welcome back to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Okay, I'm not going to talk like that the whole time. I'm Clippy the Pirate. I'm Pat, I handle specialty spirits at Binny's, and we're going to talk about rum today, rum part two. We're super excited for this, and no one's more excited than the guy sitting next to me. It's Roger, I'm back, and I brought my juicer. We brought a juicer. Look out. Who else is here? I'm Greg. Okay, that's not as exciting. I'm Shannon. Who else is here? Hey, I'm Barb. I work in wine, but I like booze too. Cool. Well, this is pretty good booze. Yeah, we all like booze. Yeah. We're going to have a really good time talking about rum today. We had one rum episode earlier this summer, and it was quite popular, and we kind of ran out of time and kept talking about rum for longer than we intended. So we promised to rum part two that originally we're going to- If we got requests. If we got requests, and we did. And people liked our first rum, and so we wanted to cover some more of that classic rum cocktail culture, and some cool classics with that. And in the time since, we also have some pretty exciting new rums that hit the shelves of the store. So we do want to talk about those too. Sweet. All right, cool. What kind of rums do we have to try, Pat? Well, I brought a variety today. The really exciting thing is we now carry rums from La Maison and Vellier. La Maison and Vellier is a joint corporation between La Maison du Whisky, which is one of the biggest distributors and specialty spirit shops in France. This company Vellier out of Italy is an independent bottler. They're sourcing all these really cool rums from all over the world and blending them and bottling them. I brought a couple of examples from their transcontinental rum line today and their habitation Vellier. The transcontinental, they're taking rums from their source of distillation, usually the Caribbean or South America, and then they're bringing them over to Europe and for a finishing period in Europe. So they talk about how they have X percentage of the total volume was aged on the continent, was continental aged. So we have two examples here, and I guess we might as well just jump right into it and try the first one. Awesome. So this first one we're trying is a Panamanian rum from 2011. And this guy I believe is 8% aged on the continent. You can confirm that Greg, it's on the front of the label. Panama, 2011, 9% aged in continental weather. 9% aged in continental weather. So obviously the big focus here is how things age in hot tropical weather versus some rustic hillside in France or Italy or something. So as it's aging in the tropics, it's going to have a lot of extraction out of the oak. You could lose a lot to angel's share. It's hot, it's fast aging. Everything kind of slows down once you get to the continent. So this one specifically spent six years in the tropics and slightly less than one year on the continent. And this is bottled at 43% alcohol. So these transcontinental lines, they're all bottled at like 43%. And it's kind of the approachable, nice, easy sipping rums, but they still have a lot of layers of flavor to unpack. There's a lot going on here. A lot of great citrus up front, very orangey. Yeah, banana. Kind of a heavier leaded note as well. Yeah, this is pretty true to style for a Central or South American style rum. They're gonna be bigger, chewier, a little sweeter, really focusing on those tropical fruits, the banana notes, the coconut, the citrus, that kind of thing. Just a really great rum. Now, something across the line here with Maison and Vellier stuff, they're not adding sugar and they're not adding color. So this is rum in its purest form. It's pretty dark for no added color. Yeah, right. And it's pretty brown sugary for no added sugar. That's a spicy, rich rum. This is a really nice rum. It's got a little bit of that funk too. It's like a funk factor of a three on the 10 scale. Tiny bit. Tiny bit. It's gonna get a lot funkier. Oh, yeah. Where do we get the Roger's rums? So these are pretty cool. You find these on the shelves at most Binny's store between like $55, $65. They have very colorful boxes with cruise liners on the front of them. They stand out certainly in the rum aisle. So really cool. So would you in your shirt today, Pat? Enough about my shirt today. I wear a shirt that every time I wear it, somebody's like, oh, that's a handsome shirt. And today, everyone's making fun of me. Not me. It's very appropriate for the podcast. It has very colorful birds on it. Yeah, I'm wearing a shirt with tropical birds on it. Listeners, non-jerks. So are these single batch distillation? Is this just from a production blend? Probably not from a single distillation. They're buying lots of that particular year, and then they're going to be batching them and bottling them to taste rather. So this next one I'm going to pass around, also from the transcontinental line, and this is from Guadalupe. Has anybody ever had a rum from Guadalupe before? I