Our first rum release is particularly special to us because the making of this spirit brought us together in the earliest days of Last Straw Distillery. We hope it will do the same for you and your friends when you pull the cork on a bottle.
Cask #1 Blackstrap Rum is the same base spirit as our Blackstrap - packed with dark toffee flavours, fruity aroma, and a smooth, sweet rum finish. This release spent one year in oak, which has rounded out some of the sharper edges. The dark licorice flavours of the Blackstrap still show through, but aren't as dominant as in the unaged version. The oak also added some lovely vanilla notes on the nose, and a nutty, buttery flavour on the finish.
This spirit came about from Mike's love of premium Caribbean sugar cane rum, and Don's enthusiasm for trying new things. When we bought the first batch of blackstrap molasses from our supplier, we didn't know that it was different from fancy/sweet molasses, which most rums in the world are made from. The reason became apparent when we distilled our first batch. The yield was only a fraction of the alcohol that we were expecting. The leftover wash was sweet, meaning that a lot of the sugars had been left unfermented. That was when we discovered just how difficult Blackstrap molasses is to work with.
Despite the challenge, we still had hundreds of litres of molasses that we couldn't let go to waste. Not to be outsmarted by a bucket of sugar cane extract, we started experimenting, researching, and experimenting some more. Don spent almost all of his "free" time trying to find a way to encourage yeast to break down the crystallized sugars. The challenge was to find a way to improve the yield of each batch without sacrificing the unique, dark flavours that hooked us on this stuff in the first place. Eventually, Don cracked the code, and in the spring of 2016, we bottled a batch of our white Blackstrap spirit, and put down three different casks of it to age as rum.
Cask #1 of our Blackstrap Rum is truly unique. It was double distilled to preserve the flavour of the molasses, and then aged for exactly one year in an oak cask. Not only is it one of only a handful of rums in the world made from blackstrap molasses, it's also the first true rum that we're aware of that is made in the GTA since... perhaps ever!
