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#17 Botanical Rum With Matt From Lunatic And Lover Distillery
774 Plays4 years ago
What on earth is Botanical Rum? Before this episode, I had no idea what to expect. Turns out Lunatic And Lovers expression is amazing! Tune it to hear what it is and how its made with Matt from Lunatic And Lover! Lunatic And Lover: https://lunaticandlover.com
CTC Support: https://chasethecraft.com/support
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsors
00:00:00
Speaker
How's it going chases? I hope you're having a kickass week. This podcast is brought to you by Gladfield Malt. Sweet craft malt made right here in New Zealand. Thanks for helping us out. This podcast is also brought to you by Adventures in Home Brewing, a sweet online and brick and mortar store in America that has all your home brewing, wine making, cider making and even home distilling supplies ready for you to pick up or order online.
00:00:29
Speaker
You can go to homebrewing.org slash ctc for all of those things. Using that link doesn't cost you a cent, but it does help support the channel. So I'd appreciate it very much. Last but definitely not least, I need to thank the Patreons. You're the people that make all of this stuff possible and I cannot say thank you enough. So thank you.
00:00:49
Speaker
If you're finding value in these podcasts or still-up videos, you can go to chasethecraft.com slash support to find out all the different ways that you can support the channel and the podcast. If you wish, one of those, if it's right for you, is Patreon.
Guest Introduction: Matt from Lunatic and Lover
00:01:05
Speaker
Today's guest is Matt from Lunatic and Lover. These guys are new on the craft distillery scene here in New Zealand and are making a very, very interesting product which they're calling Botanical Rum.
00:01:18
Speaker
What is botanical rum? Well, honestly, before this podcast, I really didn't know what to expect. I assumed that it would taste very, very similar to a gin, but with kind of a rummy undertone. I was pleasantly surprised that is not what this product tastes like.
00:01:34
Speaker
at all and it is very much in touch with the rum base. It has a big bold rum base that is not overtaken at all by the flavourings that are put into it and I also love the idea that Lunatic and Lover are trying to keep this
00:01:51
Speaker
as a craft product. They're not distilling something and then adding flavors later on. They're making it all very, very similar to the way you would make a gin where all the flavoring is added in during the distillation process. Nothing is added later on,
Crafting Botanical Rum
00:02:06
Speaker
which is great. I love that other than water to proof it down, of course.
00:02:09
Speaker
Anyway this product goes into a hull of detail on what the product is, where the inspiration came from it, the branding and of course I know you guys, I know you want to know about the process, how they make this stuff, what goes into it and Matt from Lunatic and Lover was very very generous with his time and with the information. So without further ado, Matt from Lunatic and Lover. Alright we're live with Matt from Lunatic and Lover, how on earth are you my man?
00:02:37
Speaker
I'm very good. Thank you. Yes, it's slightly surreal to be here, to be honest. Fair play, man. So I was introduced to you and your product. I'll be honest with you. I had no idea you existed by Sorin from 1919. Good point. Thank you, Sorin.
00:02:57
Speaker
I've got a bottle of your spirits on the head, which I believe is the only thing you have in production at the moment. I think what batch number have you got on the label? What's it got? Is that batch 01? It says it on the neck label. I've got the neck label. Batch 00.
00:03:17
Speaker
Oh, right. Yeah, you've even got the pre-batch one. Ooh, super exciting. So it says right here, dude. I haven't opened this, by the way. I figured I'd hold on to it and open it with you because it says botanical rum. And I'll be honest with you, I don't know what to expect. What do people do? I'll just be honest and say,
00:03:46
Speaker
It's actually a term that I've seen a bit more in the last year or two. Okay. Which I was a bit
Botanical vs. Spiced Rums
00:03:53
Speaker
annoyed about because I thought I invented it, but actually I'm not quite. So Brewdog up in the UK, the craft brewers have started their distillery and they've just released a botanical run now as well. So I think it's, you'll see a bit more and I think what's happened is it's a reaction to Spice Drum.
00:04:15
Speaker
Right, okay. Now without wishing to be nasty about other people's products, there's a lot of fairly average spiced rum out there. There's a lot of stuff that was not good rum to start with and then we throw as many spices and weird things at it so you can't replace the bad rum anymore. I wouldn't mind if it tasted of spices but most of them just tasted sugar to me and vanilla. This is, yes.
00:04:43
Speaker
And so I think people, and certainly where I came from with it, is a reaction to that kind of spiced rum. But I think there's still some merit in putting some kind of flavouring in rum, but we don't use flavouring, we use whole spices, roots, herbs, all sorts of stuff.
00:05:02
Speaker
And the other thing we do, which is a bit different, is that we don't infuse it after the rum is made. It is made in the same style that gin is made. So we get our base spirit, which is a fairly flavorful white rum. It's not a neutral in any way, shape, or form. And then we re-distill it with stuff in the botanicals basket and in the pot as well.
Scaling Fermentation and Distillation
00:05:26
Speaker
So you masquerade some of it beforehand?
00:05:29
Speaker
Yeah, cool. How many macerating? It's three techniques, so steeping, macerating and gin basket.
00:05:38
Speaker
because all the different botanicals I found behave differently. And then after distillation, the only thing we put in is water. So there's no added sugar, there's no nothing. It is really just the botanical bill and the base rum. So you'll notice once all the botanicals have gone through and you smell and it says you still get quite strong licorice element coming through at the end from the molasses.
00:06:03
Speaker
So it's a hundred percent molasses spill as well, we don't use sugar. Are you fermenting on site? Yeah, everything from scratch. So you're not fucking about are you? No, it's quite a mention, I can tell you that. So we get the molasses comes from just around the corner out of Chelsea.
00:06:23
Speaker
and I do the fermenting and the I'm just making the base drum is a mission in itself you know our fermentation is quite a long one, averages five to six days and it's a batch fed so that's a mission in its own right and then I do a stripping run and then a spirit run
00:06:42
Speaker
pull it off at about 84%, so use a couple of plates to get it to that, but not so much that it gets too neutral. And then there's the third distillation with the botanicals in it at the end. So yeah, it's quite a process. Yeah, man, that's crazy. I ended up where I am.
00:07:01
Speaker
You wouldn't have planned it like this, that's for sure. Yeah, for sure. So you said you're doing batch fermentation. I can't remember the exact words you said, but what I assumed you meant from that is you keep adding sugar to get to a higher ABV than you would have.
00:07:18
Speaker
No, it's not the high ABV that I'm aiming for. So one of the things I found when I scaled up was the limitations weren't coming out like they were the smaller on a smaller level. All the test runs and everything and never had an issue that always worked out pretty well. But then it
00:07:37
Speaker
Something happens with the scaling and I'm still at a loss to tell you exactly what. And it's not the temperature. I was stressing the yeast and it came through in the base spirit. You get kind of a sulphury on the slightly meaty note coming through and it was really plaguing me what it was like. No matter what I tried, lower temperature, longer fermentations, whatever, it was still there.
00:08:02
Speaker
And I wasn't shooting for a particularly high gravity. So I was coming out about 9%, 10%. The yeast is capable of going up to 13% or 14%. So it wasn't that. But I work with Lalamon, and they were very good. And they came back and said, well, try this. And so what we're actually doing is you start off at a very low, low bricks for the first
00:08:29
Speaker
10 hours and then you put another batch in, it's a much higher reaction, you build the bricks up that way and avoid the pressure on the yeast cell walls and stressing the yeast that way. And fair play, it seems to have come across, I mean, it's a lot more work because I mean, you know, I used to put the fermentation on and pretty much walk away for the first three days and
00:08:50
Speaker
coming in, pumping some more in, yeah, setting the alarm, coming in at nine o'clock at night and pumping another 200 litres into the fermenter or whatever it might be, you know, so it's, but I think that it's working. Yeah, yeah, that's how I've ended up there. Again, I don't seem to do anything the simple way. Well played, Raul. It's always nice to have suppliers that will have you back with that thing, right? Yeah, I mean, they'd be really, really helpful with the questions as well.
00:09:18
Speaker
Yeah, nice. I wonder, I mean, I know from the beer world, the one thing that comes up a lot is pressure as the fermenters get larger, you end up exerting a lot of pressure on the bottom of that fermenter. And if you've got a lot of yeast,
00:09:35
Speaker
I don't know, maybe. Like I said, maybe that was it. I certainly know the first batch. I hadn't set the pressure release valve on my fermenter. I didn't realize it was wound shut. This is one of those stories you hear. And it's a two and a half thousand litre fermenter. So it's a big, it's a big fermenter. And I came in one day one morning and hear this hissing sounds.
