Changing the name for Filipino spirits: Don Papa rum
(Picture: Press handout)In the Philippines, there is an island called Negros. It is the country’s fourth largest, not a podium finish but a decent placing, behind three but ahead of 7,637 others. Roads run endlessly on — it is about the size of Jamaica, with a side of Tahiti — and somewhere on a drive there is a sign for the Upper East Side. In place of Madison Avenue skyscrapers are shops with roofs woven from palm leaves, brown and straw-like in deference to the endless sun, where they sell crisps and phone cards. Humming by are skinny Honda bikes with covered sidecars welded on, or maybe they’re tuk-tuks with bikes banded to them. These are the Philippines tricycles and have room for two or three, but it’s more usual to see them with five or six people apiece, or loaded with crates of Cola bottles, empty and glinting. The road signs don’t warn to drive safe, but to drive friendly.
Past the palm-roofed shops, fields of sugar cane start. In them are towers like lighthouses; men climb them to sit and watch. Perhaps they are looking for the fantasy houses, some shells and some not, where the sugar barons used to live. Perhaps they aren’t. The fields stretch on and on, a rug endlessly unfurled; all that breaks them up are stalls by the side of the road selling tombstones, and great steel and glass mills where the cane is processed. In and out of these mills pickup trucks bounce, coming with hand-hacked stems and leaving empty to collect more, their routine broken only by the diesel cough of the bigger lorries doing the same, but doing more.
The lingering air around the factories is a haze of sugar, like a sweet-smelling dust cloud. And it is in these factories and these fields, in southeastern Asia — rather than, say, the West Indies — where the world’s largest producer of rum, Tanduay, operates (as such Tanduay, 169-years-old this year, happens to also be the world’s best-selling rum by volume, even outstripping Bacardi). There are others too: the small-batch Kasama, which has Alexandra Dorda behind it; Dorda has spirits in the blood, being the daughter of Tad Dorda, Belvedere’s co-founder (her mother is Filipino). Last year’s IWSC awards saw a silver medal awarded to Luisita Oro, which is made in the shadow of Mount Arayat on Luzon, which is the largest Filipino island. The Crows Craft Brewing and Distilling Company are doing a rum as well now, floating on a modest name built on gin. The Philippines, then, is not internationally known for its rum, but perhaps should be. One brand doing its bit to be synonymous with the idea is Don Papa.
The Don Papa name is already a big one, and is set to swell into a giant through this year and over the following four. 2023 was barely underway when news came that Diageo — who already own Guinness, Johnnie Walker, Tanqueray and others — had bought Don Papa for €260 million, and are set to invest a further €177.5 million by 2028, “subject to the spirit’s performance.” Some of that performance is anticipated to be in the UK, where Don Papa remains little known. The aim is to bring it up to speed with markets elsewhere: it has a foothold sure enough in the USA, for instance, that alongside its standard seven-year-old bottling, and its other mainstays — a 10-year-old (top of the pile), a sherry cask-aged bottling, a spiced offering — it has recently launched a rye-aged bottling, appealing specifically to fans of the American whiskey.
Don Papa’s sell is that not just that it’s Filipino — the novelty of geography can only go so far — but that it is positioning itself as the country’s foremost super-premium dark rum. If Tanduay and its ilk are known as hard-nosed, tough-fisted fire waters, the kind mixers are there to tame, Don Papa poses for the most part as its opposite; a smooth, cuffs-down drink to be savoured. It too can be mixed, but the point is to stir it into cocktails that celebrate its flavour, not into those that suppress it. Molasses-based, as opposed to born from sugar cane juice, the style is rich and sweet and spicy. It has a flooring punch of vanilla, a sweet swipe of toffee, a shot of orange and pineapple. Don Papa like to call Negros “Sugarlandia”, a local nickname. It is fitting; dry Don Papa is not.
Neither is it short of ambition, and already the range is broad. There is a honey-scented bottling, called Masskara. It mixes well, light thanks to the infusion of Philippine botanicals and — aptly for something named for a festival — is what you might call a party spirit. Elsewhere is the Baroko, where wood spice from ageing in ex-bourbon casks comes through; most curious of all is Gayuma, which Don Papa says “pays homage to the unique rituals performed by the shamans of Mount Kanlaon”. Kanlaon is the mountain that dominates the Negros skyline; quite how a drink pays homage to shamans escapes me, but the finishing here is the kind that makes a complex drink: after three years in bourbon, there are six months in ex-red wine casks, and three months in ex-Islay Scotch casks. By the end, the Don Papa vanilla is clouded with gunsmoke. There have been others; look to last year, when a port-cask bottling came to the UK. Rather than limit itself, Don Papa seems to be exploring; from the outside, it looks as though the intention is that, whatever a bartender is mixing up, they could turn to the back bar and find a bottle of Papa to suit.
It’s an intention that could seriously be realised. Rum has a reputation for lawlessness; the rules for its production are seen as slack compared to the regulations governing other alcohol production (Scotch is on a tight leash; the directives around Bordeaux wine are draconian). There are rules for rum — quite a few, in fact — but there is a freedom that lends itself to a playfulness which marks the drink at large. It means that rums are usually considered to be made in one of three ways: as an English rum, as a French-leaning thing, or as a Spanish-style spirit. This breadth means rum is increasingly becoming a bartender favourite because there is so much to use, to try, to trial. Where, say, brandy cocktails can often follow a type, rum is not so easily contained. Don Papa seems to want to lean into this.
They say that Don Papa is a Spanish-style rum. They say that, but they say a Philippines tricycle is built for three. They say Don Papa is named for Dionisio Magbueles, a sugar farmer and anti-colonial revolutionary from the late 1800s, but the company was started a little over a decade ago by Stephen Carroll, a British-educated, one-time executive for Rémy Cointreau. But what is said and what is are different things, and Don Papa seems to intentionally be blurring the lines of what defines the brand with its increasingly eclectic releases. It is playing and experimenting, redrafting the boundaries. It is a rum of those endless fields, of those fantasy houses, of the roads that run on and on. So when they say that Don Papa is a Spanish-style rum, they’re wrong. Don Papa is a Filipino-style rum. Whoever’s in charge of the categories just hasn’t caught up yet.