have. Yeah. Pretty cool. They're very rare though. They are very rare, and they are mostly known for being one of the I think three or four regions that can legally make agricultural style rum. This is not an agricultural rum. This is a molasses-based rum from Guadalupe, which makes it even weirder. So this was a 2013 distillation, and it was aged slightly more than three years in the tropics, and then slightly more than a year in Europe, which lands us on about a five and a half year old rum. About a five-year-old rum. So as a reminder to listeners, the rum agri-coles are going to be made with fresh-pressed sugarcane juice, whereas most rum is made from molasses. The incentive is gone now that most sugar production comes from sugar beets. A lot of the islands that used to count on growing and harvesting sugarcane for sugar, it's not as economically viable. So ironically, when you have an island that's so tiny like Guadalupe, they struggle to produce enough sugarcane to meet the demand for the rum distillation. So part of the year, they'll switch over and do the more traditional rum industrial out of the molasses. I'm sorry, for a total of four and a half years of rum maturation. Is this pot or column? Does it say? This is, doesn't say. It's kind of estuary. So I'm wondering if maybe. Pot? Well, that just could be a fermentation thing. Yeah, that's true. So this is definitely different in style than that Panamanian rum we just tried. It's light, it's estuary. It's got this bit of a dried, almost overripe fruit character thing going on. As far as that estuary note goes, a little bit of banana leaf type of thing, green banana. You can see it's definitely lighter in color, and it's just more delicate all around. Definitely a bright sweetness right at the front. Yeah. You can see that. Yeah. A little spice in the finish. It's kind of lingering. I'm spicing a little smoky too. But a nice balance though. It's not just that wood spice in the finish. There's a nice sweetness that carries it all the way. It's a nice rum. I could see drinking this with some proper ice cubes that will melt a little slower. This is not super high proof, so you don't want to dilute it too much, but to get a little chill on it, and just a tiny bit of water. I think a little chill, and then honestly maybe even a little bit of lime juice. This would really shine. I could see drinking this one with you guys. Yeah. So now we're gonna try a couple of Habitation Velier Rums from La Maison and Velier. So this Habitation Velier line, this is their like rum geek nerd line. This is kinda, well this would be the equivalent of like, you know, these cast strength, independent bottled, single malt type of things, which is really what they are. They are natural strength. They're in these kinda cool, old school, kinda smashed medicinal type of bottles almost. So the first one I'm gonna pour, they call Last Ward, which is a 2009 Barbados single rum. So this is a triple distilled rum from Barbados. Last Ward refers to Tom Ward. Tom Ward was the master distiller at Mount Gay, and this batch was from one of his very last distillations before he retired. So this was made from molasses, state-grown molasses actually, bottled at 59 percent, it's nine years old. This was aged entirely in the tropics with an angel's share just north of 64 percent. Wow. Yeah. Hold on a second. I'm getting the feeling that this is an expensive bottle of rum. Depending on the age and the make on these Habitation Valuation Alliance, they're usually falling around like $70, $80. So expensive, but not out of line expensive. Is that 64 percent? Is that anticipated or at what point is the distiller surprised? I'm not sure. I mean, that's standard for something. Is it? Yeah. It's a good question because the angel's share down there is really intense, but also they like to counter that. We mentioned this on the last version of the rum podcast that they like to say, if something's a six-year in the Caribbean, you can almost double it if you were talking about continental aging, like if you were comparing it to a scotch age in scotland. We've debated if that's actually, they might be exaggerating a little, but there's an element of hyper-aging because of that intense amount of loss. I also love the labels on these. I guess Pat nailed it when he said these are for rum geeks, which I definitely am. The fact that it has exactly how long it was in Barrel. I also liked how they wrote no sugar on there, so no sugar added. This is purist, so you're really getting what you pay for. It's a little more expensive, but super high proof, which is a rarity in the rum world. The majority of rums are bottled at 80 proof. I don't know if you guys looked at the label. The label is really cool because on all these Havitation Velier, there is a picture of the actual still that made the rum in the bottle. No matter what the still they got it from, they get a picture of that actual still. This is a pot still, but it looks like the pot still feeds into these two little