I’m sitting on a porch on the island of Barbados, shooting the breeze with brothers Peter and Keith Laurie. Rum bottles from the Caribbean and beyond crowd a wall of wood-stained shelves. More than a dozen decanters sit on the bar, holding rums from Trinidad, Haiti, Britain, and, of course, Barbados. I’m here as part of my quest to learn the history of two of Barbados’ most well-known commodities — sugar and rum. I’ve heard the Lauries are the island’s foremost rum experts, and I’m here to pick their brains.

Nonchalantly, I mention a recent trip to another Caribbean island where I’d discreetly sampled a certain kind of rum made in the woods, a Caribbean moonshine of sorts. “That’s Hammond!” exclaims Keith Laurie as he adjusts his finely woven straw cowboy hat and takes a sip of Brazilian coffee. “Horrible stuff, isn’t it?” He tells me it was named after a British civil servant who came here in the 1950s to compile a report that outlined illegal bootlegging practices. Keith is on a roll at this point, telling stories and waxing philosophical on the subject of rum, and I seize the chance to pointedly ask him what I really want to know. “So,” I say, with what I think is a deftly timed pause that will get him to reveal a closely guarded secret about this island, “what do they call moonshine in Barbados?”

“Here?” his younger brother Peter chimes in with a laugh. “We don’t need that stuff. The rum here is cheap, and there’s lots of it.” He goes on to explain that not only does Barbados have a great supply of rum, but also that distribution is simple on the island. “There are easily over a thousand rum shops on the island,” he says, referring to the often tourist-friendly shacks that serve food and rum (and that I plan to visit later). I soon learn that Peter has just completed the second edition of a guidebook, The Barbadian Rum Shop: The Other Watering Hole, and that he’s frequently asked to lead trips to a few of his favorite out-of-the-way shacks. I’m satisfied. These guys know their rum — and rum’s most famous island.

Tourism now drives the economy of Barbados, but it was sugar — and the rum made from it — that put the tiny nation on the map.

Wine lovers often spend their weekends touring vineyards, even stomping grapes and helping with bottling. Adventurous foodies travel to culinary-themed inns where they forage for mushrooms, oysters, or crabs and then have the on-site chef prepare whatever they find for dinner. Me? I’ve been fascinated with sugar and rum — both derived from sugarcane — since my first visit to the Caribbean. I want to learn more about the sweet grass that largely shaped the culture of this region.

The story of the Caribbean cannot be told without broaching the topic of sugar. Today, tourism is frequently the biggest income generator for many Caribbean islands. But there was a time when cane (and the products made from it) was king. Sugar products regularly made up 90 percent of exports from the region after 1660, not long after sugarcane was introduced to Barbados by Dutch Jews from Northern Brazil. European governments assessed the value of Caribbean islands in terms of the amount of sugarcane they produced. In many cases, this output exceeded — at least in monetary terms — any export from the American mainland. Entire islands were transformed to maximize production of sugarcane.

In those days, Barbados was the sweet center of the Caribbean. Emory University professor of history David Eltis writes that “the exports of no other European colony approached the value of that of Barbados in this era.” Sugarcane was first brought to the Caribbean for cultivation in 1493 by Christopher Columbus, but it wasn’t until more advanced methods of sugar production arrived in the mid-17th century that the trade took off throughout the region; to do the hard labor, thousands of slaves were brought over from Africa.

During this time period, Barbados looked much different. Workers flooded the fields for each harvest, and windmills were built to crush the sugarcane; by the mid-19th century some 500 windmills were scattered across the decidedly rural island blanketed with fields of sugarcane. Today, only one of them is still intact, and the introduction of harvesting machinery means that the sight of workers hacking at stalks with machetes isn’t nearly as common as it once was. But traces of colonial Barbados remain and can be found throughout the island.

