This year we partnered with Moncole magazine to identify top makers in the UK. View their profiles on the Makers Monday website.
Think rum and the Caribbean comes to mind. But as the only distiller of rum in the UK, the British Island Rum Co is a totally unique set-up. “We are not about parrots and pirates,” says founder Keith Davie, who has gathered the skills and techniques of generations of British distillers and come up with his delicious 42 per cent proof rum.
Tell us what you make and how you make it.
We are a unique business in that we distil rum in the UK. As you are probably aware, rum is traditionally made in the Caribbean. We import molasses, which is made from sugar cane from Trinidad, and distil it into rum using small [200ml] copper stills [or pots]. Large-scale commercial rum operations will use huge stainless-steel stills. After a two-week fermentation we distil the alcohol three times, each time removing the heads [toxins that float up] and tails [fats and other matter that sink down] until we have premium rum that is 42 per cent proof; you’ll find most rums are at around 37 per cent.
So why start up a British rum brand?
I have a background in branding and creative direction of brand strategy, working a lot for alcohol brands and companies, so I gained a lot of what you might call “insight”. I saw the current craze for gin unfold and also saw that the UK has a great tradition of distilling that goes back generations, and I’m not talking about in-one-end-out-the-other kind of stuff. So anyway, I posed myself the question: why can’t we take the same excitement that is being generated around gin and apply it to rum?
But has it been a challenge to produce rum away from its native homeland and produce alcohol that is in the shadows of more fashionable drinks?
No actually, not at all. I’ve always lived by the motto of differentiate or die. And British Island Rum is not about parrots and pirates. We are not trying to be from the Caribbean; we are most definitely a British brand. I would say that we are leveraging our history of distillation and exploration – and not some sort of colonial history, I should add. I like to think of botanists and explorers in faraway lands bringing back their finds and applying some British ingenuity and industry to them.
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