Both of us are at Cayman Spirits Company in George Town, Grand Cayman — the only working distillery in the Cayman Islands, and one of the more original spirits operations in the Caribbean. The reason for the visit is the bottle the distillery is built on: Seven Fathoms Premium Rum, the world’s first and only rum aged underwater.

The Distiller’s Tour walks the 5,000-square-foot production floor — the Vendome copper pot still, the towering Gun Bay Vodka column, and the original Christian Carl pot still used to perfect Seven Fathoms — and ends in the tasting room with the full lineup plus Distiller’s Special editions only available on site.

A holiday visit, but the kind that earns its way into the conversation back home. The work happening here is unique enough to make the trip a real point of reference for any Caribbean spirits coverage on the show.

What is Cayman Spirits Company?

Cayman Spirits Company, headquartered at the George Town Harbour Distillery on Grand Cayman, is the only working distillery on the Cayman Islands. Co-founded in 2008 by master distillers Walker Romanica and Nelson Dilbert, the company runs a small-batch handcrafted spirits program rooted in Caymanian production — and Caymanian innovation.

The portfolio is anchored by Seven Fathoms Premium Rum (the underwater-aged flagship), Gun Bay Vodka, Governor’s Reserve, and a rotating series of Distiller’s Special editions available only on site at the distillery. The 5,000-square-foot facility is open for the Distiller’s Tour, a 45-to-60-minute walk through the operation that ends in the tasting room with the full lineup poured.

The Caribbean has built rum traditions for four centuries. Cayman Spirits Company is doing something inside that tradition that no one else has done.

Aging is one of the central problems in spirits production: ambient temperature dictates how much spirit is lost to evaporation, and traditional warehouse cycling — the seasonal expansion and contraction that drives spirit in and out of the barrel wood — depends on the climate where the warehouse sits. Cayman Spirits inverts both. Underwater aging keeps the temperature constant; ocean motion does what warehouse cycling does on land, only faster and more deliberately.

For a bourbon-curious palate, Seven Fathoms is a useful point of reference. The same wood-spirit relationship that defines bourbon aging is being run here in a fundamentally different environment. The result tastes like rum, but the structural lessons translate — aging is what the spirit does to the wood and what the wood does to the spirit, and both are functions of motion and temperature.

The Distiller’s Special “only available at the distillery” framing is its own argument for the pilgrimage: this is not just a place to taste, it is the only place to taste certain bottles at all. For a working distillery this small in a market this remote, that is the right model.