And also, a cousin of ours, Francis Gosling, who, back in the 1940’s actually came up with the logo, that of a black seal, balancing a barrel of rum on its nose. This is our Goslings’ family reserve old rum. It is a premium sipping rum that was first bottled in 2003. We bottle it once a year only, and it is aged 16 to 20 years in these once-use bourbon barrels. So this is the premium rum? Oh this is the finest money can buy. What’s a Dark and Stormy? The one that you, I would hope you’d have heard of is the “Dark and Stormy” which is Gosling’s Black Seal rum and ginger beer. And that is, we believe, a Royal Navy connection. The Royal Navy used to serve morning tots of our Black Seal. Locally they operated the HMS Malabar, which was the local Royal Navy base. There was a non-commissioned officers’ mess that had a ginger beer factory and they used to product ginger beer as a fund raiser for the mess. And it really doesn’t take too much of an anthropologist to actually come up with the conclusion that sometime, somewhere, someone took their morning tot and their ginger beer and they did a very very refreshing cocktail. Mmm that is the spirit of Bermuda.