Ship of the Line is our private cask programme — single-barrel releases, each named for a legendary flagship, each chosen one cask at a time and never repeated. When a release is gone, it is gone, because the cask it came from does not exist twice.
The first one proved the point faster than we expected.
What a private cask actually means
Most rum on a shelf is a standing blend. The producer's job is consistency: the bottle you buy in March should taste like the bottle you buy in November, and the one you buy next year. That is achieved by blending across many casks to a house profile.
A private cask selection works the opposite way. A single barrel is tasted, chosen, and bottled on its own terms. There is no blending to a target and no correcting a cask that has gone somewhere unexpected — if it is not good enough on its own, it does not get bottled.
The consequence is simple arithmetic. A cask yields what it yields, minus whatever the angels took. When those bottles are sold there is no second run, because the liquid that made them no longer exists anywhere.
Why we call it Ship of the Line
A ship of the line was a warship built heavy enough to stand in the line of battle and trade broadsides with anything afloat. The Sovereign of the Seas, launched in 1637, is generally reckoned the first true one — more guns than any ship then sailing, and so expensive that the tax raised to build her helped push England toward civil war. The Dutch called her the Golden Devil.
The Spanish treasure galleons were a different kind of vessel: the Capitana of a fleet was its flagship, the finest ship in the convoy, carrying the fleet commander and usually the greatest share of the treasure. Not a line-of-battle ship, but the first-rate vessel of her fleet all the same — the best accommodations, the commanding size, the speed and the armament.
What all of them have in common is that they were the ship everything else formed around. That is what the name is for.
The releases, in order
I — Formidable 18 Year (sold out)
Our first Ship of the Line release: an 18 year Barbados rare cask. It sold out quickly, and there will be no more of it — which is the programme working exactly as intended, even if it was a short acquaintance.
Formidable set the terms for everything that followed. A single cask, an age statement worth stating, and no additives to soften it.
II — Sovereign XO 22
The most complex and the rarest thing we have ever bottled. Distilled in Demerara's wooden Coffey Enmore still, approximately 9 years in ex-armagnac casks, then 12 or more years tropically aged in white oak. 43% ABV, limited to 924 bottles, presented in a gold cannon bottle. Marmalade, bitter orange peel, Demerara raisin, wood and spice.
Named for HMS Sovereign of the Seas. See the bottle · Sovereign On Deck
III — Capitana
An 8 year single-origin Panamanian dark rum at 40% ABV, double aged in white oak and bourbon casks. Delicate caramel butter, rich wood undertones, cherry-almond and a touch of crushed cacao nibs.
Named for the Capitana El Rubí, flagship of the 1733 Nueva España fleet, which sailed from Havana on a Friday the 13th and wrecked on the reefs of the Florida Keys the next day. She rests still in about twenty feet of water off Plantation Key. See the bottle · Capitana On Deck
IV — Maravilla 8
A single-origin Ron de Venezuela, eight years old at 40% ABV. Venezuela is one of very few countries on earth with a controlled designation of origin for rum, and very little of it reaches the United States. Nutmeg, honey and vanilla over a long, dry finish of almond, leather and cinnamon.
Named for the Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas, lost in the Bahamas on her way to Spain in 1656 with the king's salvaged treasure in her hold. Forty-five of her crew survived. See the bottle · Maravilla On Deck
The same rules apply
Private cask or not, every Ship of the Line release is bottled under the Bombarda Rum Pledge: no added sugars, no caramels, no artificial colorings, and never chill filtered. At these ages there is no reason to add anything, and nowhere to hide if you did.
Best given On Deck
These sell best as On Deck sets — the bottle paired with a handmade garrison carriage, built by hand in Texas from cedar and raw steel, so it stands like a cannon on a gun deck.
There is a reason for that beyond presentation. These are bottles people buy for someone who already owns rum, and the problem with giving rum to a rum drinker is that it gets finished. The carriage does not. It stays on the shelf long after the bottle is empty, and it fits any standard 750ml bottle, so it keeps working.
For Christmas, for a milestone birthday, or for Father's Day — the occasion this whole company was built around — that is the difference between a gift and a good gift.
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