A Risqué Rum Brand is Also One of Belize's Finest Craft Distilleries
Although rum is the spirit most synonymous with the Caribbean, Belize has never been considered much of an industry player. But a craft distilling movement is afoot and, at its vanguard, is a brand as playful as it is sophisticated.
History of Rum
In its pirate days, marauders christened Belizean liquor “titty rum” after watching local women dribble the spirit on their breast for teething babies to suckle. More than a century later, the name captured Frankie Gagliano’s imagination, both for its historical origin and its risqué implications. He named his craft distillery on the idyllic Placencia peninsula Big Titty Rum.
Gagliano doesn’t just produce rum, he’s a student of the spirit’s long history—a story in which, up until the last decade, Belize has rarely been included.
Rum, a liquor distilled from sugarcane molasses or juice, was first produced not in the Caribbean but in the Canary Islands, where the plant was cultivated by at least 1425 C.E. Plantation owners forced enslaved Africans to do the brutal, hot work of sugarcane cultivation, says Gagliano.
“On the islands, they couldn’t escape. That’s a big part of the reason why they colonized the Caribbean.”
In the New World, Europeans began replicating their island sugarcane prisons almost immediately. By the early 1600s, the sugar barons on Barbados were among the wealthiest exporters in the world. The Old World’s superpowers vied for control of the industry and the region.
“The Spaniards were especially sophisticated and took rum making very seriously,” Gagliano explains. “The French, on the other hand, were in the wine business so they made the cane juice into wine, then put the wine in the still. They called it Agricole.”
The British, meanwhile, weren’t particularly interested in honing their rum craft. Makers of refined whiskey and gin, to the British rum was something of a drink-to-get-drunk spirit, not one that deserved careful attention. “They made a lot but didn’t make it very well,” says Gagliano. “They were above rum.”
Rum in Belize
The British attitude towards rum infected Belize, too. Indentured servants from South Asia helped build the sugarcane industry in the 19th century but the rum the country produced was of the lowest common denominator, a cheap spirit for the masses. Even after the country gained its independence in 1981, they continued to produce industrially-made liquor instead of honing a more artisan approach.
But in the last decade, small independent producers have begun to break away from the factory-made mold. The country now has a few artisan distilleries, including the southern estate-grown Agricole brand Copalli (a 2021 Gold Winner for their Barrel Rested Cask Strength in 2021) and the Placencia company, Tiburon Rum. At 10 years old, Big Titty Rum, is the matriarch of them all. With its bawdy name and viral marketing campaigns that have, among other things, bombed the village of Placencia in polka dot bikini tops, its also the fledgling industry’s most recognizable brand.
Big Titty Rums
Gagliano produces his nine styles of Belizean rum (and half dozen other liqueurs, bitters and aperitifs) with great care. He finishes the provocatively named 44DD, an aged premium rum, in oak barrels that have been meticulously re-charred just enough to deliver their smoky, roasted sugar flavor. He infuses his lightly aged gold rum, Island Spiced, with Belize-grown botanicals and fruits like orange. With his Demerara Black, he makes a case for the out-of-vogue style “black rum” using the high-character, low-yield demerara cane variety.
“Don’t get it confused with dark rum,” says Gagliano. “With black rum, you take aged rum and you add caramel and molasses back in to give it kind of a port wine character.”
Big Titty Rum uses only recycled bottles, and as many of their ingredients as possible come from Belizean producers and harvesters, from the sugar cane to the red habanero peppers in their Habanero Rum, the organic bananas in their Go Bananas, and the seaweed-based carrageenan and chocolate in their creme liqueur Fat Pussy.
“Rum is extremely versatile,” says Gagliano. “You can mix it with anything.” But unlike the mass-produced liquor that has dominated Belize for the last several decades, Big Titty Rum is both complex enough and delicate enough to sip on its own.
The country may not have the selection found in Barbados, Cuba and Haiti yet, but it finally has an artisan spirits industry it can be proud of.