santa cruz rum

Also known as “st. croix rum”,“Santa Cruz rum”,“gold Santa Cruz rum”. Santa Cruz rum refers to a heavy-bodied defunct style of barrel-aged pot still rum once produced on the island better known as St. Croix. No such rum has been produced in the Virgin Islands in a long while, but the term crops up frequently in pre-Prohibition recipes. The stuff was sold in younger and older expressions, and evidence suggests that it was, as a category, less distinctly and immediately recognizable than Jamaican rum—a general purpose brown rum, but with a bit more bias toward funk and grassy character than is typical with current general-purpose brown rums. A brown rum from Barbados might be a passable substitute. Historian David Wondrich proposes a DIY blend of one part Smith & Cross, two parts amber Martinique rhum agricole and 3-4 parts Cuban-style rum such as Havana Club 3 Year or Caña Brava. (See Imbibe!, Second Edition, p. 74-75.)