00:09:58
Speaker
you know, CO2 is coming out in the fermenter, you know, it's obviously the fermentations working away. And I realized it was coming out the seal of the man way on the top. Oh, God. The pressure build up there.
Branding and Market Reception
00:10:11
Speaker
And then I thought I'd just crack one of the valves just to release some pressure and bloody hell did it make me jump.
00:10:19
Speaker
And it came out like that for about 10 minutes solid. So we're giving a renewed appreciation for the forces at play. Yeah, that will tell you that much.
00:10:30
Speaker
I mean, I just meant literally just the pressure of the water. Yeah. You know, we start working in vertical tanks and, you know, if they're 10 meters high or something, that's two atmospheres by the time you hit the bottom, right? Yeah, true. I didn't even thought about that, but yeah, it could well be. And, you know, it's been half the fun, I guess, of setting up and scaling up has been learning this stuff. I mean, it's also been pretty hard work and pretty disheartening at times. But I'm sure, man. It's been some dark days.
00:11:00
Speaker
So I'm sure we'll get back into the process later on, but I just ripped into the spot of where you were talking.
00:11:11
Speaker
Um, this is quite interesting, dude. It is. I was expecting it to taste like a gin with some rum coming through the bottom. That's kind of what I had in my head. It was going to be, and it is not at all. No, good. Good. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not a spice drum either, but that I wouldn't, if you put this under my nose and said, what is this? I would say, I don't know. It's a rummy something.
00:11:35
Speaker
We're definitely breaking down a few barriers here. One of the things when we started out was, which botanicals are we going to use and how's it going to work? And unlike when you're sort of developing a gin, for example, there's some fairly
00:11:52
Speaker
well publicised gin recipes out there that you can start from and you can pull that out, you can add this, you can do whatever, you know. But they always juniper forwards, you know, a lot of citrus and coriander notes, they're all fairly common. So you've got a good base point of where to start from and get as creative as you like from there.
00:12:10
Speaker
We didn't have that. So I didn't, you know, no requirement to be doing it before words, no requirement to use citrus or anything. I'm making up as I go along, which is, you know, a blessing and a curse at the same time. So the way we went about it was, and I didn't want to overpower the rum with botanicals. It was supposed to be there to augment it rather than just be a vehicle for the botanicals.
00:12:36
Speaker
So, you know, I went around and basically got a little one liter of guitar, you know, the Olympics and just
00:12:46
Speaker
I spent an hour or two every evening just distilling all the botanicals individually. But I mean, as many as I could get my hands on and try. I did about 50 or 60 of them. Oh, wow. Yeah, a lot. Just a kitchen table kind of thing. And from then had a library of what worked, what didn't work, what I liked, could do more. And then I
00:13:07
Speaker
blended them all together. And that was the start point for the recipe, which I then attempted to replicate with a single shot method. So yeah, it's been a long process of trial and error. But yeah, I mean, I'd like to think that we've achieved what we set out to do. And it is interesting. There's some other stuff going on in there that people don't expect.
00:13:31
Speaker
The dandelion and burdock is part of one of the flavors that comes through at the end, which I really like. A lot of people can't put their finger on it because they're not familiar with it, but it was a childhood pop drink from when I was a kid. I used to love dandelion. I have no idea what dandelion tastes like.
00:13:53
Speaker
I wouldn't eat the flowers. This is the root. I don't know if it was just a UK thing or whatever but I always remember back in the day when I used to go to stay with my granny she used to have bottles of pop delivered by the milkman every day and we always used to have a bottle of dandelion and burdock and we used to drink it probably more than we did coke you know or Pepsi or any of that kind of stuff.
00:14:15
Speaker
Yeah, wow. Yeah, and I just found in a health food store there, dandelion and burdock teas. I would give that a bash. I was just trying anything and everything. And it actually, I really like it. So it gives a, because it's a roasted root and it just gives a earthiness and a warmth and that roasted plate has sort of come through at the end. Hmm. Oh, I think I know what you mean. It's almost, I was trying to put my finger on it earlier. It's, it's, um,
00:14:44
Speaker
somewhere between like cardamom and then Angelica. Yeah. There is cardamom in here as well, so you probably get a lot of that. But yeah, just at the end, ticked on the palate, you get and it's tied in with a coffee, so it's quite a, like a rootsy, just there's an earthiness that sort of underlies everything. To me, it's one of the signature notes of this, which I really enjoy. Yeah, it's a very interesting drink because
00:15:13
Speaker
On the nose, it's quite rum forward still. I don't get a lot of the spice. And then when it first hits your mouth, you get that first initial almost unadulterated rum sweetness through honey. And then it starts heading towards the darker side of rum to where you would find starting, if you're going Jamaican pot still, you'd find a little bit of spice or start heading towards hogo or even just
00:15:41
Speaker
like a generic age
Technical Insights: Production and Flavor Profiles
00:15:43
Speaker
drum, you'd start getting into the molasses and vanilla and stuff. And then instead of going that way, it takes off down the botanical road. Yeah. It's, um, yeah, it's, it's interesting, man. It's really fun. I was supposed to get tonic to try with this and I, I didn't. You know, I,
00:16:02
Speaker
I've only recently started mixing it because when I made it, I made it to be drunk neat. And that's just by process of the way I developed the recipe, you know, you taste a bit and you smell a bit and all that's nice. You use some more of that and you end up with something that hopefully people enjoy neat. So the idea of being able to make something that has to be mixed to be palatable, I don't even know how you go about that.
00:16:25
Speaker
But we've been, East Imperial have come on and helped us with a few collaborations and stuff. And they've been very good and given some suggestions. And that's actually brought some things out. If they do an old world tonic, for example, and mixing that with it, it's brought some stuff out that I didn't even know was there and I really enjoy. So that's been quite good fun, actually, the side of it that I didn't really anticipate as much.
00:16:48
Speaker
Yeah, nice. Yeah, before I say anything else, you are 100% right, dude. I could easily drink this straight, neat, whatever you want to call it, without anything else and sip on it. I'm trying to... Not many volumes you can probably hear it so much.
00:17:08
Speaker
I'm trying to figure out what sort of situation I would drink it in because it's not like a full on winter drink by any means. Whenever we say spiced rum and stuff, don't get like, if you're listening to this at home, don't get that sort of side of thing stuck in your head. It's not like a mulled wine at all. It is very much a rum with a little something else.
00:17:28
Speaker
I tell you where a recent revelation for me is my kids very kindly gave me a cold over the weekend. So I started having hot toddies with it in the evening. So a spoonful of honey and some lemon juice. And boom, that's a winner. That would be good, man. I highly recommend it. Yeah, I don't know. It sits somewhere between where I would drink. It's kind of like a triangle of
00:17:55
Speaker
is when I'd normally drink whiskey, like neat, and just enjoy it. And then there's kind of where I'd drink port after, you know, almost as a digestive after a meal. And then there's kind of like, I guess, yeah, almost like a hot toddy or a mulled wine. And it sort of sits somewhere in between those three. Yeah, it's bizarre.
00:18:15
Speaker
It's going to take me a little while to get used to this, do you want to? We're in between categories here and I'm excited to see what people make of it, really. You know how they drink it. I think in the summer, just with a splash of tonic and a couple of Q's of ice and you've got a pretty good summer drink right there. For sure. Is there ginger or something? There's a little bit of spice to it that isn't... There is definitely spice in there. I'll give you the botanical bill, shall I? I'll tell you what. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So, there's orange peel.
00:18:45
Speaker
And then we use two sort of native herbs. So one is jorapito. So you might notice there's a bit of a bit of spice, a bit of heat in there and a bit of pepperiness that comes from the jorapito. And then the other quite odd one we use is one called marihau, which is apparently the marios used to use it as a perfume.
00:19:09
Speaker
And I've got to go out and forage that one, which is again, I've made a bit of a rod for my own back there. The one bush I found and started to get a little bit depleted. And that's really strange stuff. I don't use that, not so much for the pallet, because you can get bitter very quickly, like a lot of native herbs, but this one is
00:19:33
Speaker
When you dehydrate it, when I come into this after I've had it running, dehydrating overnight, it smells almost like fresh sponge cake with a bit of cinnamon in there as well. It's beautiful. Oh, interesting.
00:19:46
Speaker
Yeah, so there's that. And then we've got allspice, which is pimento. And nutmeg, which is probably the two spicy notes you're getting. Cacao nibs is the other big one. So we steep that. So I get a 80%. I get the base rum and get about 10 kilo sack of cacao nibs and soak it in that for a week.
00:20:12
Speaker
to extract the flavor of those. There's some green cardamom, which you've already mentioned, dandelion and burdock, and a few coffee beans thrown in there for good measure as well. And then orange fruit tied it all together. I would not have picked the cacao nibs and the coffee.