contraptions next to it. Those are called retorts, and that is a pretty uniquely rum thing. So this is a double retort pot still. And what the retorts are is there are essentially just devices that act as second and third miniature pot distillations, but they are filled, the first and second retorts are filled with the heads and tails of the previous distillation. And they're not actually heated, but when the hot vapor comes off of the initial pot still and falls into that retort, the vapor is hot enough that it boils that retort, and then that vapor rises, goes into the second retort, boils the second retort, and then it rises again and then gets collected. That's crazy. Then how does it not push the previous heads through? Well, the previous heads are being redistilled in that process too. So you're not collecting methanol. Oh, so you're kicking that out first, right? Essentially. It becomes like super heads of the whole batch. Most distilleries that pot still will add heads and tails back into the next distillation just because it's going to be efficient, you know. They're going to extract the most out of everything they can while still leaving the unwanted methanols in the heads and fusil oils and stuff in the tails in the still. That's very common in scotland. How common is it used in rum practices? So double retort pot stills are really used a lot in the Eastern Caribbean. They're a huge thing in Jamaica. They're used in Barbados, actually. The next one we're going to try was also made on a double retort pot still. There in Guiana, there's actually a wooden pot still with some retorts in it at the El Dorado Distillery. So pretty common. And sometimes the retort, besides being filled with heads and tails, can also be filled with dunder, which is kind of like the sour mash of Jamaican rum, which we talked about a little bit on rum part one. I think you mean gross rotting compost mash. Correct. From the muck pit. Yeah, the dunder from the muck pit. By the way, this is superb. Yeah, this is outstanding rum. Just maxed out graham cracker, spice, a little bit of fruit sweetness. Yeah, like hot buttered graham cracker. And considering it's 118 proof, like it drinks high proof, but I would have guessed probably like 110. I mean, it's certainly high proof, but it's not like sapping all the moisture out of your mouth, you know? Yeah, and it finishes really light and fresh. I am so stunned by this. It's really beautiful. It's like caramely, but not overly sweet. This is kind of silly, actually. It's a superb rum with an incredible story and an esoteric style from a place where you don't usually get it. No, it's just big commercial rum, you know? Aged in France and Italy, and it could be yours for like 80 or 90 bucks. Yeah, this one. Are you sure? I am sure. Because this should be like 150 or 200. This one was only aged in the tropics. If this was, oh, it was? Yeah. Still, if this was a whiskey- This would be 200. It would be $200 like day one. Yeah. I wouldn't be unhappy about the price of it either. If it was $200. This is awesome. That's one of the good things about rum that's underappreciated because there's such a wide variety of them. I mean, you could give this to spirit to a whiskey drinker and they'll immediately be able to identify with some of the flavors and characteristics. Some total misconception that rum is all of its overly sweet or one-dimensional. There can be a lot going on. It's not all parrots bay. Yeah, people should not sit on this. Yeah. What's the producer again? Habitation Velier and the producer of the rum was Mount Gay. It's called Last Ward 2009. It is delicious. But you have another one from these guys. I have another Habitation Velier, which I'm really excited about because I'm a fan boy. This is from Foursquare and we've talked about Foursquare before, we've tasted Foursquare before. Morons call it the Pappy Van Winkle Rum. That's a stupid thing to say, so that's the last time we'll say it on our podcast. But this was distilled in 2013 and actually bottled in 2015. This is only a two-year-old rum. It was aged in cognac casks, which is really cool. Now, the really unique thing about this, this is the only bottle of Foursquare available to us that was purely pot distilled. Foursquare is very famous and well known for blending pot still distillation and column distillation, because their distiller and owner thinks that things taste better when they're combined. But this was kind of a unique situation, and this is the first, and to my knowledge, only 100 percent pot still Foursquare, and this is 64 percent alcohol. And this one also is going to be pretty affordable. This one's actually, I think, only like 60 bucks. Oh. That's, well, let me try it first. It could be hot garbage, but you know. I'm not bringing hot garbage. I've heard you guys talk a lot about hitting up spirits here and there, especially when you talk about rum or whiskey with just like a touch of citrus, right? I think part of it is because I'm staring at this lime wedge you have over