Ask for the federation's national drink and nobody will hand you a cocktail list. They will pour two fingers of CSR into a cold bottle of Ting, drop in a wedge of lime, and pass it across the counter. CSR and Ting. It is the pour at the rum shop, the cooler at the cricket, the thing in the red cup at the family lime. Most Kittitians could not tell you the year they first had one, the way you cannot remember learning your own name.
CSR stands for Cane Spirit Rothschild. Baron Edmond de Rothschild built the distillery on the island in the 1970s, and Demerara Distillers took it over in 1996, running it now from Bird Rock on the edge of Basseterre. The spirit is distilled from fresh cane juice rather than from molasses, which is the harder and rarer way to do it and the reason CSR drinks closer to a rhum agricole than to the dark sippers most people picture when they think Caribbean rum. It comes off the still high and clean, then down to forty per cent in the bottle. Vegetal, peppery, dry, with the cut-grass note of the cane field still sitting on the back of the tongue.
Here is the part worth holding onto. St. Kitts grew sugar for three and a half centuries and then closed the industry in 2005, and for most of the years since, the rum sold on the island was imported. CSR is the exception. It is the only spirit still in commercial production on St. Kitts, the last working distillation left from the sugar era. Everything else either stopped or, like Old Road up the coast, is being slowly built back. CSR simply kept going. While the cane fields went to scrub and the mills stood ruined, this one spirit carried on being made and being drunk, every week, without ceremony.
That is why it belongs at the front of the shelf rather than the back. The aged bottles tell the story of what the island lost and is reaching for again. CSR tells the simpler story of what never left. It is not built to be sipped neat and contemplated. It is built to go in a tall glass with a grapefruit soda and disappear over an afternoon, the way it has for forty years.
Pour it the way the island does and you will understand the whole thing faster than any tasting note can tell you.
Shop this story: CSR Cane Spirit · Ting Grapefruit Soda
Make it: CSR and Ting, the recipe →
Read on: The long quiet between bottles, on the rum coming back to St. Kitts →