00:20:33
Speaker
But in saying that, I guess that you could easily misplace that as rum flavors, I guess. Yeah. Well, I talked about the difficulty of coming up with a botanical bill and what we were going to put in there just because of the range of options. One of the start points was reading all these rum reviews of these fantastical runs. And I looked at the descriptors that they were using. So you often get people talk about,
00:21:02
Speaker
chocolatey notes, some citrus and ripe fruit and this, that and the other. So that was the start point for a lot of my botanicals. So, you know, it's probably not a surprise I ended up with some of that stuff in there that can be almost mistaken for, you know, different elements from an older rum, if you like.
00:21:21
Speaker
I wasn't trying to recreate it, that doesn't sound right. We were talking about this recently with, who was it? Oh, with Better Than Board, guys, if you want to listen to that podcast, it was Better Than Board. It was number 15 on food and distilleries. And we talked about pairing drinks and food. And I think this is pretty similar. Whenever you're trying to put two flavors together,
00:21:44
Speaker
for enjoyment's sake. You can either pick something that's already there and accentuate it, or you can pick something that's there and put it with something else that's going to fight. So to me, putting the chocolate and coffee are very much flavors on the molasses
Future Plans for Lunatic and Lover
00:22:04
Speaker
spectrum. They're components of that molasses. So that makes a whole lot of sense to me.
00:22:10
Speaker
I think it's interesting. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to send you a sample of it, but the barrel rested one that will be coming out later in the year. We've got a barrel up there that's been in there for about six weeks. We've pulled the sample earlier.
00:22:28
Speaker
The botanicals are sort of taking a bit of a backseat to the oak, but they're still there. But it tastes, it's starting to all come together and really turn into something quite interesting. And I think it's a result of putting those kind of flavors in there. So it's not mimicking an old rum, but it's kind of getting some of the elements to make old rum so good.
00:22:52
Speaker
Yeah, totally. You're taking inspiration from it. It's not like you're trying to recreate a full-stage drum. I get what you mean. For those of you that can't see me, I apologize to those of you that can, but I'm currently trying to snip one nostril out of a glass of your botanical rum and another nostril out of some whisky to try and
00:23:14
Speaker
Oh, that doesn't work with the red wine. No, no, no, no. But yeah, I think that sort of barrel, if it heads down the barrel candy and vanilla path, that could be fun. But I don't know, man, I also think the barrel spice, like more of the tannin and the pepper could be quite fun because you've got a fairly solid backbone there for it to live up, you know, to carry a bit of spice.
00:23:44
Speaker
four roses. So they're X4 roses barrels. And they've got quite a strong spice note from the heavy char. And that's coming through quite quickly. Even though, say, it's only been in there five, six weeks, you really get that baking spice kind of nose coming through, which is lovely. Perfect. Exactly what I'm looking for. That's fun, man. When you decided to throw it in a barrel, do you have a very specific idea of what you wanted from it? Or was it just a case of
00:24:02
Speaker
The stuff that's in the barrel, there's quite a heavy charge.
00:24:14
Speaker
just like, let's find out what I would like it to be. But but whether it was going to turn out anything like that was another story. I mean, I did the usual stuff, you know, sort of aged a couple of cowboys with some different types of wood chips and all the rest of it. And I got a bit I said, I never had a great deal amount of joy with wood chips. I never really sort of I never achieved anything close to what I would consider barrel barrel. But there was one particular batch that really
00:24:44
Speaker
that the vanilla and the sweetness came out of the wood chips. It's like, oh, right. Now that's really working with what's going on here. And that's when it's like, yeah, OK, we're definitely going to go down that road. That's worth pursuing. Like anything, to a certain extent, especially when you're starting out like this, you have a big library of stuff to work from. It's a bit full of barrel and hope. But that's part of the magic of it, right?
00:25:13
Speaker
Oh, 100 percent. Are you? Yeah. Is this something that you're going to pursue heavily? Like, are you actively putting down more barrels or is it? Yeah. And I'm going to be doing traditional rum as well. So there's a lot more botanical stuff going in, going to start going down fairly soon as well. As soon as I've built up some stocks, you know, don't have to feel obliged to spend every week a day making botanical rum. I can, you know, maybe one week do a traditional pot still and chuck it in a barrel and leave it there for a while and see what happens.
00:25:44
Speaker
So, yeah, we want to do normal run as well. This is at some point. You can see behind me, I've got 40 casks, ex-urban casks, and there's only two of them full now, so I've got a bit of work to do. So, I mean, that leads into the question of what equipment and what size equipment are you running? Because the idea of filling barrels suddenly starts getting scary, man.
00:26:11
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I made a conscious decision early to also go with full-size casks. So don't use any half stuff. And so that kind of informed the size of still what I was going to have to get as well. You know, you don't, to my mind, you don't really want to be doing multiple runs just to fill one barrel because it kind of introduces too many variables, if you like. Handling too.
00:26:37
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the way I operate is I've got a I've just got the one for mentor at the moment, which is two and a half thousand leaders. And I have a leader postal, which is from Hoga in Portugal.
00:26:52
Speaker
It's pretty agricultural but it does the job and it's got the ability, it's got a column on it that I can drop plates into and I've also had a deflag made that I can turn it into a reflux still if required. So I do, out of the one fermenter I get three stripping runs and then I save
00:27:13
Speaker
for the botanical run, I'm then putting about six plates in and running a bit of reflux to bring it off the still at 84%. But yeah, it's a thousand litre pot. So run off a electric steam generator. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's good fun coming all that together.
00:27:35
Speaker
I've seen photos of this on your website, maybe on your Facebook page, one or the other. I do remember seeing photos of it somewhere. It's got a bit of character to it, man. It looks cool.
00:27:46
Speaker
Oh yeah, it's not one of these distilleries where you go to and you see all this beautifully polished copper and it's all been lacquered and everything's spotless. No, that's not here. I say it's a bit of agriculture. I've had some adventures with it. It's just things like the still drains in the wrong place, so it doesn't properly drain out. When you're dealing with molasses, you get quite a decent sludge left in the bottom.
00:28:13
Speaker
and you know it's an hour every morning scooping out sludge at the bottom still because it doesn't drain properly and yeah just good times.
00:28:23
Speaker
Hey, it works. It does a good job. Yeah. And do you, do you have plans, sort of specific plans to upgrade at some point in time? I mean, I'm sure. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, you know, we could scale up without a massive rethink of the equipment, you know, don't take another fermenter and, you know, that's a double capacity there. I think, um,
00:28:49
Speaker
probably a wash still might be a pretty good investment as well because three days to strip a fermenter is, you know, to strip it down is painful, to be honest. So a bigger boiler and be able to do that in one hit would dramatically increase production. But, you know, we've got to see how we go in terms of demand for the product, really. You know, if people aren't buying it, then there's no point dropping $150 million on smoking to make more stuff people don't want to drink.
00:29:19
Speaker
It's such a catch 22, isn't it? You set up anything like this where it's sort of production, especially around food and beverage stuff, whether it be beer, wine, spirits. You've got two options. One is to kind of be nice to the bank account and get a proof of concept in the market. Yeah.
00:29:39
Speaker
The problem with that is as soon as you get a proof of concept, you're fucked. If it works and people are buying stuff, I mean, to be fair, you haven't gone tiny. That's pretty decent size still, man. You have three stripping runs and one spirit run. That's not horrible. Well, I guess I'm going, I could probably make a barrel a week if I was really going for it, which is good. That's a decent amount for a small distillery, I guess.
00:30:08
Speaker
I mean, actually, let's talk about the advantages of rum over whiskey right now too, dude, because mixing water and molasses together is a whole lot easier when you... Yeah, I'm glad I don't have to worry about all that mashing in and stuff. That's pretty painful. Oh, out!
00:30:30
Speaker
figuring it out and then what do you think of it and yeah oh man so did you was that a conscious decision like was that part of why why you ended up doing rum or was it just that you had a bad idea? I've always been a rum drinker and I'm a sailor so it's the old cliche you know sailors and their rum but I've actually spent a lot of time over in the Caribbean as well and it's always been it's just been my drink I've always drunk it and
00:30:57
Speaker
The idea of setting up a distillery, it wasn't, let's set up a distillery and make all kinds of different stuff. It was, well, let's make it, let's make rum. And so I've never really entertained the idea of going outside of that. Although it's not that I find others interests, other spirits, disinteresting. I just...
00:31:14
Speaker
from is my thing. That's what I like. And when I first came up with the idea and decided that I was going to do it, I didn't, I wasn't one of these hobby distillers that tries everything. And, you know, I literally bought it still with the
00:31:30
Speaker
express intent of learning how to make one. And I've never made anything else, really. So that's probably to my detriment as a distiller. I don't know how to make Apple brandy, or I've never done a TPW, or a UJSSM, or any of that kind of stuff. And like I say, I probably should. I might do anything or two. But I've been pretty focused on the run, to be honest.
