This is the fifth post in our journey in making Shakespeare Distillery’s first rum. While we were fine-tuning the production process for our white rum on the iStill, we also needed to get started developing our spiced rum recipe. Since we planned to launch our white rum and spiced rum together, we needed to start working on our spiced rum recipes.
Formulating a Spiced Rum Recipe
I started by researching other spiced rums online and then I came up with six different recipe ideas. Sam, the brand ambassador looked the recipes over. He then took his favourite elements and combined them to make a new recipe. We experimented with three different methods of making our new spiced rum recipe.
In the first experiment, we distilled our botanicals with the low wines from our initial iStill stripping run. Our second experiment was to distil the botanicals in our spirit. We wanted to see if there would be a difference between distilling botanicals in spirit that had been distilled once versus twice. Our third experiment was to macerate the botanicals in spirit that had already been through two distillations in the iStill.
We liked the flavour best in the two experiments with the distilled botanicals. There was not much of a difference between those two experiments in terms of flavour. However, when we used the low wines as our base, the spirit louched when I diluted it to 40%abv. Thus, for every following spiced rum experiment, I used the white rum that had been through two iStill distillations.
The initial recipe we came up with consisted of apple, honey, mulberries, chestnut, nutmeg, orange, ginger, orange peel, cloves, and caraway seeds. I initially thought that the honey was the cause of the louching, so we omitted honey from our recipe later on.
Test Distilling Spiced Rum Recipes
Usually, I made two or three spiced rums at a time, so I had a few copper alembic stills running. I ran each distillation the same way. I collected the same volume of heads and hearts to minimize any differences between each spiced rum experiment. Then, I diluted each experiment down to 40%abv with reverse osmosis water and let it sit in the cupboard for at least a day. Then we had a group tasting to assess the taste of each experiment. The group tasting determined what alterations would be made to the recipe. The slightly altered recipe became the following experiment. We repeated this process numerous times, changing one or two ingredients and then assessing how those changes affected the taste of our spiced rum.
I completed 21 spiced rum experiments in total over two months. In our last set of experiments we tried replacing a small amount of orange peel with a different citrus fruit. In this case we were comparing the addition of lime peel versus lemon peel. We all agreed that the one with lime was better than the one with lemon. The lime gave it a fresh and zesty note and seemed to brighten up all the other flavours.
The final spiced rum recipe that we settled on contained: mulberries, vanilla bean, chestnut, cinnamon, mace, ginger, clove, allspice, orange peel, and lime peel.
Watch it Below on YouTube
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