Appleton Estate 17 Year Legend Rum is Reselling for $2,000

News

By RC Staff

25 July 2023

Key Points

• Appleton Estate has recreated the legendary rum used in the original 1944 Mai Tai recipe

• Only 1,500 bottles are available worldwide with an MSRP of $500

• Bottles of the 17 Year Legend are selling on the aftermarket for almost $2,000

Item

Food & Beverages

900

Profit

This is the difference between the sale price and resell price. It does not take into account any costs associated with reselling. Things like shipping, storage fees, if applicable.

Appleton Estate 17 Year Old Legend Rum

This rum is a faithful recreation of the J. Wray & Nephew 17 Year Old Jamaican rum which was produced during the 1940s and used to create the original Mai Tai at Trader Vic’s. It was created in an extremely limited edition of just 1,500 bottles worldwide.

No drink is more important to Tiki culture than the Mai Tai. Aged rum, orange liqueur, lime juice, and orgeat syrup make up this tropical staple. And while these days most any aged rum will do, the original drink was created to showcase the flavor of one J. Wray & Nephew 17 Year Old Jamaican rum. Only problem is, J. Wray & Nephew 17 hasn’t been available since the 1940s.

What is J. Wray & Nephew 17?

The J. Wray & Nephew 17 Year rum is the stuff of legends for tropical drink connoisseurs and rum fanatics. It’s a bottle that has been shrouded in mystery for some time, with plenty of disputes regarding the rum’s specifications.

Heck, the bottle was even hard to come by all the way back in the 1940s, when the Mai Tai’s surging popularity caused a shortage, eventually causing Trader Vic’s to swap over to using a 15 Year Old Rum as a substitute.

That being said, it has been widely accepted that the rum was most likely created at the Appleton Estate, the oldest distillery in Jamaica (1749), and available only on the export market.

Appleton Estate Recreates the Original Mai Tai Rum

J. Wray & Nephew Ltd acquired the Appleton Estate in 1916 and began using it as one of their distillery locations, with the Appleton Estate name beginning to appear on labels in the 1940s. In 1987, Appleton Estate released their signature blend, marking a true brand differentiation from their parent company.

In 1997, Joy Spence was appointed as master blender. She would be the one directly responsible for the creation of the 17 Year Legend. 

Some time in the early 2000s, Spence combed through the Appleton Estate archives and found the recipe for the original J. Wray & Nephew 17. She then recreated the pot-distilled marques (a marque is used to refer to a specific rum distillate recipe), and aged the rum for a full 17 years (2005 – 2022), resulting in just enough liquor to fill just 1,500 standard 750 mL bottles.

Appleton Estate 17 Year Legend Goes on Sale

Although filings for the rum were spotted in 2022, Appleton Estate did a great job of keeping the release’s specific details a secret until shortly before bottles became available for sale.

A press release was published announcing the Rum was published on May 17th, 2023. Interestingly, the first 36 bottles of the 17 Year Old Legend would be available via blockchain spirits trading platform BlockBar, sold as redeemable NFTs for $500 each. The BlockBar sale started on May 18th, 2023, and sold out completely within just 45 minutes of going live.

Following the BlockBar sale, with anticipation from the rum community rising to massive levels, Appleton Estate announced that the rum would have a wider US release at the end of June.

This wider release would eventually end up being delayed a number of times, ultimately happening on July 20th, 2023 via online spirits vendor ReserveBar. There was very little advanced public notice of this updated date, being shared only a day in advance with newsletter subscribers. Even so, the release proved popular and sold out completely within under 20 minutes.

Appleton Estate 17 Year Legend Resells

With such a legendary backstory and rabid fandom to boot, it was all but inevitable that the measly 1,500 global bottle run wouldn’t be enough to go around. As such, bottles of Appleton Estate 17 Year Legend starting selling for heavy markups on the aftermarket before the wider release even took place.

Crafty retailers lucky enough to get a bottle would commonly advertise them for far above MSRP — and still sell out instantly. Take for example this bottle that sold out at a Florida retailer for a whopping $799.99.

And because this release partially took place on BlockBar, non-liquor-license-holding resellers were offered the rare opportunity to publicly participate in the aftermarket. As of this writing, the cheapest listings for the 17 Year Old Legend on BlockBar are $2,000 and $2,500, with the most recent sale taking place at $1,403.47.

With the unique history, limited supply, and Appleton Estate explicitly stating that they’ve “depleted all available liquid” and will never be re-creating this rum again, it’s a pretty good bet that the 17 Year Legend isn’t going to get any cheaper. 

To learn about cool product releases like this in advance, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter. While we aren’t primarily a liquor-focused company, we do cover the exceedingly special drink from time to time.