there. But that last one, it hit me that even just like a orange zest would be enough, even just like the oil off the orange zest would be just enough to even bring that even more to life. Yeah, for sure. Garnishes is really under appreciated. What you just said where if you just twist a lime peel, lemon peel, just to release some of the oil, or even sometimes if you really just want nuance, just to put a wheel on the glass so that as you're drinking it, your nose is right next to freshly Going back to these fabulous labels here, the picture on the still here is a pot still, well again with a double retort. What's really interesting about the double retort pot still at Foursquare is the heads on these retorts are chilled. Because they keep the metal on the top of each retort chilled, it creates even more reflux in each retort. Even though you're making a pot still rum, you're making a pretty delicate, fruity, fresh style of rum, that's only coming out of a pot, which is really cool. That's another geek reason why this is just a rum you have to taste. This is really different. This is definitely got a little bit more of that dundery, estery. Crazy spicy for me. It hits me all over. It's young and it shows its use. I mean, it's spicy and it is hotter, even at 100. I mean, it's 128 proof. So, I mean, certainly drinks it. Estery to the point of vegetal. But that's not bad. It's not a knock on it at all. The back end is really fruity, though, and tropical. There's some pineapple notes. Yep. There's some really interesting flavors on the finish. But it's really cool. And again, this is the only way you're going to ever get to try so far, a pure pot still rum from Foursquare. Did you see the proof is? 64, 128. Again, I think this would benefit from big ice, melts slow, doesn't dilute too quick. Maybe making it into a cocktail. Yeah, for sure. One of the simple cocktails we're going to get to, where the rum shines, it doesn't get overly diluted. So what do you guys think? So that was Habitation Velier stuff. Pretty cool. And now of these Habitation Veliers, we got, I don't know, like six or seven or something. And there's a couple other transcontinental ones too. Also, La Maison and Velier is like the global distributor importer for Hampton Estate Rums, which is an old school Jamaican rum that was only ever had spotty availability just in a couple countries before. And so having true authentic Jamaican rum available is always a good thing. So pretty cool rum. There's a lot of different stuff available. It's a great time to be a rum drinker at Binny's. And I think that whiskey drinkers shouldn't sleep on these. And especially whiskey drinkers who like the narrative, like the story. These are hitting all the marks. I mean, no color, no sugar added. Cast strength, single distillery, exclusivity, older stuff. This checks all the boxes for whiskey drinkers. And they couldn't be further from... If you've had a rum before that you thought was one-dimensional, gloppy, too much caramel flavor, like they're just in a completely different ballpark. Is this kind of in the same camp as Samaroli? Kind of, yes. Kind of like that. Samaroli, famous Italian independent bottler. They've done a lot of scotch and a lot of rum over the years. Tend to be very expensive, though. Certain young Samaroli whiskeys can be a couple hundred dollars. So these are a little more value driven. What do you think is this? This is the dark horse of the tasting? Yeah, kind of. I got one more exciting new rum to share, and this is from Denizen, and this is Denizen vatted dark rum. And this is really cool because it is 80% dark rum from Guiana. So what distillery does that come from? El Dorado, and 20% rum agricultural from Martinique. So you have 80% this rich molasses based heavier rum that was actually made on wooden pot stills and French style Saval stills, which are this old school kind of column still, and then 20% of it rum agricultural. So fresh pressed cane, grassy, a little bit vaginal, a little funky estuary, and I really like the combination. It's so 80-20, Kiana and agricole Blend, bottle that 100 proof, it is 30 bucks. This is an unbelievable deal. This is a perfect as when we get to making Mai Tais, this is exactly what I'll be doing when I make the Mai Tais, mixing rum agricultural with Jamaican rum. So this is like a go-to perfect pre-mix thing for Mai Tais. I wonder how many producers practice this then, and if it's few, which I'm getting the impression it is, why don't more people blend it in bottle then? I think it used to be one of those more common things, and just as brands grew, these producers became focused on brands more than style. It's more important for Mount Gay to maintain, Mount Gay is a brand and its reputation as the big Barbados rum than to add in rum from somewhere else to give it a little more balance or finesse. Rum Agri-Cole is an acquired taste as well, especially the Blanc, so this, and as you can tell by the 80-20 ratio, you can still smell the Agri-Cole big time. So Rum