The long-awaited project has seen the construction of a US$25m distillery with some of the most pioneering technology aimed at extracting the local terroir.
Located on the north east coast of the Windward Island, the distillery has been designed with air filtration and water purification of waste streams to reduce its carbon footprint.
Renegade is the vision of Mark Reynier, CEO of the Waterford Distillery in Ireland and the man responsible for resurrecting Bruichladdich in 2001.
Reynier's ambition is to create a rum by extracting flavours from Grenada’s isolated parcels of sugar cane grown on the fertile volcanic land.
Reynier said: "I started planning the project in June 2015 after an initial exploratory trip to the island. Immediately I felt this was the right home for Renegade after a fruitless 10 year search.
“It has been a veritable rollercoaster of a ride since then and several times I was on the point of giving up – frustrated by the lack of progress, dead ends and delays.
"We had the chance to make something really special here, with the latest thinking, drawing on our distilling experience from Scotland and Ireland to support the unique underpinning Renegade philosophy: rum defined by Grenada’s geology, farm by farm, field by field.
"We had to propagate cane where none existed to prove it was worthwhile building a distillery; then we had to design it backwards, from the end waste streams back to the incoming cane.
"Now we have a landmark, state-of-the-art-distillery, the envy of the industry, built and run by Grenadians to use Grenadian cane – the veritable spirit of Grenada.”
