The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

Today was a different experience as my friend Tim and I took a 2-hour workshop to learn how to distill rum at the Spirited Union Botanical Rum Distillery. Or more specifically, doing a secondary distillery to add in some flavors to a generic unflavored rum. There were about twenty people in the workshop and we each had our own small copper pot.

We had a book with the instructions and the different ingredients were in jars around the room. Later we realized that the book had 4 different flavors of rums we could make, so we started improvising and added flavors we thought would be more fun.

On the left is my mix of lemon peels, orange peels, lavender, rose petals and elderflower. This was added to 500ml of white rum On the right is the result after I cooked it and steamed out all of the ” botanical distillate”.

It took a few minutes of cooking, but eventually the steam worked its way up the tube, cooled off a bit as it spiraled down, and dripped about 100ml into my beaker.

We then poured the botanical distillate into a bottle of generic rum, added a little bit of sugar water, and then some extracts. I chose to ignore the recipe and used only clementine extract.

The end result was a decent rum that will work well when mixed with some citrus. However, Tim chose a dark rum as his base with a mix of various botanicals, but mostly almonds. His tasted much better than mine and you could probably enjoy it straight, like you would a whiskey.