Agri-Cole Blancs can sometimes be a challenge for the uninitiated. The aged ones are a little easier on the palate, easier to get used to, so I think that's part of it too. So when I first tried this rum, my immediate thought was, holy cow, they've blended these two rums and they've created a Jamaican rum. Yeah. Where they have this molasses character, but a little bit of that funk and grassy estuary thing, it's awesome. I think this rum, and at 100 proof too, it doesn't really drink at 100 proof either, but it's perfect for cocktails. Like Roger mentioned with Mai Tai, this isn't going to get watered down. If you make a great Mai Tai with it, you can add ice to it, and this is just an unbelievable rum for 30 bucks, I think. This is one of my biggest surprises the last couple of months. Yeah, fresh funk and round breath and estuary quality. All in one. $30, hard to beat. As a reminder to everybody, check out the episode description or the Binny's blog for all the brands. We link to them everything that we taste in the podcast on the blog post. So check out binnys.com/blog. While you're checking that out, do us a favor, leave us a review on iTunes. We'd appreciate it if you like what you hear. So speaking of agricultural funk and agricultural blank, Roger has transitioned us with probably one of the world's most perfect cocktails. What is this thing, Roger? So a tea punch is short for petit punch, so little punch, and this is the preferred way of enjoying rum in the French-speaking islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. So it's a pretty simple three ingredient cocktail, one of the quintessential rum preparations. You got weak, strong, and a little bit of sour. So we've got petit cane syrup here. We put about a dime-sized dollop of that in the glass, cut a little measure of lime off of the side of a lime, so it looks like about the size of a quarter or so, maybe it'll touch bigger. Squeeze that onto that little dime-sized serving of the cane syrup and then add in some rum agri-col. You can do this with aged rum agri-col or blanc. We've used blanc here. Yeah, we're using Trois-Rivières Cuvée La Oceanique, and this is a blanc rum agri-col where all the sugar cane was grown within, I believe, 30 yards of the ocean. Whoa. Pretty cool. This is a terroir-driven rum agri-col. This is a little on the sweeter side. I probably should have put less sugar in because I didn't, in retrospect, I didn't want to pour the full measure of rum. I think maybe you should get us all rum. Like a full-size one and then we divvy it up. Yeah. Why don't you just make a picture of it, Roger, and we'll show you after that. This is pretty awesome. Yeah. Either way, you got the flavoring here. It's still sweeter than it normally would be. It's just right. Usually you use about two ounces of rum and then about, like I said, a small dollop of sugar. With a recipe this simple, you can mess around with the ratios to your liking. Roger, can I just make this cane syrup at home if I use demerara sugar or something of the like, or is there something special about this? This is a little different. So you could do that in a pinch. As you can see from this, it's about amber in color. So it's pretty thick too. You would be making thicker than a one, than an equal part sugar syrup. You'd probably be doing a heavy sugar syrup, like two to one. This is definitely worth the investment. It's going to last you a long time. Yeah. So this bottle of Petite Con, which is a sugar cane syrup from Martinique, 500 ml bottle, half liter bottle, I think we sell this for $9.99. Oh yeah, that's not bad. Yeah, it's reasonable. That makes a fresh and zippy cocktail. The lime is pretty subdued in the whole thing. It's like enough to let the rum breathe, right? Yeah. It brings out some of the normal citrus aspects that are in the rum to begin with. Rum agrocol famously has that really kind of grassy, banana-y kind of characteristic. Depending on the distillery, some of them can get pretty vegetal, almost like olive-like. This one's nice that Pat brought. It's a little more approachable. It's not quite as... Yeah, this Tuat Revere is a... It's not totally an entry level rum agrocol, but it's easier drinking. It's not over the top funk. It doesn't really smell and taste like stewed tomatoes like they can or anything like that. Pretty approachable. Before I get started here, let's just delve a touch into the idea of tiki drinks. So we're going to be making some rum cocktails, and the ones that I'm going to prepare are some classic tiki drinks. Tiki culture is experiencing kind of a renaissance. It's the most popular trend in drinks, really. It's outlasted so many other things. It's pretty unique in that it started just by one person who, if you've ever heard of the Don the Beach Coma restaurants, this gentleman literally changed his legal name to Don Beach. So he was very committed to this. And it's quite an amazing story of his life. And it kind of explains how this all came about. His father had made quite a bit of