Our Rum Diary
Erica Sagon
Last week we gave you a peek at something bubbling away in our test still...
That's rum, folks! It'll be one of our upcoming bottled spirits for release this summer. Our goal is to make a rum that is great for cocktails but also for sipping on its own. We're leaning toward a Jamaican-style rum with tropical flavors, and we've gotten plenty of direction from our #tikituesday masterminds Chris Resnick and Baylee Pruitt.
Much of the flavor of rum comes from the yeast, so we're spending a lot of time getting that right. Our tiny test still has been running like mad, one gallon of experimental rum at a time.
(Any name suggestions for our test still? Still the One?)
Each test batch produces 50 milliliters of rum — that's 1.7 ounces, or about what you'd use to make a tiki drink. It's veeeery small batch rum at this point.
We started experimenting with five or six foundations, from molasses to cane juice, and now we're playing around with eight yeasts. Yeast wrangler Matt Bochman, a professor at Indiana University, is helping out with that.
We're getting close!