00:31:53
Speaker
definitely something to be said for incremental improvement, though, doing the same thing. I'm the complete opposite. Personally, as a hobbyist, my interests probably sit somewhere between what I do and what you did, but because of the channel content, it just doesn't make interesting content to make the same thing over and over and over again.
00:32:17
Speaker
You've made a virtue of it, right? Yeah, and I've literally never made the same thing twice, like never. So I mean, which is fun, like it satisfies my, I don't know, my desire to just try weird and wacky things. But at the same time, there's this other part of me that wants to be able to, you know, make something, sit down, taste it, pull it apart, critique it.
00:32:42
Speaker
and then change one variable and have another crack at it. I think if you want to really master one thing, dude, that has to be the way to do it. If you know you're going to be a run distillery, why make anything else?
00:32:56
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's something I've had to learn to be able to do, though, because much like yourself, although within the parameters room, I was always trying this and, you know, bacterial infections and this, that and the other. And actually, since coming in here and doing it at scale for the first time, I really had to rein that back in and go right back to basics. You know, I talked about the issues having with
00:33:19
Speaker
the fermentations and the batch feeding and it was because I was trying to do all this crazy stuff but it worked quite well on a small still but it wasn't translating with gale so I really had to take a step back and just do right let's just do 100 molasses no dunder treat it this way and just work up to that stuff which I thought I knew already the reality is that I didn't and so it's it's amazing the things that
00:33:45
Speaker
It's amazing what you don't know. How are you supposed to know it? You don't know what you don't know, right? Until you're confronted with it. Yeah. I'll tell you a story. I was lucky enough to have dinner with Joy Spence. You know Joy Spence's? I've got no idea. You used to be a head blender for Appleton's run. Oh, okay. Well. So she's a little Jamaica lady, incredibly talented and very, you know,
00:34:12
Speaker
PhD in chemistry and all this kind of stuff. And by the way, you're telling the story, I'm going to pour another one of these. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Good on you. This is not me brown-nosing because you're my guest. This is actually really enjoyable just to sip on. Believe it or not, I won a Facebook competition. I think it was Purna Ricar were trotting around to launch. She'd done her special blend called Appleton's Joy.
00:34:38
Speaker
And so I entered this competition and won a nice dinner at Euro down in the viaduct with Joy Spencer. I managed to sit next to her during the whole thing. And I said to her, what's your one piece of advice for me starting my own runs through? If there's one thing you could say, what would it be? And she said, control your fermentation. And I looked at her and went, that's really unexciting advice.
00:35:10
Speaker
and you throw some goats' heads and all this wacky stuff. And I thought, well, I know the control of fermentation. It's just control the temperature and do this, do that. And it's only now
00:35:25
Speaker
sort of three years after that conversation, I'm beginning to really understand and value that advice and realize what it was she was driving at. It's that sort of deep level of understanding and control over what you're doing that you don't know what you don't know. And back then I thought I knew it and it turns out I don't.
00:35:48
Speaker
I mean, there's one thing knowing it on a small scale, very different than knowing it in a commercial. And even if you take all of that stuff that semi seems like voodoo, like the fact that your ferment just didn't work the same when you scaled it up. It seems kind of like witchcraft or magic. If you take that stuff out of the picture, just the logistics change so much when you suddenly can't just
00:36:12
Speaker
pick a thing up and move it if you need to move it six inches or the hose doesn't reach you, like all those little things. My molasses pump blew up yesterday so I'm now faced with setting a fermentation tomorrow and I've got to figure out how to get 500 kilos of molasses into the hot metal tank with a 20 litre bucket.
00:36:33
Speaker
the the
00:36:52
Speaker
I mean, yeah, yeah, that's crazy, dude. I mean, I've been around commercial distilleries and breweries a little bit, and I've kind of seen people doing it, but I've never done it myself. And I'm very, very aware of what I don't know. Not that I don't know what I don't know. And it always impresses me when people just dive in.
00:37:15
Speaker
you know, head first, because I'm assuming you didn't like, did you have any experience on a manufacturing background or? I was lucky through my sailing and stuff. I skipped a yacht and stuff. I used to be the engineer on board as well. No formal training in that respect. But you know, so I know how to wield the spanner. Right. So I've made a lot of expensive mistakes.
00:37:38
Speaker
So I've learned the hard way. But, you know, that stood me in good stead. But even so, I mean, you know, a lot of my equipment's sort of secondhand that I refurbed and did myself, and they've all got different fittings. I remember one day just sat here, and I'd literally tear my hair out because I had a BSP fitting that needed to go to an RJT, and I had tri-clamp, and that took me three days to work out the piping for this one system that it just drove me literally insane.
00:38:08
Speaker
Things like that are so funny aren't they because you're sitting there and it's almost like um what is it there's a cartoon that does it and it's sort of like there's this mind map that starts emerging and things start moving together and then something happens and the whole thing just evaporates yeah start building it back together and you've got it down to this last piece and then you suddenly realize that that last piece doesn't exist and it always happens
00:38:34
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. I mean, it's good fun and I enjoy the challenge of that, but at the same time, it's got to be easy always. Like maybe employing somebody who knows what they're doing, I don't know. I mean, yeah, you're 100%. There's certain types of people and I very much get the feeling that you're one of them that
00:38:57
Speaker
It's almost like you're not happy unless you're a little bit unhappy. Like you need, you know, some people just need a little bit of complication or strife or something to strive towards that isn't easy to, you know, to get satisfaction in life. Just for a couple of days, you'd be fine. Yeah.
00:39:21
Speaker
All right, let's dive back into the production side of this dude and feel free to, obviously you've got proprietary stuff that you don't necessarily want to share. I barely know how I make it.
00:39:40
Speaker
I mean, right at the beginning, I mean, I have to imagine that is the molasses for you. That would have been one of the first things he needed to sort out. And you said you're getting it from right around the corner at Chelsea, wasn't it? Yeah, that's right. And actually, funnily enough, I started off, there was another source, and it was coming over from the Bundaberg refinery. Oh, interesting. Yeah, which is, and I don't know how I ended up there rather than Chelsea, considering I actually live on the edge of the Chelsea view estate.
00:40:09
Speaker
But for whatever reason, when we moved in here, then the supplier came back to me and said, oh, we're not going to be able to bring it in for at least six months. Oh, that's a bigger problem because I've done all my recipe development with your molasses. So I just I got straight back on the phone to Chelsea and they were excellent. And, you know, when I look around the facility and, you know,
00:40:31
Speaker
exactly how they make it all. They're really good there and it makes it's really high quality molasses. It makes good rum and it's it's a much better fit for the story of of how the rum is made, you know. So, yeah, they just bring it up the road and I get it in a big huge 1.4 ton palacons that got heated base in them. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll go through about one of those month, about 500 kilos at a time. So
00:41:01
Speaker
crazy. And where does it sit on the, I don't know what the official word for it is, but on the molasses spectrum of
00:41:09
Speaker
light versus dark, how refined it is. So again, there's a lot of confusion about what the different grades of molasses are and where they're made and what black strap is and this, that and the other. So this is a food grade molasses. So if you were to go and buy stuff for baking, it's pretty much the same stuff. They make a lot of licorice out of it. So this is what they call refinery molasses.
00:41:38
Speaker
as opposed to mill molasses. So mill molasses is the first molasses that gets made on the crushing and the initial processing of the raw sugar. So when they crushed the cane at the mill,
00:41:51
Speaker
they turn it into raw sugar. And this, that mil molasses is the first by-product. Now that's quite different stuff. It's very bitter, very strong, very variable in terms of the brick's content and all the rest of it. Not necessarily bad or better. It's just different. But this, so Chelsea import raw sugar,
00:42:18
Speaker
from all over the world. And this is the molasses that has spun off that first raw sugar, if you like. So it's not the same as the gift of cattle. OK, so if you take sugar cane, mill it, and then refine raw sugar out of it. Wait, this way. Then, sorry, what was the, it was mill molasses? You said it was called? Mill molasses, yeah. Is the byproduct of that? Yeah. And then if you add it to the cattle,
00:42:45
Speaker
And then if you take the raw sugar and basically do a similar process again to create refined sugar, then you end up with a molasses that you're using.
