Abuelo

In that small strip of land that divides North and South America lies the Republic of Panama. Here, in 1908, came a young Spanish immigrant, Don José Varela Blanco, full of hopes and expectations. José decided to open a sugar factory, the nation's first, in the town of Pesé, located in the center of Panama and surrounded by a very fertile land, where most of the people were engaged in sugar cane farming. The operation of the small company did very well, but, in 1936, Jose decided to give it a real direction: following his three sons' advice, he began to convert the factory into a distillery. It was the beginning of a path made of successes, which led Abuelo to be recognized as the first producer of Panamanian Rum, and which sees it today continue on a glorious path, in which the Varela family's only goal improving more and more the quality of its products.

Abuelo is a distillery that stands out for the level of the materials it uses. The cane sugar in fact, comes from the Panamanian peninsula itself, and it is during the dry months, more precisely between January and February in a period that is locally called "zafra," that farming families begin their valuable work on the fields. Here, on some 800 hectares of land, they harvest sugarcane, from the subsequent processing of which they obtain molasses, a key ingredient in the creation of Abuelo-branded products. Fermentation then follows, finally leading to distillation, which is carried out through the use of four column stills. Once the Rum is obtained, it is matured slowly, mainly in American oak barrels with a capacity of 200 liters.

The range of Abuelo's Rums is wide and varied, starting with softer, flowing labels and going all the way up to more solemn bottles, in which long aging contributes to a truly interesting olfactory and taste profile, as in the case of Rum Cask Finish, finished in barrels in which other wines or spirits have matured. The rums are elegant and always very balanced, an ideal spirit for a quality evening with the flavours from Panama.