It's a drink associated with pirates but a Nottingham man passionate about rum is out to change its image. Lewis Hayes, a self-confessed rum nerd, is behind Nottinghamshire's first rum distillery. Not only is it the biggest in Europe, it's bigger than some in the Caribbean, the birthplace of the spirit.
At the launch of DropWorks Rum Distillery's first drop - without a Captain Jack Sparrow in sight - Lewis said: "It's enormous. We can make two million bottles of rum a year. That equates to ten barrels of rum a day. And there's a lot of room for expansion.
"I think there's there's less than 75 distilleries making rum in the Caribbean combined. The UK has nearly 50 so the UK is very quickly becoming noticed by the rest of the world as a rum producing nation, very much like Japan with whisky. Our ambition is we're not looking backwards at what rum was, we're looking forwards at what rum can be."
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The first drop is an unaged, crystal clear liquid - four more releases are planned, including dark and spiced rums. A barrel-aged one will take the longest and it will be a couple of years before it is launched.
Ironically Lewis used to own what was thought to be the largest gin collection in the world. He said: "I owned a bar in a gin distillery, I have lots of friends that are gin distillers. I had an opportunity to go have a go at a gin distillery right at the beginning of the boom.
"I am passionate about rum. I've always seen rum as being undervalued and misunderstood by the majority of the public because of bad marketing and marketing campaigns that don't tell you what the liquid is, they tell you more about ships and pirates and sea monsters.
"There's a rum that's won best rum in the world five times at blind tastings - you can buy that bottle for £50. If you bought a whisky that had won that award once, it's thousands of pounds. Rum is massively undervalued."
The first bottles to come out of the distillery at Welbeck were tasted by guests invited to Six Richmond House, a cocktail bar in Hurts Yard, Nottingham. Bartenders created an exclusive list of cocktails especially for the event. It's hoped that the spirit will be behind the bar there and many others across not just Nottingham and Europe but the world - as well as being for sale online at £35 and at Welbeck Farm Shop.
Lewis said: "I have no idea how far-reaching this could be but our plan is to be selling in mainland Europe next year, and start selling in the US the year after and we have patents as far as Australia and New Zealand so our ambition is to go global. That's why we've built the distillery the size we have - it's all about quality production but we are doing it at a scale we can start to get it out there to people.
"We want to work very closely with the people in Nottingham. Because I haven't had a product to go round and give tastings to people I've not been able to showcase it until now. We're hoping it rolls out quite quickly and it's going to be available to everyone. I'm personally going to be doing deliveries. I live here, it feels like my city and I want to to be able to drop everything off.
"We don't need to wait for wholesalers to take it and that whole slow chain of events. It should hopefully be available in lots of places soon."
The spiced rum will be released this summer in what will be a world first. "We don't have any spices - that sounds very confusing. The legal definition of rum across all different nations in the world, you must not add any flavourings to rum and still call it rum. If you go to a supermarket today you will find many brands selling themselves as rum when they are flavoured.
"We are celebrating quality production processes where we add no flavours so we're making a stand, we are going to generate so much flavour and spices within the natural process of fermentation and distillation that we will be able to bottle it without having to add any fake flavourings or any nonsense to it.
"We are going to age it for a little bit on some wooden chips, so in the space of 24 hours we can get the flavours we need out of the wood. American oak attributes vanilla, and French oak is really famous for delivering on spice notes, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. We will add those flavours naturally through infusing it with no flavourings added. We have given our prototype to a few bartenders and the reaction has been mind bogglingly good."
At the moment the team is small, just Lewis, a head distiller and his assistant, a sales director and head of marketing. But with an ambition to grow fast there's likely to be a much bigger sales team and new jobs in the distillery, as well as tour guides to show visitors around.
Six Richmond House bar manager Tom Payne said: "It's a fantastic rum. The guys that are producing it really know their stuff." And if you're wondering what the paint-splattering is in the video, it's for the logo which will hang in the distillery.
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