00:42:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's a it's a bit smoother. There's less shit in it, to be honest, less mud. And it's I don't find it as bitter. And the sugar content is pretty stable. So, you know, every batch you buy comes with a lab analysis, you know, what your content is. And it's, you know, from the high 70s every time. So it's it's a it's a good quality, reliable
00:43:22
Speaker
source of feedstock, which is what you're looking for really. Because some of that mill stuff, you just never know what you're going to get. You can use sulfur in it as well, depending on where the sugar canes come from. So you've got to be prepared to deal with a lot more variability if you go down that road. Plus, I'd have to import it, because obviously we don't have mills here. But refinement, you just don't have mills. Yeah, because you said Chelsea's importing the raw sugar.
00:43:49
Speaker
That's right. Yeah. So the mills are generally close to where the sugar cane is grown. Oh, of course, because you need to do it while it was it's a perishable good. Yeah, exactly. And that was actually one of my, I guess, not concerns, but slight worries about being authentic. When I first started, it was, you know, we're not
00:44:07
Speaker
We're not close to where the sugar is growing. But at the end of the day, molasses is a very stable product and can be transported easily. And there's no reason. And there's a long history of rums getting made outside of sugar producing areas. And stuff like that is fairly well regarded. And so I resolved that issue in my head that way.
00:44:29
Speaker
Yeah, nice. I mean, let's face it, if you were calling it agricultural or something that is obviously misleading, that's a totally different thing. But yeah, I get it, dude. That makes a whole lot of sense. So are you using any nutrient in it other than molasses? What is the traditional value of molasses?
00:44:59
Speaker
It's pretty good. There's a lot of stuff in there, but to keep those little yeast beasties happy, it does take some extra nutrients. So I use specific distillers nutrients. And the other thing you've got to add is DAP, the nitrogen. That's the one thing molasses is.
00:45:19
Speaker
is deficient in. It's not a funny story here. So DAP is quite hard to come by at the moment, food grade DAP. You can buy the fertilizer stuff anyway. It's hard. So I called up this chemical company said, oh, well, you can make your own. All right. How do you do that then? So you get some of the, we sell ammonia and phosphoric acid and you just mix them in these proportions and you've got DAP. That's all it is.
00:45:48
Speaker
Right, okay, so you think I can do that, do you? He said, yeah, it's easy. I'll sell you 20 leaves of that, 20 leaves of that, mix them together, and away you go. All right, I'll give him a bash, you know. I've got a fermentation to do, why not? What he didn't tell me, and me not being a chemist, was that it's an acidic reaction, and it's fairly violent.
00:46:11
Speaker
Luckily, I did it in the, I had a proper two litre borosilicate beaker that I did it in. I poured in the ammonia and I measured out the phosphoric acid and I poured that in. Bloody hell, just smoke, heat, the thing that turns like smoke powder. I was literally ducking on the ground under the table.
00:46:33
Speaker
do not try tomorrow guys don't fuck with chemistry yeah don't mess with chemicals did it work though yeah brilliant the um fermentation off went off like a bloody train i got a few more gray hairs
00:46:58
Speaker
yeah i'm sure all right dude well first of all i'm very glad that you're safe after that and second of all now you've got um molasses and your nutrients and then you're just mixing it with water to hit like gravity you said you're aiming at about 19 percent so it's that 10 10 90 or something like that gravity oh you're in bricks aren't you sorry i can't think of bricks yeah about 19 bricks is where we're in that but it's it's got hard to measure because i'm doing that batch fed thing but um
00:47:27
Speaker
Nice, of course. The same amount of sugar as I was doing before, but yeah, the total bricks will be about 19 and finish up somewhere around the 10 mark. Oh, so yeah, so the molasses does still have a fair amount of un-fermentable. Yeah, it's got a fair amount of stuff in there. Yeah.
00:47:49
Speaker
Interesting. Okay. What yeast are you using, dude? And how are you treating that? There's specific rum yeast from Lalamo. And I've done a lot of testing and sort of doing, I still do, I still love playing around with different yeasts and bacterial infections and all that kind of carry on. I've yet to bring any of that into the production, but you know, I might do a couple of batches with some random stuff. But yeah, the yeast and
00:48:18
Speaker
what that brings to the party and how to control and get the most out of it. I know myself and you've had a couple of exchanges on Facebook about talking about using that kavik stuff. That's been quite good fun. I might even do a limited run with limited edition with that because I think it makes quite a nice white run.
00:48:36
Speaker
Um, that was the horny doll. I haven't tried the boss. Um, but the horny doll and I've got another batch to give it another go. Cause I suspect that last lot I had, uh, it took about nine days and it should take two. So it wasn't quite up to, uh, up to speed.
00:48:55
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, that's one of the great things about this is you get to indulge your passions a little bit and try random stuff on this and maybe have a crack at using it. So we'll see what happens there. But there's this, yeah, there's some good fun stuff. And so the bacterial stuff, acting, adding lacto and
00:49:16
Speaker
Clostridium and all those kind of things, just to see what happens is good stuff. Not brave enough to put any of it into market just yet, but we'll see. Yeah, fair enough. Well, you saw what happened. Well, you're telling me what happened just with the straight use pitch and how that was not simple to scale it up. So I can imagine doing all of that would be even worse. Yeah. Okay, man. So the yeast that you're using,
00:49:45
Speaker
the Lalamon's rum yeast. What is that specifically giving to the mix that you chose? So this one is a, you know, yeast these days are pretty good where you don't necessarily have to use a lot of dunder and all the stuff that you used to have to do to get a flavorful rum. So it's got a pretty good ester content production just from the yeast alone.
00:50:15
Speaker
And the straight white rum, the base rum that I make from it is pretty flavorful. It's got some nice spice notes, a bit of fruit coming through there, some of those kind of esters. So yeah, I am looking
00:50:31
Speaker
for flavor and deep rich flavor as opposed to speed or alcohol yield. They do other yeasts, which I've tried, which will ferment in sort of two to three days, whereas I'm at about five to six. But I just prefer it. It's just a taste thing, which has fairly major knock-on consequences from my production schedules. I'm sure you imagine double the fermentation time.
00:50:55
Speaker
it's kind of a big deal.
00:51:09
Speaker
No, I think by the time it gets through the process of the botanicals added, you'd be lucky to pick that out in this product. Also, you do have a banana in the new make, do you? Yeah, there's some ripe fruit in there, a little bit of ripe fruit. I tend to get more of the pear and green apple notes, depending on where I make the cut, obviously.
00:51:35
Speaker
But do a fairly wide head cut, you get more of those notes coming through. But yeah, it's pretty good yeast in terms of flavor profile. I'm pretty happy with it. And I think it will probably always be in the repertoire somewhere, particularly obviously as the base for the botanical rum. But when I do traditional rums as well, I think it will be definitely part of the canon, so to speak.
00:51:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's cool, man. Yeah. So this, I mean, this tastes like a pretty locked in product to me, dude. Like I can't imagine you're going to drastically change. Like this is a product that you're going to aim for consistency with now, I assume. Yeah. I mean, we'll say that batch two is different to batch one already.
00:52:16
Speaker
No, I mean, it's yeah, we are aiming to keep it the same. I'm pretty happy with where it's at. And, you know, we might do seasonal variations, although we have to get another bloody bottle design to do that. And we might do some some single botanical stuff, who knows? But this this is this and the barrel rested will be our core products, if you like. Yeah, so they're slightly different because I've
00:52:45
Speaker
The main reason is I found a New Zealand grower of orus root. So I changed from imported orus, powdered orus root to big whole chips that come out of the Bay of Plenty and it's beautiful stuff. But I used it in the same amount and I think what it's done is it's locked in the volatiles from the orange peel so the whole thing is a bit brighter.
00:53:09
Speaker
Whereas this one, the one you're drinking doesn't have that as much. So something is just a little change like that makes, you know, does make a difference. And it's still small craft stuff. It's going to, it's going to be a variance. Oh dude, totally. And I mean, a lot of different markets all steer into that too. It turns into almost a, um,
00:53:33
Speaker
It's a badge of honor to have a certain batch from a certain distillery or the new batch comes out and everyone wants to taste it next to the last one.
00:53:43
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like the, I feel like the community in the, in the, the consumer has gotten used to the fact that it's not Jack Daniels or, you know, like one of the behemoths, behemoths of the industry that can, you know, dial it right in. Yeah, I did. Oh, sorry. I'm not carrying on. No, it's just, I went up to Scotland a couple of years ago and did a distilling course with the IBD up there. And, um,
00:54:12
Speaker
You know, it wasn't really geared at craft distillers, but there were a few on course. And the rest of the course was made up by distillery workers from, you know, the big name distilleries up there. We were in Elgin, you know, the half space side. And the instructors, the lecturers were all from the Scotch industry. And what really struck me
00:54:36
Speaker
was the extraordinary amount of time and effort that industry spends on consistency. But it's kind of at the detriment of innovation.
