The family's involvement in rum began in 1926, when Reginald Leon Seale founded R.L. Seale & Co. Ltd. as a rum merchant. The company did not distill its own spirit but sourced rums from other distilleries for blending and bottling, establishing the family's expertise in evaluation and blending. Over the decades, the Seales acquired additional brands -- Doorly's, Old Brigand, E.S.A. Field -- names that became part of the Barbadian rum vocabulary. David Seale, Reginald's grandson, took the decisive step in 1995, establishing the Foursquare Rum Distillery on a former sugar plantation in the parish of Saint Philip. His son Richard now runs the operation, combining the family's generations of blending knowledge with a distiller's obsession with process and purity.

The site itself carries centuries of history. The Foursquare Sugar Plantation was established in the 1640s, among the earliest wave of sugar cultivation that transformed Barbados and the wider Caribbean. A molasses factory was built around 1730, and the site was converted to a sugar factory in 1867. Much of the original architecture has been restored and now houses Heritage Park, an open-air museum featuring antique rum manufacturing equipment, and the Folk Museum, which traces the role rum has played in Barbadian history. In 2009, Seale donated part of the grounds to create the Foursquare Park cricket field -- because in Barbados, cricket and rum exist in permanent proximity. The distillery sits among these preserved buildings, modern equipment operating within 17th-century walls.

Foursquare produces rum using two double-retort copper pot stills alongside a modern twin-column Coffey vacuum still. The combination allows Seale to create rums with the character of traditional pot-still distillation and the precision of column distillation, blending the outputs to achieve specific flavor profiles. Aging occurs primarily in ex-bourbon and Madeira barrels. No sugar is added. No coloring. No flavor additives. The distillery purifies its own wastewater and uses it to irrigate the surrounding sugarcane fields, closing a loop that connects the raw material to the finished product. The results speak in competition scores: the International Wine & Spirit Competition named Foursquare Rum Producer of the Year in 2021, with rums scoring up to 99 points in the 2024 awards. Richard Seale was recognized as the IWSC's Industry Champion in 2023.

Seale's advocacy extends beyond his own distillery. He has pushed publicly for a Barbadian geographic indication for rum -- a GI that would legally define what can be called Barbadian rum, similar to the protections that govern Scotch whisky or Champagne. Foursquare, Mount Gay, and St Nicholas Abbey, the three major distilleries aging rum on the island, all produce in the traditional Barbadian style with no added sugar and support the GI effort. Seale has pointed out that it would be cheaper to import bulk spirit from column-still producing countries and slap Barbados flags on it, but that doing so would destroy what makes Barbadian rum distinctive. He has also criticized the practice of shipping rum to Europe for finishing, calling it a colonial-era pattern that extracts economic value from the island. For Seale, rum is not just a product. It is Barbados's cultural and economic heritage, and protecting its integrity is a form of sovereignty.