When the barque Picton Castle embarks on its seventh circumnavigation this April, it will have a special cargo of four barrels of rum from Lunenburg’s Ironworks Distillery stored in the hold. If all goes well when the ship returns to Lunenburg in May of 2019, she will be carrying the same four barrels, and the rum will be better for it. 

Why carry four barrels, 900 liters, of rum around the world? In the age of sail, wine would often spoil on long voyages. Distilled liquors, however, were often improved by the motion of the ship, as well as changes in atmospheric pressure and temperature. With luck the Ironworks’ ‘Round the World Rum will be nicely aged by the voyage. 

Ironworks co-owner Lynne MacKay acknowledges concerns about the crew tapping into the cargo. She is quoted by the Globe and Mail, “Everybody’s making jokes: ‘You’re sending rum barrels to sea and your expect them to come back whole, that’s a joke!’ But they’re pretty well secured. We sent it out under the auspices of Excise Canada and all of those customs things so that what goes out will come back, and we have faith that it will.” 

I wonder if the crew is familiar with the phrase, “sucking the monkey,” Royal Navy slang for the surreptitious drinking of the purser’s rum through a straw forced through a small hole in the rum cask. (Not to give anyone ideas…)

Ironworks is not the only distillery offering ocean-aged spirits. If you prefer cognac or don’t want to wait until 2019 for the Ironworks rum, there is a really very nice ocean-matured cognac by Kelt.  Oak barrels containing Kelt VSOP Tour du Monde cognac spend roughly ninety days at sea, circling the world in a shipping container, before returning to France to be bottled. Each bottle includes the name of the ship and the dates of the port calls in its voyage around the globe. Now, a container ship is not nearly as lovely as the three-masted Picton Castle, but the cognac is very smooth and well balanced. I recommend it highly.