00:54:49
Speaker
You know, they've got, they work so well for them, they've painted themselves into a corner where the innovation is pretty hard to justify. And they're very, very good at it, you know, let's be honest. They make quite a decent product at the end of the day, and that's just where they've ended up. But, you know, all the Scotch
00:55:08
Speaker
just to lose air, we're all using the same yeast. They didn't do any experimentation with yeast. Their fermentations are all about getting maximum yield in the shortest amount of time. They spend a lot of time on barley and it's all quality, consistent stuff. But there's a little bit lost there. And some of the things I was talking to them about that concerned us as crafters was straight over their heads.
00:55:35
Speaker
They weren't interested in that. I hear the same story over and over again from people all over the world, you know, at our craft distillers that have been to Scotland, that have seen the behemoth machine that it is. And on one hand, it's kind of like you're absolute magicians. I don't understand how you take those ingredients that you're using
00:55:59
Speaker
and those practices that you're using and you make something so fucking good. Like it is such good product. But then the flip side of it is, dude, if you just backed up to the beginning and used all of the knowledge and the magic that they have,
00:56:16
Speaker
to focus on just making something delicious. That was the be-all-end-all. Imagine what they'd make. The yeast, I just couldn't get my head around the yeast thing. They're all using exactly the same yeast. Just what? Especially coming from the rum wheel, where we did crazy shit with bacteria and this, that, and the other. The yeast is such a massive part of it. Why aren't you guys trying something different to that one?
00:56:44
Speaker
They seem to have made a pretty good job. That really is. So I'm super interested to hear about something that you have done on a home distilling scale or on a batch trial sort of scale. Something where you did go crazy with the yeast and the bacteria and tell us a story about that well and what you did get there.
00:57:13
Speaker
Um yeah so uh I guess I'll try to
00:57:19
Speaker
obviously being rum, the dunder pits and the muck pits, if you like, there's a difference between the two. Dunder being pretty much just backset, whereas muck being the stuff that's left to really go rancid. So yeah, yeah, I mean, it is quite incredible. And you do get some pretty, pretty radical stuff coming out of there.
00:57:44
Speaker
So I've tried all that. One of the things I realized again was controlling it and understanding what's going on. So I actually broke it down into individual bacterial strains. Now, again, I'm not a chemist. I'm not a biologist. I don't have a lab. So what I did is I took a, when I was making a big wash, I took
00:58:06
Speaker
10 liters of several batches of 10 liters of wash, and then got individual strains of bacteria and infected those. And then later on, added that back into smaller batches of fermentations with normal yeast to see what it did. And that was quite interesting. So you had a comparison seeing what the Clostridium did versus what the Propionic
00:58:31
Speaker
bacteria produced versus what the lacto did and a range of stuff that I could get my hands on. The propionic one is quite interesting, which is, have you played with that at all? I have not, no. I can't remember what I, I've only done rum once and it was really something I need to circle back around to. And I honestly, I can't remember what it was that I put in my quote unquote,
00:59:00
Speaker
I think I saw one of your episodes where you were chucking like Yakult in there or something. That's exactly what it is, you know, so why not give it a go. I was hoping to get something from, you know, like a salvia, a couple of salvia strains from from White Labs or, you know,
00:59:25
Speaker
a mix of Lacto, Breton, Pedio, or something like that. And just not being able to source it. And that was, screw it, I'll buy this. It's probably as valid as anything anyway, because at the end of the day, although I sort of use single strains, the reality of my process being sterile enough to only be a single strain in there is slim chance. So it would have been a random selection of beasties in there the best of times.
00:59:55
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, the appropriate one was quite interesting because that's supposed to be, through the literature you read, it's supposed to be one of the major contributors to this mystical rum oil that you hear so much about. And they use it in cheese making. It's the stuff that gives Swiss cheese its holes.
01:00:14
Speaker
Oh, OK. I know very little about cheese making. But so I tried something that was that was really gives a nutty flavor and it gives funny a slightly cheesy if you overdo it. But again, sort of, yeah, some rich fruit stuff coming through. So that's all stuff I'm thinking maybe some point if I get a chance, I'll do a bigger scale version of it and do it as a limited release. And what I'd really like to do actually is
01:00:44
Speaker
is I'm going to do a white overproof, proper job run, which is not something the New Zealand market's really got at the moment. You know, you've got to go to like a Ray and nephew or one of those kinds of things. And I'm not sure the New Zealand public's necessarily ready for it because there could be a reason why it's not that popular. But, you know, do a proper full arm, heavy white drum and see what people make of it.
01:01:12
Speaker
and release it at something crazy like 60% or something. Yeah. It's tricky, man. Nartenders will love it, but were there anybody else on the go? I don't know what Elon's relationship with rum is. It's always seemed like something to me that is
01:01:31
Speaker
It seems like the industry as a whole treats rum like I used to treat all spirits, right? It's just an alcohol delivery device. It's quiet to put in Coke or, you know, or into a tiki drink or something to make yourself feel flesh, which is odd because I, to be fair, I haven't tasted a whole lot of, you know, really quality rums, but every time I do,
01:01:56
Speaker
It gives me everything that I enjoy in whiskey, but in a totally different space. Like I can sit there and enjoy it just for, like right now I'm sitting here sipping this and I'm just enjoying it. I'm concentrating on talking to you and podcasting. And I'm just enjoying it. But when I do take a second to sit here and sort of pull it apart, it gives me that same enjoyment that I get out of drinking
01:02:22
Speaker
you know, whatever type of whiskey it is. So I can't quite find why that hasn't broken through into the industry in New Zealand yet. I don't think it's necessarily a New Zealand thing. I think, you know, that's relatively new concept. We're not new concept, but people are only waking up to the fact that, you know, a high quality rum
01:02:43
Speaker
an age rum is it can stand on its own two feet up against the finest spirits and there will be there brownie or whiskey, you know. And right now you can get some pretty extraordinary stuff that's not crazy expensive either. And people just waking up to that fact. So there's been a sort of core group of people enthusiasts around the world for years who've known this, but it's
01:03:07
Speaker
With this birth of craft spirits, people are exploring these things more and more, and they're realising that rum is a pretty serious category in its own right. I was reading the other day that in the UK, rum now has overtaken gin.
01:03:21
Speaker
in the last year in terms of, yeah, right. Extraordinary. So it's, you know, maybe it's just me being optimistic on the kind of having a run, but I think it's coming and people as people are going to get more aware of it and they're going to explore different types of RAM and realize that it's got a lot to offer, you know.
01:03:41
Speaker
Yeah, totally. So I want to get back to the production stuff, because we're halfway through that story. But about five minutes ago, I dropped just a couple of straw fulls of water in this. And it's interesting, man, it's brought out the, it tastes like ginger to me. That is a real gingery. I suspect that's a nutmeg in the oil spice doing that. Yeah, maybe with a lot of the jorapito pepper, maybe. I don't know.
01:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, that and the chocolate. It's brought out the chocolate a lot. It does change in the glass, actually. Oh, so you think it might just be that too? Well, I know for sure the water will make a difference. But yeah, even if you didn't do that, I noticed that just leaving it in the glass sort of brings out different stuff in it. I don't want this to sound like an insult.
01:04:32
Speaker
Anyone else they've talked to saying this to I really can't wait to see what mixologists do with this when it starts getting out the industry simply because it's so freaking different. It's it's not like anything I've had before.
01:04:51
Speaker
and it's not easy to put it in a box. Like I said, I thought it was going to taste, I thought it was going to be reality to be similar to gin in terms of botanical profile sitting on top of a rum. And it's really not. You're not really perplexed. I am, dude. I am. And it's a joyful perplexed.
01:05:20
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, I'm not much of a mixologist myself, although I've been known to enjoy the odd cocktail. So yeah, I'm really interested to see what people come back with. And that's, you know, you release this, you nurture this thing for a couple of years, and you release it in the wild, and it's up to people what they do with it. And that's going to be half the fun, seeing what they come back with. I think you'll make pretty good old fashioned. I haven't tried it yet, with the barrel age one, for sure.
01:05:46
Speaker
I could see that, dude. Or just like this with what could you use to maybe like an old fashioned, but with maple syrup.
01:05:56
Speaker
to sort of add a bit of that barely, I don't know. Or I can't get past this ginger thing, but a Moscow mule would be... The citrus works very well with it. So I'd like to say when we're doing the thing with East Imperial, Mikey Bull, who does a lot of the recipe development as one of their ambassadors, he's a mixologist, and he said, I try it with a grapefruit. So they do a grapefruit. So it's really nice. It's a bit strong, it's a bit overpowering, but it just brought a whole new dimension to it.