money in the oil industry in Texas. And he told him he would either pay for him to go to school anywhere he wanted, or he would pay for him to travel around the world. And this was in like the late 20s, I think. So, I mean, that was a big deal to travel the world then. It still is now, obviously, but you need to have a lot of money. So, I think he did what most of us would and said, I'd rather travel around the world. And he really did go everywhere. He went to parts of Africa, Central, Southern America, and most famously, he went to Polynesia and he really fell in love with the island of Tahiti. So, he was really inspired by the artwork there, the culture, somewhat the drinks and like the fruit and everything. But as much as we associate Tiki culture with Polynesian artwork, things like the Tiki statues themselves and whatnot, the drinks themselves are actually more based in Caribbean culture and Caribbean drinks. Punches, things that combine different kinds of fruit juices, liqueurs with different styles of rum. It's not as common if you were to make a whiskey drink. You don't usually see multiple whiskeys being mixed together. But one of the interesting things about cocktail culture when it comes to Tiki is that you're often blending a bunch of different kinds of rum together. Things like a rum agri-col versus a really pot still heavy Jamaican rum, or part of weaving this tapestry of flavor is incorporating different rums, and then using some of these really neat preparations of liqueurs and whatnot. Some of the most popular drinks when you think of Tiki, what comes in mind, guys? If you've had a Tiki drink, what are some of the ones? Mai Tai. For sure. Those are two of the big ones. Pina colada to some extent as well, yeah. Fine. Not a pina colada. What about just like a daiquiri? Is that a? Yeah, it's definitely that's a Caribbean drink for sure. You'll have those at Tiki bars as well. But the second component to this besides the rum is the flair. So everything is about the presentation, putting it in these elaborate, be it Tiki mugs or just glasses, but then the garnishes start to go over the top, like carving lime wedges into little shapes and making islands out of them. Had one in a prominent Chicago bar that had a little plastic space shuttle. Sweet. We actually are pretty lucky in Chicago. We have some excellent Tiki bars. Top of the list would be Lost Lake. So if you haven't checked out, if you're interested in Tiki at all. It's a must. Absolutely, you have to go there. Paul McGee is one of the legends and one of the go-to people when it comes to Tiki drinks. So I brought in a whole bunch of gear here. As Pat has mentioned, this is the problem with Tiki drinks. There is a whole bunch of stuff on the table here. There's a blender, there's measuring pours, there's shakers. Yeah, there's definitely some initial investment. So there's as many mixers as there are rums. Yeah. It's kind of ridiculous, Roger. I've helped quite a few friends get into this and set up a bar. So yes, you definitely have to make some initial investments to get yourself set up. But once you start playing around with this, I guarantee it's going to surprise you. It really took one gentleman in particular to save Tiki drinks. His name is Jeff Berry. He's a cocktail historian. People call him like the Indiana Jones of tropical drinks. He went around and interviewed people all around the world that worked for the main two Tiki bar and restaurants. They were Don the Beach Coma restaurants and Trader Vic's restaurants. These guys had such a fierce competition that Don Beach in particular would have these preparations, different kinds of syrups, different kind of juice mixes. He would have part of his employees mix those, label them with this is Don's mix number two, so that only a select number of people knew what went into those. There was literally like cocktail espionage. This was a big business. There were literally hundreds of these in between the 40s and the late 60s, early 70s, was the height of Tiki Madness, and they were all over the countries. Tons of different people imitated these two guys, but Don Beach and Trader Vic were the two that it took, rifling through all these little notepads, interviewing bartenders, finding all this information to be able to craft these recipes. What you get are these amazingly made drinks that are all about balance and a multitude of flavor. Unfortunately, over the years, they devolved into these sugary mess, boozy, using crappy rum, crappy ingredients. It was the 80s, man. That happened to cross-culture. Yeah. Flair bartending just was like the death knell, the introduction of vodka drinks and making all these silly like Sex on the Beach, Bahama Mama crap. Vodka ruins everything. Thankfully, I can't say enough how cool the Jeff Berry books are. You should check them out. Potions of the Caribbean. I have one sitting right here that I brought in, this Beach Bum Berry Remix, which is two of his original books, Intoxica and The Groglog. It turns out the