Rums of the Eastern Caribbean
Ed Hamilton’s 1995 country-by-country guide to the Eastern Caribbean rum world—written after the author spent years on a sailboat visiting every working distillery in the region. The first serious English-language documentation of who actually makes rum in the islands, how they make it, and what makes each tradition distinct. Out of print; secondary-market only.
The first serious rum-country book.
Rums of the Eastern Caribbean is the 1995 book that documented—country by country, distillery by distillery—what was actually being made in the Caribbean at a moment when almost no English-language writing on the subject existed. Ed Hamilton had spent years on a sailboat traveling the region; the book is the structured output of that travel, organized by island and by distillery.
What it covers
Country profiles for the major Eastern Caribbean rum-producing islands—Barbados, Trinidad, Guyana (technically South America but historically grouped here), Martinique, Guadeloupe, Antigua, Dominica, St. Lucia, Grenada, and the rest. Each chapter walks the distilleries, the cane-spirit traditions, the still types in use, and the bottlings available at the time of writing. Recipes for regional cocktails appear throughout.
For 1995, the book was unprecedented. Most rum writing to that point had been promotional, aspirational, or focused on the major industrial brands. Hamilton’s book treated the Caribbean rum industry as a working industry worth documenting precisely.
Why it still matters
The book has aged in interesting ways. Some distilleries Hamilton documented have closed; others have changed hands or branding; the high-character pot-still tradition he profiled has been substantially adopted by the craft-bartender world he was writing before. Reading it now is part history, part current-events—the bridge from the late-twentieth-century state of Caribbean rum to the contemporary scene.
For a working cocktail bartender, the analytical chapters on production methods, still types, and aging practices remain useful. For a rum collector, the regional breakdowns help interpret older bottlings showing up on the secondary market.
To go deeper
- Author Ed Hamilton—the man who did the travel.
- Follow-up The Complete Guide to Rum (1997)—Hamilton’s broader follow-up that expanded the scope beyond the Eastern Caribbean.
- Online Ministry of Rum—Hamilton’s long-running website carries much of the same encyclopedia material in living-document form.
- Related entries Hamilton Rum (his import operation), Demerara, Jamaican Rum.