01:06:25
Speaker
And so I've since found that, yeah, the Yuzu tonic that they do, anything with citrus seems to go really well with it. And then it's at the counterpoint of whatever it is, how the flavor combinations work. But yeah, let's get out in the vials and see what people can do there, I reckon. Yeah, hell yeah. While we're on the topic, where is this available? I'm assuming just...
01:06:50
Speaker
Yeah, so right now we have literally only, so the first batch we did was a limited release to people who were a member of a club we've started, which anybody can join, and those members will get exclusive releases and things like that. And then so we've literally just bought hold and put on sale batch two.
01:07:11
Speaker
So my left here, I've got 500 bottles sitting there ready to go out. Right now, only available through our website. And it's just because we've been heads down doing the production. We haven't really talked in any seriousness to distributors or anybody, but that's coming. So you can expect to start seeing it in a few more places pop up fairly soon. But right now, if you want a bottle of it, just go to the website and you can get it there. What's your website again, mate?
01:07:39
Speaker
lunatica lover dot com easy all right if you're in New Zealand guys and you want to try something new yeah check it out grab a bottle and we would be interested to hear what you end up mixing it with yeah I want some inspiration I've got a bottle sitting here and
01:07:58
Speaker
I'm probably going to burn through this relatively quickly. But if there's anything left, then you guys have a good cocktail for me to try and let me know. So where were we, dude, before we had this giant tangent? It was a whole lot of fun. Okay, so we've got fermentation. Fermentation was done. And from the discussion right at the beginning, I know that you're doing three stripping runs basically to get through your wash.
01:08:22
Speaker
And then you're going through to essentially a spirit run. Oh, wait. So did you do stripping runs and a spirit run and then a botanical run? Or is the last one the same? No, no, no. There's three separate distillations. Initially, I tried to do it in a single, make the bass drum in a single run. I wanted to do a single distillation. I caught a lot of success with that in my small batch stuff.
01:08:50
Speaker
but it just got too hard. They take too long and the yield's not great. And so it just made more sense to do this. So yeah, it's, believe it or not, it makes more sense and it's more economic to do the three stripping runs, the spirit run, and then the botanical run. So yeah, each bottle you drink has been through the still three times by the time you're done.
01:09:12
Speaker
What but like so I try and try to that's why I've got to start with a flavorful base because otherwise you just have a neutral cool man, and then so your botanicals are doing one of three things They're either soaking in the spirit for a while beforehand and then going into the still they're going into still spirit or they're going in the vapor path. Yeah Most of them are in the vapor. Yeah Okay, I
01:09:41
Speaker
How do you even begin to work towards consistency with this? Because every time I talk to a gender stiller, it's, you know, it's, well, the, you know, the cardamom came in this week and it was a little bit different to the cardamom last week and the oris route's different and that just fucks everything up. So how do you do that? How, when you're adding another whole layer of complexity where you're getting
01:10:11
Speaker
I mean, this is not a spirit that is botanicals with a hint of rum. It's like a big, dirty, great, big rum base, although it be white and distilled to a relative high proof. You're getting a lot of flavor coming through from the rum. So how do you deal with consistency on the rum side and the botanical side and try and wrangle it? Well, you just gotta...
01:10:33
Speaker
Gotta keep your processes the same. Don't be tempted just because you haven't got one.
01:10:43
Speaker
let's say I didn't have enough dap for that fermentation, just let it run without it, you know, or you can't get a certain botanical from one source, you're gonna get something else that's quite different. I just alluded to the Orys fruit made a big difference. Luckily, in this case, it was beneficial, I think. But you just got to try and keep your processes and your changes down to a minimum and also be
01:11:09
Speaker
be prepared to throw shit away. That's the reality. It's heartbreaking, but sometimes, you know, I've done a couple of batches like, that's not right. I can't, I can't use it. And it just, and there's that party ahead, saying, Christ, I've got to try and claw some money back out of this, you know, bet the farm on this. It's costing us small fortune. And I've got
01:11:37
Speaker
maybe $1,000 worth of product in terms of the raw materials just that I've got to get rid of. But then there's the other part of you that says, right, well, you know, you've you've set down this path of being a premium product. You know, you're not selling it cheaply by any stretch of the imagination. You better, you better walk the walk. And if that means
01:12:00
Speaker
sacrificing the old batch that isn't quite perfect or whatever, then for the sake of the quality of the overall thing, that's what you've got to do. Must be quite a hard lesson. It's soul destroying. I've yet to talk to a distillery that's biffed anything. But to be fair, most of the distilleries that I've spent time with and really seen are whiskey distilleries. And I guess they have the advantage of
01:12:27
Speaker
Fuck it, leave it in the barrel for another year, see what it turns into, and then we can blend it into, you know. Yeah, I've got that. I can do that as well. So if a base run isn't quite how I want it, it's too, you know, whatever the problem might be. I can certainly just chuck in a barrel and come back to you in a couple of years, and I might have something I can use in some way, shape, or form. There's not much that ends up down the drain, to be honest. There's a few of the early ones just were horrible.
01:12:54
Speaker
and they have gone down the drain and I was hoping because I had all these grand ambitions and false belief in my own skill set. I was expecting to be production almost as soon as we moved in and this that and the other because that was radically different in reality and that took some adjusting too but yeah I mean I can do that you know I've got stuff open I can turn over but I'll actually start
01:13:19
Speaker
As a normal run, it turns out all right. It's just different to what I base this product on. Crazy, man. So I guess that pretty much sums up the production for this, doesn't it, other than then proofing it back down. Yeah, it's fascinating. I'm going to have another one of these with dinner in.
01:13:40
Speaker
Yeah, go for it. Really pull it apart. I'm a little bit speechless on it, to be honest. I don't know. It's funny, I don't have any memories or handles really to attach it. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I had to ask too, is this a theme occurring in Auckland where sailors end up being distillers? What the fuck?
01:14:10
Speaker
Why don't we say that? Oh, because there's actually one just around the corners. There's a guy I know who's doing exactly that. Yeah, yeah. Well, Sorum was driving boats too, wasn't he? Yeah, Sorum was, yeah. There's literally a guy over the street from here who's an ex-super yacht skipper who's doing rum as well. He's just moved in. So yeah, it is obviously a theme. Although when I told people what I was doing, they said, oh, it's such a great story. Sailing in rum goes together. It's like, oh.
01:14:40
Speaker
The last thing the rum world needs is a middle-aged man in a Hawaiian shirt filling a bottle of rum with anchors and ropes on the front of it. So if anybody was to be entitled to use the nautical theming or pirates, it would be me, but I deliberately
01:15:00
Speaker
deliberately steered against that. But saying that, we have actually got one little tiny little sailing boat on the bottle there somewhere. If you guys are listening to the podcast, I'm not looking at the YouTube channel. Obviously you can't see the bottle, but I have to ask you about the brand name dude and the brand name. In the face of it, a little bit out there. Yeah, a little bit left field.
01:15:30
Speaker
OK, so where did the name come from, dude? Like, is there a story to that or? Yeah, I mean, so I was kicking around lots of different names and I had a lot of good ideas and I brought a partner in the business who's in the sort of advertising roles in the creative side of stuff. And he was really good at sort of narrowing down what they call brand territories and all this kind of stuff going on on them. And we had some good candidates for names and ideas of what it would look like. And
01:16:00
Speaker
I quite liked, like there was a, I think it's a bourbon, I'd say it's called Whoop and Holler, and I quite like that double-barreled sort of name. It had a certain, just, so I started looking up stuff randomly, like quotes on the internet. And I came across a quote by Shakespeare, it says, at a Midsummer Night's Dream, and the quote is, the lunatic, the lover and the poet are of an imagination all compact.
01:16:25
Speaker
that it's supposed to be about. You shouldn't dismiss crazy people because sometimes their ideas are pretty good. And whilst I like the idea at the time, I didn't really have a framework to put it in.
01:16:41
Speaker
the brand guy, our partner, had a set of brand territory that was based around sort of this maverick, creative type thing. And suddenly this name, which I found this lunatic lover, which I popped into my head from months ago, suddenly, suddenly fitted within this. Actually, that's really good. I really like that. And it was so much more rich. And the opportunities we had to do stuff with it was so much more than the more linear brand names we come up with.
