Pour chilled Brinley Gold Shipwreck’s Coconut Rum Cream over ice. Sit back and sip.

-- Maryann Brinley

 
Sugar cane is where rum comes from. And, or course, rum punch! but not that sugary icky, artificially sweet, make-yourself-sick rum punch you might recall from some adolescent age.

This is my all time favorite. 

Island Rum Punch

• 2 parts Shipwreck White Rum
• 1 part Shipwreck Coconut Rum
• 1 part fresh lime juice
• 4 parts (or less, taste and trust yourself here) orange juice
• 4 dashes of angostura bitters
• Freshly grated nutmeg (on each punch cup)
• Serve chilled over ice. Please don’t skip the nutmeg. It makes that Caribbean world of difference. 

Our St. Kitts Rum Adventure

Good stories are hard to find. Heroes rescue victims. People find true love. Everyone lives happily ever after. You need cliffhangers, cures, happy endings, and why not some buried treasure? And that’s exactly what we found.

Rum has been made from sugar cane on the island of St. Kitts in the Caribbean Sea for hundreds of years. Local Kittitians used to call their home-grown, barreled, fermented and distilled spirit: Hammond, so-named after a British sea captain. It was always a source of secret national pride: an unvarnished treasure that tastes harsh and bites all the way down. Personally, I can hardly sniff it let alone sip. In the early 1990s, billionaire wine-maker Baron Edmond de Rothschild sailed into the deep-water port of Basseterre, the capital city of St. Kitts, with a good idea. No, let’s make that a great idea. With his financial resources, international reputation in the wine and spirits industry and the skills of a young French winemaker, Michel Joly, he hired and brought to the island, St. Kitts sugar cane finally began to turn into real treasure.

Then, he died and the Rothschild organization decided to abandon their interests on St. Kitts. 

And this is where our story starts. How did a nice New Jersey family turn into international rum-runners? Well, the seeds of our St. Kitts Rum Company, makers of award-winning Shipwreck Brinley Gold Vanilla, Coffee, Mango, Coconut, Spice, Coconut Rum Cream and White Rum Reserve were planted on our very first trip to this island in the Caribbean. We just didn’t recognize that all the ingredients we needed, not just for cocktails, but our lessons for growing a unique business, were right there.

As a family, we first fell in love with St. Kitts in 1985 when my husband Bob decided to set up a factory in the industrial area to assemble the temperature sensors he still makes and markets as president of Sensor Scientific, the company he founded. At the time, the U.S. government was offering hands-on advice to help entrepreneurs bring jobs and manufacturing to the islands. This was not long after a small war in Grenada and as a hedge against Communism, America had decided that our country needed a stronger footprint in these sunny islands not so very far from our shores. Bringing American ingenuity to the islands was the plan and we became part of it.

Bob jumped right on the government’s offer of free help to build an offshore operation because if he could reduce the cost of assembling his thermistor parts, his business could grow faster. Never one to miss out on any adventure I could possibly join, I went along everywhere on these island explorations and brought our kids. Zach was 7 and Maggie, just 4. It was a toss up between St. Lucia and St. Kitts so, as a family, we explored the industrial sides of both islands. I remember learning the visceral meaning of hairpin turns on the side of a St. Lucian mountain. You go up the steepest dirt road imaginable and then you make a 180-degree turn down just as steeply while kids are screaming in the back seat from fear. Meanwhile, the tour industry, the beaches, bars, hotels or what cocktails visitors were drinking were the farthest things from our minds back then. Rum? Well it was just a drink I might order at a pretty bar then. Not the matter of financial life and death that we would learn to live alongside.

In 1985, it takes all day to get to St. Kitts. You are in and out of planes and airports starting early morning in Newark, heading to San Juan, Puerto Rico and arriving always late at night, finally, at last, on St. Kitts. This is our very first trip there. There are no direct flights. You land in the dark on a barely-paved stretch of flat space and honestly, it’s really dark. No industrial-sized lighting at all. Gather up kids, one sleeping soundly, the other so excited he can barely contain himself. Zach, who turns 40 this year, still loves airplanes and flying to this day. He always grabs a window seat to see what he can see. This first time landing on St. Kitts, we take just a few steps down jiggly flip out stairs from that very small 10, maybe 12-seater plane and feet are on the ground, very unfamiliar ground, right on the roughly-paved blacktop. Outside, in the night air, there is no jet way to an airport terminal with a roof. A guy waves a flashlight out there to direct us to the Quonset hut on the side of the runway. We are dragging but the scent is overwhelming, new to our noses: A green, fresh, something-un-nameable-growing-right-there-in-the-fields aroma.

In the dark, hot, sweet humid air, we hear also sing-songing… squeaking, chirping, beeping, trilling going up and down, melodious and quite calming. 

“What is that sound, Mom?” Zach asks. 

“I’m not sure.” 

“It’s the tree frogs,” Bob explains, He’s carrying Maggie, head on his shoulder, sound asleep. Tree frogs? Really? Oh my god. How did he know that? My husband is like a walking encyclopedia at times. He doesn’t always remember birthdays and anniversaries but esoteric facts are his forte. This time, it’s tree frogs.

“They live in trees, not in water or ponds,” he says. Zach takes it all in, mesmerized.

“Cool.”

Of course, I had no idea where this nightly, dawn to dusk serenade was coming from at first but would know it so well soon. You fall easily asleep to the gentle sound, like the white-noise of a baby monitor. Seriously, Google tree frogs on St. Kitts and you can actually find YouTube recordings of this music to my ears.

“Watch your step,” Bob says. “Hold Mom’s hand. I’ve got the paperwork. Don’t worry.” We head to the immigration and customs booth inside the tin roof building and wait in a line that moves so very slowly, in spite of so few passengers. We are last, loaded down with kids and carry-ons. 

I’m not worried, just tired and curious. This is nothing like any airport I’ve ever known. There is no air conditioning and it’s still hot and humid inside even at 10 pm. 

“How far are we from the hotel?” I ask Bob.

“Everything is close,” he assures. “We’re on the smallest island in the Western hemisphere with a seat at the United Nations.”

“Are you making that up?”

“No, honestly. I’ve been researching this place and I think it will be perfect.”

Of course, he’s thinking of his business venture ahead. But I am not on that same train of thought. I’m so ripe for anything out of the ordinary, wanting to add extraordinary twists to the predictable-ness of life. I look around and already feel as if we are in an adventure novel. Not exactly Africa but certainly not home.

Imagine all this: tree frogs, a darkness you can’t find in New Jersey and that overwhelming, fresh, warm, sweet-green scent, the aroma of all the sugar cane fields everywhere, growing right up to the edges of the airport. 

Every Caribbean island claims rum for its own but only St. Kitts has miles and miles of sugar cane plantations. This we learn very soon, as well as so many other, twenty-year-long lessons in living life right out there on what I like to call “our what’s the worst that could happen?” boundary…with a rum drink in hand, of course. Our treasure was not buried at all but growing all around us in plain sight. We found cliff-hangers, cures, victims we could rescue and we are not yet at any happy ending.

Later that first St. Kitts’ night, sitting on the porch of our hotel room with the kids finally tucked into bed and sound asleep, tree frogs chirping softly, I sip something sweet, creamy and absolutely delicious. I think I’m in heaven.