The most intimate way to learn about any culture or place is to tenaciously eat the local cuisine and drink the local beverages – particularly those that are fermented and/or distilled. It’s this unwavering conviction that inevitably influences my week-long itinerary in the Seychelles, a 115-island African archipelago in the western Indian Ocean that’s rapidly becoming known for its local rum brand: Takamaka.
At La Plaine St André, the home of Takamaka, rum has been produced since 2002. With each passing year as the founding brothers, Bernard and Richard d’Offay, have refined their production methods, the brand and team have slowly grown. By 2022, Takamaka rum was distributed in 28 markets around the world and was launching its St André Series, a collection of four premium rums that showcase Seychellois Creole traditions and push the boundaries of conventional rum-making.
The coconut rum, Takamaka Koko, produced from local coconut – a historically prominent industry in the Seychelles – is a crowd-pleasing expression of its island home, as is the Zepis Kreol, a blend of pot and column distilled and aged molasses rum that’s macerated with locally grown spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, and allspice as a homage to the local Seychellois Creole cuisine.
But it’s the distillery’s fresh cane juice distillates, made from local sugarcane, grown on unique granitic soils (the Seychelles are the only mid-oceanic granitic islands in the world), that provide an agricultural liquid so clearly expressive of a place.
Having sampled a variety of rums on the island, it's clear that Takamaka is just the tip of the iceberg for a sub-category that’s showing great promise and delivering flavour profiles that don’t exist in rums anywhere else in the world.
Elevated standards
While rum production in Africa has existed for centuries in the island countries of Mauritius, where rum has been produced since the 18th century when sugarcane was introduced to the island by Dutch colonists, and Réunion, where rum has been made since the 19th century, it’s only in the past decade that mainland countries such as Kenya, Ghana and South Africa have firmly entered the fold.
Beyond making waves in their local markets, these brands are showcasing their products at renowned trade shows, such as The Whisky Exchange Rum Show and the UK’s annual Rum Fest, to further elevate the continent’s budding industry, in addition to getting their products listed in cocktail bars both in Africa and around the world.
“I believe the rise in popularity of newer rum-producing regions can be attributed to some notable movements, both globally and in Africa,” says Richie Barrow, general manager at Hero Bar, a Nairobi-based cocktail bar that was ranked No.62 on the extended list of The World’s 50 Best Bars in 2023. “First, the rise of Afropolitanism has led to a re-evaluation of what defines individuals with African roots worldwide.
“This cultural shift has sparked a newfound interest and enthusiasm for African products in the Western world, causing African producers to elevate their standards and refine their craftsmanship to become international competitors.”
Barrow adds that a new, well-travelled population of Africans is also demanding higher-quality products, thus putting more pressure on craft brands to refine their products from locals who are keen to drink more sophisticated spirits.
Barrow’s sentiment is shared by Amma Mensah, founder and chief executive of Reign, a Ghanaian rum brand that only launched in January 2023 but has swiftly made an impact in its local market as more educated consumers care about, and take pride in, provenance than ever before. According to hospitality consultant Köjö Aidoo, general manager at Front Back in Accra, Reign has indeed been positively received by bartenders and local drinkers, taking share of throat from some of the larger spirits companies who’ve dominated the market for decades.
Reign, as Mensah explains, is the “world’s first African luxury rum from Ghana”. The brand launched with two entry-level expressions of flavoured rums: a spiced rum made with local African botanicals, such as coconut, cacao and coffee, and another infused with baobab and hibiscus.
But, most excitingly for rum lovers and discerning spirits enthusiasts, Reign is set to release a pot distilled, tropically aged rum made from single estate sugarcane juice grown on the distillery’s farm.