01:17:11
Speaker
And so, yeah, we decided to run with it, and people were like, you called it what? And I appreciate it. It's a little bit different. And likewise, the design of the bottle is very different. But that's, you know, we made a bit of a decision to go that way. And that's the same by a lot of the old skeptics, the prettier the bottle, the shittier the liquid. And, you know, I've certainly heard by
01:17:37
Speaker
raised eyebrows and a few bottles. I've seen that on the shelves. But I'm hoping that maybe we can sort of prove people a little bit wrong with that. And there's no reason why you can't have a quality spirit in something which is, you know, an object of beauty in its own right, I'd like to think. I mean, the story of how this bottle gets made is unreal. It took three years to get it made. It's
01:18:01
Speaker
I'll tell you how they do it, right? So they, because this decoration up on the compound curve of the shoulders is virtually impossible to do. We got told it couldn't be done. Yeah, I was just looking at that when I got the bottle, man. And yeah, they coat it with, in this case, the silver color first, then they coat it with the black and then they etch it back off with a laser.
01:18:30
Speaker
Oh, wow. Yeah, so it's the only way they can do it over the curve. So yeah, I mean, again, I don't know how we've ended up here, having the most difficult bottle in the world to decorate. And it wouldn't be far more, but I can tell you, it is really a one off. The guys who do the decoration in Poland want to enter into competitions and stuff. You can feel the texture of it. Without the distortion, it was literally two years of back and forth and
01:18:59
Speaker
you know, sending it back. And no, that's not why you distorted this. You've done that. But, you know, much like the essence of the brand, it's slightly mad. It's not just pretty for the sake of pretty, and it's not just out there for the sake of being out there.
01:19:19
Speaker
Um, it works. So guys, I mean, even if you are, if you're in America or freaking Iceland or something, jump on the website and have a look at the, um, the bottle, uh, cause it's, it is dope. It's really cool. And I imagine you've got all sorts of little Easter eggs built into this, right? Like a lot of these random things that I'm looking at means something that I don't know about.
01:19:40
Speaker
And they're going to be cropping up in some of the stuff we'll do in the future as well, like little motifs. And yeah, like I say, when the idea came to us, it was such rich territory. It was like you almost could not do it, you know. Yeah, right, right, right.
Design Philosophy and Market Environment
01:19:56
Speaker
Can you give us a spoiler on one of the East Greeks?
01:20:02
Speaker
That was the only nod to the Northfield theme. Yeah, you did get one fair enough.
01:20:12
Speaker
They're all little motifs and they all stand for, so obviously the bottle is designed as a head if you like so they're all different parts of the brain like the old phrenological heads used to seem Victorian times and yeah the symbols are just little compartments of information about what it is and some of the qualities and some of our motivation and what we try to put into it you know and
01:20:37
Speaker
and it's funny sometimes the brand actually informs the product and I look back and there's I think it's one through
01:20:44
Speaker
Where is it? I can't even find it now. Through adversity, adventure through adversity, that's actually exactly how it's turned out to be. We haven't done anything the easy way. Virtue through adversity, I think that's it. It's turned out to be 100% true what we've ended up with.
01:21:11
Speaker
That's pretty cool, man. That is pretty cool. I really, I can't wait to see what you do with everything else over time because, excuse me, I've been thinking for a long time that Rum is just something that's completely lacking from New Zealand producers, right? There's stolen and there's, you know, a few other people sort of sourcing stuff. And I'm hearing rumors about a few other people that have got barrels down and that sort of stuff.
01:21:38
Speaker
It's cool to see something like this coming out of New Zealand because I can't understand why New Zealand isn't leading the world in terms of craft ingenuity in the space, simply because if you go right back to the beginning of what you said, you got to just
01:21:59
Speaker
You got to mess around with stuff. You got to buy some little 25 litre stills or whatever it was. Fuck about with it in your living room or in your kitchen or in your garage and the tax man or customs or the local police knocking down your door and having to go at you for it.
01:22:21
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you're exactly right. Why isn't this taken off already? Not just ramen, craft spirits in general are only really getting, you know, starting to get a little bit of traction now for a few years behind Australia and miles behind the US in terms of the penetration in the market. And like I say, it's the New Zealand mindset, you know, we've got the environment and the ingredients to do it. And you've got a regulatory environment that's incredibly forgiving compared to what other people have got to deal with.
01:22:50
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, absolutely. Let's get into it. We're already behind the April. Let's get stuck in. That was literally what let you get your start, right? Would you have done it if it was illegal for you to home distill, do you think? Yeah, probably.
01:23:09
Speaker
I'm not one for rules normally. Who knows? Who might not have even known that it was an option? That's the thing, yeah. I'm looking into, oh, look, I can buy a still. I can do this. I can go and, yeah. Okay.
01:23:26
Speaker
There are forums where people are talking about it, and they don't have to worry about it, about it being illegal. So I'm for sure it would make the whole process a lot easier, a lot simpler, you know, you don't have to stress about it. But it's not just the fact that you can do it at home. It's actually when you do start to look into it, like getting the customs control area license for the distillery,
01:23:56
Speaker
was actually pretty straightforward. The customs guys are awesome. They're really helpful, really friendly. And they said, look, at the end of the day, you're starting a business. We're here to generate revenue for the crowd, and your business is going to do that. So it's in our interest to assist you in that, which was a remarkably
01:24:17
Speaker
open-minded attitude for a government agency official.
Regulatory Comparison and Advice for Distillers
01:24:21
Speaker
You know, I wasn't expecting that at all. And you listen to what the guys in the States have got to deal with in their three-tier system and the TTP. And oh, God, I really, I don't think I would have the ability to even deal with that. You know, it's not. So, no, I'm quite grateful that we're doing it here. And I think more people should have a crack at it, for sure.
01:24:43
Speaker
Yeah, you got to have a big old set of steel ones to get started up in America. That's for sure. It does not sound like fun and a huge shout out to the customs guys down in Wellington. They're the only people I've talked to. But when I started the channel and, you know, I explored a few options throughout the time and every time I've talked to them, they've been nothing but helpful. And it's, it's almost like I get the feeling that there is a,
01:25:13
Speaker
There is somewhat of a wall of bullshit to get through, but they almost see themselves as guides to get you through it, rather than gatekeepers to tell you to piss off. Yeah. It's not an adversarial relationship. No, not at all. Yeah. And it's, oh, what do you want to do? Let me see if I can help you out with that. And you know what? I don't know the answer to that. That's a tricky one. You're doing what now? YouTube? What?
01:25:37
Speaker
He asked some questions and I'll get back to you, you know. Yeah, so shout out to the New Zealand Customs guys. But yeah, speakly dude, I just wanted to, I may or may not be building up a list of commercial distillers saying that home distilling is a good idea. One day it would be nice to change things in America for the Americans.
01:25:59
Speaker
and the
01:26:17
Speaker
We've been at this for almost an hour and a half. And I'm going to, once we get backstage, I've got a list of questions for you from the Patreons. But before we go, I'm going to follow up on you a little bit. Sorry, what was the name of the lady from Appleton again? Joy Spence. Joy Spence. You asked Joy Spence for one piece of advice when starting a distillery. So I'm going to ask you for one piece of advice when starting a distillery. And you're not allowed to give the same answer that she gave because that would be cheating.
01:26:49
Speaker
So for those people, someone out there that was thinking of starting a distillery, one piece of advice you'd give them from anything at all, doesn't have to be rum. Honestly, I think make sure you've got a clear vision. It's very easy to get sidetracked and say, I'm going to do a distillery, I'm going to make this, I'm going to have a go at rum, I'm going to do some whiskey, I'm going to do this, that and that. And that's fine.
01:27:16
Speaker
But I think, certainly for me, it was pick one thing and do it really well. And if your vision is to create a distillery that does a range of products, just, you know, you really got to think about your brand and what it is you're trying to achieve. Otherwise, you can waste a massive amount of time and money and just have
01:27:36
Speaker
a raft of mediocre products and spend a shit ton doing it. Be focused and have a vision. And it's not that daunting, but that'll really give you a path to follow. When all the shit hits the fan, you know where you're going. You know what you're trying to achieve.
01:28:00
Speaker
Well said, sir. And thank you very much both for hanging out with us and having a chat. And also for this, I very much appreciate that. I'm going to enjoy it. I'm glad you're enjoying it. Even if you don't know what to make of it. I still don't know what to make of it, but I'll do my best to find out over the next week or so.
Closing Remarks
01:28:21
Speaker
So a huge huge thank you to Matt from Lunatic and Lover. I learnt a lot about a category of spirits that I knew nothing about and honestly guys I've found a spirit that I thoroughly enjoy. I know I talked a lot about how to add this to mixes or cocktails or whatever but honestly
01:28:42
Speaker
I think I've just settled on having it straight like a whiskey. It is absolutely delicious. It's a nice work lunatic and lover. I'm loving your products. I really, really appreciate being able to talk to you and thanks for sharing with us. Thanks also to Gladfield Adventures in Home Brewing and of course the Patreons for making this possible. Thanks heaps guys. We'll see you next time. Keep on chasing the craft. See ya.