Bermuda drinks company Gosling Brothers is going after the high-end US liquor market ? and has just launched a new luxury cask-aged rum.

"Old Rum" is the first new product Gosling's has launched since the 1970s when it unveiled the dark and stormy in a can.

But this wooden boxed, branded, hand labelled and finished blended aged rum is a far cry from that tinned drink which went on the shelves 30 years ago.

Retailing at $55 in Bermuda and up to $73 in the US, this product is going after the high-end after dinner drink market.

"People used to look at rum as something they mixed with coke and drank when they went down to the islands," said Malcolm Gosling, president of Gosling's Export (Bermuda) Ltd. "They certainly would not order it at home. But that is changing, and critics and connoisseurs are now paying new attention to fine aged rum."

Old Rum is just one of two new products being launched this year, with a golden rum to be unveiled in April this year ? also aimed at the US market. Goslings has been pushing its Black Seal rum in the US and Canada ? and it is now sold in all 50 US states and every Canadian province bar Quebec.

And now it is going for the mass golden rum drinking population and the lucrative high-end market.

The Old Rum has been cask aged for between 16 and 13 years and came out of an experiment at Gosling's where they decided to put the rum into oak barrels for a few years to see how it tasted.

And the tasters at Gosling's decided that it was such a fine aged product that it had to be launched as a very special product.

They looked to the past to find inspiration on what to do. Gosling's Black Seal, the company's most popular brand, used to be called Old Rum when it was first developed in the 1850s in Bermuda. It was originally sold from barrels, with customers bringing along their own bottles for filling ? something that still happens in the company's Somerset store.

As the tourist industry started expanding after the war, the company found that the tourist wanted to bottle the product and take it away with them. So what Gosling's did was to recycle champagne bottles it sold to the officers mess by collecting them, washing them, filling them with rum and then sealing them with black wax.

Soon the drink became known as "black seal" ? there were other rums sealed with red wax to distinguish them. When "Goose" Gosling changed the name to just "Black Seal" in the 1950s, it was after everyone had stopped calling it Old Rum ? and just called it Black Seal.

And it was from some of these original black-wax sealed champagne bottles held in the Gosling cellars that the design inspiration came for the new Old Rum.

The new bottles are in a champagne-style heavy green bottle, which are hand numbered, hand sealed with wax and hand labelled and then placed in heavy wooden boxes.

"We have been doing taste tests for the past few years to get the blend just right," said Mr. Gosling. "And it really is a good fine rum, for sipping, say, after dinner."

About 2000 bottles have been produced ? the maximum for this year with about 300 earmarked for the Bermuda market, the rest for export. There will be no further production until next year when the blend is repeated with more oak barrelled rum that will have reached maturity.

In April the company expects to launch its "Amber Gold" a light rum also aimed at the US market ? and both new products have already won gold medals at the International Rum Festival held this year in Newfoundland. "Rum is the number two seller in the US," said Mr. Gosling. "They sell 19 million nine litre cases a year. Just a little percent of that would be nice."