Beyond the liquid, leaning into the demands of the modern drinker Mensah insists it’s not only important to look and taste good as a brand, but to do good, too. “We are a grass-to-glass business,” Mensah says, “and as a result, we exist to empower the entirety of our value chain, from farmers and bartenders, to customers and all who encounter our regal nectar.” Reign practises organic farming for its sugarcane cultivation, in addition to using the bagasse (dry fibrous material that remains after crushing sugarcane) to power the distillery’s furnace – both practices having their independent environmental benefits.
Mensah shares that the brand is committed to raising salaries at its farm and building ownership structures among the team to ensure the longevity and stability of the industry it’s championing.
New players such as Reign and Kenya-based Bahari, which launched in 2022, are indeed bringing some fresh diversification to Africa’s craft rum scene, but the driving force behind the continent’s growing industry has been South Africa, where local craft distilleries have flourished in the past decade, registering a positive compound annual growth rate of 3.74% from 2016 to 2021, according to Global Data.
“In South Africa, we had a rum boom from 2013 to 2017, when smaller, craft distillers finally figured out that we should do more with our sugarcane than turn it into sugar,” notes Leah van Deventer, a Cape Town-based Wine & Spirit Education Trust educator, spirits judge and consultant. “African rum has caught the attention of investors who not only see the industry as a business prospect but as an exciting new spirits sector to be explored as well.”
Van Deventer, who has chronicled the country’s rise of rum for various publications, credits South African brands such as Inverroche, Mhoba, and Tapanga with paving the way for this trend – the latter two serving as best-in-glass examples from the region as they produce terroir-driven agricultural rums made from local fresh sugarcane juice instead of molasses.
For rum connoisseurs, it’s these bottlings which garner the most intrigue as they highlight the unique flavour profiles specific to the region’s local sugarcane and climate. And these are the types of products that are helping add credibility to the growing African rum industry.
Making waves on-trade
The rum industry’s most influential ambassador, Ian Burrell, launched the world’s first Afro-Caribbean rum, Equiano, in 2020 – a blend of rums from Gray’s Distillery in Mauritius and the lauded Foursquare Distillery in Barbados. And it helped spark conversations about African rum on-trade and put the region on the radar in a way that it hadn’t been before at scale.
Now, other brands such as Takamaka are also seeing success as bartenders more deeply explore the booming rum category (which outsold whisky in the UK for the first time in modern history in 2023, according to data from CGA by Nielsen IQ).
“We’ve had a fantastic response from the global on-trade and have had the opportunity to work with some of the world’s best bars and bartenders,” says Bernard d’Offay, co-founder of Takamaka Rum.
“We had the guys from Dubai’s Ergo take over our Rum Shack at the distillery in the summer, and the guys at Sugarhall in Singapore have an amazing twist on a Jungle Bird using our Extra Noir.” In Paris and London, Takamaka can also be found in some of the cities’ best bars, including The Cambridge in Paris and London’s The Lowback.
Hero Bar in Nairobi uses a blend of African rums in its Barbosa cocktail, a clarified Piña Colada. The team fat-washes the local Bahari rum with Kenyan coconut oil before marrying it with Takamaka Koko to up the drink’s coconut flavour. This base is mixed with fresh pineapple juice before being clarified with coconut milk. It’s a guzzleable crowd-pleaser that Barrow says guests can’t get enough of.
“It has been overdue that rum becomes established in these countries,” admits Barrow. “The raw ingredient [sugarcane] has long been grown across the region, providing a valuable income for farmers. The bar industry has a general curiosity to explore new regions and products, and as the world gradually shifts its focus away from the prolonged adoration of gin [and whisky], there’s a growing interest in rediscovering other categories.”
African rums are undoubtedly emerging as one of these new-found categories for bartenders and enthusiasts alike, especially as consumers in the Western world continue to show enthusiasm for African products as Barrow claims. Drinking rum is as much about appreciating the liquid in the glass as it is about connecting with the culture it expresses, and the rise of African rums offers imbibers a novel opportunity to connect with cultures that truly are long overdue their rise to prominence in the spirits industry.