I journeyed to St. Nicholas Abbey, billed as one of three genuine Jacobean mansions in the Western Hemisphere. At this estate, finial-tipped Dutch gables and a Chinese Chippendale staircase are testaments to the opulence once associated with the sugar trade in the Caribbean. Not far from this stately manor is Farley Hill National Park, where you’ll find the ruins of a once-splendorous Georgian estate; the area now serves as a venue for concerts and events.

On another day, I ventured down a country road to a rum shop and enjoyed a stiff Cuba libre and a cutter, a sandwich made with salty bread; the filling for mine was fried flying fish, one of Barbados’ signature foods. Later, while visiting the industrial section of the island, I gawked at the massive holding areas where sugar and molasses are stored before being shipped off. And in Speightstown, I toured Arlington House, a recently opened museum with extensive exhibits related to sugar cultivation and trade. There, I discovered that the word “rum” is said to be derived from the way the libation makes you feel: “rumbustious.”

The sugarcane industry flourished because of slave labor, and Barbadians do not try to ignore or hide this history. At museums and other sites, photographs, artistic renderings, and audio narratives depict the experiences of slaves brought by ship from West Africa. Collections also show what their lives were like once on the island. In Haggatt Hall, the slaves’ quest for freedom is memorialized by Karl Broodhagen in A Slave in Revolt, a bronze sculpture of a man with broken shackles dangling from his upraised arms. It’s more commonly known as the “Bussa Statue,” for a slave who led a revolt against British rule in 1816 and who was proclaimed a National Hero in 1998.

I learned that the word “rum” is said to be derived from how the libation makes you feel: “rumbustious.”

I had learned a lot during my explorations, but I still felt like I was missing some pieces of the puzzle. What does sugarcane look like up close? How is it transformed into Barbadian sugar, a favorite ingredient for English bakers? And how is the molasses made that’s used to produce rum?

“Sugarcane is not the only thing grown on Barbados,” my driver says as we motor past a field of sugarcane on our way to the Portvale Sugar Factory. Yams, bananas, sweet potatoes, grapefruit, and cotton are also cultivated on the gently rolling hills. But their production pales in comparison to sugarcane, which is still harvested by machete-toting workers on the steeps hills where machines can’t go.

Before we arrive at the factory, I ask the driver to stop on the side of the road so I can walk a few paces into a field of cane. As the wind blows at the top of a hill, the long leaves attached to the main stalks flutter like streamers. In the distance, I spy the gray stone silo of the Morgan Lewis Sugar Mill, the last functional sugar windmill on Barbados.

Finally, we reach the Portvale Sugar Factory, where cane cut from the fields is transformed into sugar and molasses. I check in beside a sign advertising cane juice for sale. I’m surrounded by large harvesting equipment that is part of a small sugar museum located on site. After grabbing a hard hat and paying the admission fee, I follow my Barbadian guide toward a factory the size of an airplane hangar.

At the outskirts of the plant, a sky-blue truck filled with stalks of cane as thick as a garden hose pulls up, and workers unload them onto a conveyor belt. Stepping inside, I watch a massive steamroller-like device as it crushes the cane to squeeze out juice. Once the juice is extracted and clarified, it goes through a repeated series of boilings, evaporations, and extractions. Molasses is what remains after the sugar crystals are removed, following the first boiling; the second and third boilings yield increasingly darker versions. The loud drone of the equipment and the steam emerging from the various tanks makes me feel like I’m in the belly of the beast of sugar production.

As I emerge from the factory, I think I’m closer to understanding what’s involved in this sweet trade that has played such a pivotal role in Caribbean economy and culture, but I realize there’s still much to learn and see. I have only one thing left to do. As we pull away from the cane fields, I spot a rum shop in the distance and ask the driver to pull over once more. Even though I know that rum has come a long way since a 17th-century British writer called it a “hot, hellish, and terrible liquor,” it never hurts to double-check the facts.

Christopher Percy Collier has written for the Boston Globe, the New York Times, Smithsonian, National Geographic Adventure, and Men’s Journal.

Photography by: Christopher Percy Collier