The full bodied, pure Scottish craft rum is fermented and double distilled in the hotel's very own distillery.
Owner Craig Innes posted on social media: "After years of trial and testing... we've just launched a White Rum!"
Hotel News Scotland: "How did the idea came about?"
Craig: "I think that for us, the step towards making rum was inevitable. Many years ago Noru had holidayed with her dad in the Dominican Rebublic and Cuba and her love for rum and in particular rum cocktails was born sipping on these with the white sands between her toes and sun beaming from the sky. My story was a little different I first began enjoying rum with my flat mate back in my university days, we would always pick up a bottle on a cold Aberdeen's winter Friday afternoon on the way home from class, usually just served with coke.
When we finally opened our craft distillery in October 2017 as Pixel Spirits our goal was always to make a variety of spirits and though we began with gin we wanted quickly to expand our portfolio of wonderful hand crafted drinks.
After our first gin launches, we started researching how we could make rum here in Scotland. When you are starting anything new, the amount of different opinions on production can be phenomenal and sometimes confusing, so I reached out to a former employee of our still manufacturer who I had met previosly, what he doesn't know about rum probably isn't worth knowing! To our luck he said come to my distillery and lets have a chat. So in July 2018 we travelled to Nijmegan in the Netherlands for a couple of days and to our enormous debt of gratitude he had surprised us and setup a whole itinerary of craft distilleries and breweries for us to visit. At that point our fate was sealed. We got our approval to begin production already back in May 2019 and have been trialing, testing and aging rum on site ever sinse. With the release of our first oak aged Golden Rum about to launch we thought we would wet the apetite with a little White Rum expresion too!
Increasingly in the world of Rum we are seeing many brands importing from a large producer and then simply bottling and labeling their spirit. With this project we wanted to start from scratch, fermenting, distilling and aging here in the West Highlands. Our first releases are limited so we are only selling through our own webstore and Loch Leven Hotel when it re-opens in a few weeks, but look forward to rolling it out further afield soon!
Looking forward, we aim to continue to ramp up the speed of production a tad by increasing our fermentation capacity and by utilising a bigger still that we recieved recently so we get more of our lovely rum into barrels."
Hotel News Scotland: Tell us more details about the drink itself
Craig: "A delicate white rum, fermented at the distillery from only molasses, sugar, yeast and water. Double distilled and then married with highland water. An ideal white rum to feature perfectly in hand crafted cocktails or with an artisan mixer of choice. On the nose is a sweet cereal like characteristic, not dissimilar to a popped rice breakfast bowl. The palate commands an Orange peel and vanilla note with characteristic weight of sweetness. Warmer notes on the finish of liquorice, spice, chocolate & vanilla leave a delectable encore."
Where can people buy it?
They can buy at the hotel or order via our website: https://www.pixelspiritsltd.co.uk/shop
Best of luck with the new product Craig and Noru!
Loch Leven Hotel
http://www.lochlevenhotel.co.uk
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