Foursquare 2011-2022 - Little Brown Dog Spirits - Single Cask Rum

Foursquare is an award-winning rum distillery in Barbados owned by R. L. Seale Co., a family firm founded in the 1920s and run today by Sir David Seale and his son Richard. After a successful period as rum traders and blenders, the Seales bought an abandoned sugar factory and converted it into the Foursquare distillery in 1995/6, equipping it with a modern three-column continuous still and a traditional pot still fitted with coolers and retorts for extra reflux.

Richard Seale has earned a reputation as a progressive, maverick distiller, embracing technology like vacuum distillation while being famously outspoken against the use of sweeteners and flavourings - apart from their spiced rums, all Foursquare’s rums are all released without flavourings or added sugar / molasses, although some of them do use spirit caramel for colour adjustment. Foursquare usually blend their column and pot still spirits together both before and after maturation.

Little Brown Dog Spirits is an Aberdeenshire-based independent bottler and micro distillery run by Andrew Smith and Chris Reid. Smith had started labelling his cask projects Little Brown Dog from 2013 in tribute to his canine companion, Banksy. Little Brown Dog Spirits was registered in 2018, when Smith brought Reid on board and the company began small distillation projects on a 10-litre pot still and a 100 litre Alembic still used for rectifying grain neutral spirits for the company’s series of experimental gins.

Little Brown Dog’s first independent whisky bottlings appeared in 2020; the company has a small but extremely eclectic portfolio of releases so far, with single malt and grain whiskies joined by the Wee Mongrel small batch blended malt whiskies and adventurous bottlings such as the Petit Chien Brun Calvados and Li’l Brown Dawg rye whiskey. The company switched from 50cl to 70cl bottles for their products near the end of 2022.