secret ingredient was love. Yeah. I'm going to mix up a couple of the more famous tiki drinks here. We're going to do a Mai Tai. I'm going to present it in two ways. We're going to do the original version, which is the only juice that's in it is lime juice. It's an old-fashioned cocktail. It's almost all booze. I think you'll be really impressed with it. Then we're going to do, just to show you the difference, kind of more of an updated version with a little more juice base to it. Then I'm going to make you a test pilot, which is one of my favorite drinks, that again, I think you'll be interested to see the complexity and how different it is and how it's quite different from the stereotype of a tiki drink of being sugary or Roger, what was your first tiki cocktail? Mai Tai, for sure, yeah. The whole Portillo's family used to have a restaurant out in Naperville called Key Wester. Key Wester on 59, yeah. I remember going to Key Wester with the huge fish tank and all the treasure in the foyer and stuff. So that was definitely an inspiration. I thought that was really cool. Hurricanes, I think, are a lot of people equate that with tiki, and you sometimes see them there, but there it's more of like a New Orleans thing, but that I was really interested in. And then I got Edward Hamilton as one of the greats in the rum world. And he wrote a book called The Complete Guide to Rum. I bought that when I was very young. And I actually had a chance to meet him at Binny's. When I first started at Binny's, he came in and was sampling out some rums that he was representing at the time. Is that the Lemonheart guy? Yes, he was. Now he has his own version of that. Hamilton 151. Yeah, Hamilton 151 is his kind of answer to Lemonheart. He also represented La Favorite and Nielsen Rums for a while, which are agricultural rums. His book is awesome. I don't know if it's in print anymore, unfortunately, but in his recipe section, he had a whole bunch of punches. And like I make a lot of cocktails for friends and family. And they always ask me, what's this one called? And kind of my default answer is I always just go, it's a planter's punch. Because a planter's punch can be kind of whatever you want it to be. So it's usually a mixture of rums, a mixture of fruit juices, and then you can accent it with some of these unique kind of syrups and stuff. So I make a lot of those and I've had a planter's punch somewhere that I thought was really cool too. So those are the biggies. Let me get some ice chopped up here and let me start mixing some drinks and we'll give them I tie a try. Guys, that was the longest music break we've ever had. This better be worth it, Adamson. But from their point of view, it was only like 10 seconds. So we have three cocktails in front of us. They look pretty similar. They all smell fabulous. One of them even has fancy ice. The Mai Tai is, I would say, the most famous, most recognizable of the tiki drinks. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most bastardized cocktails. So I wanted to make you the official, original Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, better known as Don the beachcomber version. So the first little cup that I gave you is that. Over the years, the origin of this recipe, it had a specific type of Jamaican rum called Ray and Nephew 17 Year. So it's funny, during Prohibition, everybody wanted whiskey. Whiskey was the hardest of the illicit boozes to get. What was really easy to get was rum. So rum just started getting stockpiled at speakeasies and bars. Nobody really knew what to do with it. It was in super low demand. That's actually how the hurricane came about, was that Pat O'Brien needed an excuse to use up all this rum and make a drink that could use a ton of it in a serving. So when Don Beach came back from his world travels, he was totally broke. His dad was rich, but he cut him off. He said, that's part of the deal, pay for this crazy cruise and everything around the world, but you need to make your own way after that. So when he was devising this idea to open a bar, he had access to all this rum after prohibition. It was just sitting around and the market was saturated with all this extra rum that nobody wanted and was cheap. His plan was to make this cool atmosphere and to do these rum-centric drinks. So the Mai Tai was the idea of what can we make out of the best ingredients and really make a fantastic tasting drink. So they started with that rum, then they added Orgiat syrup, which is famously mispronounced as Or-gee-at. I hear that quite a bit. Yeah, Orgiet. Orgiat. It's an old type of French syrup that's almond-based, is the predominant flavor. There's also like a little, it can be a rose water, orange water essence to it. Fresh lime, it's key that it has to be fresh. Don't even think about using bottled lime juice. And then some sort of orange liqueur. They were famously known as triple secs. Nowadays, we kind of equate triple sec with the cheaper versions of orange liqueur. You can use a high quality one. I used Cointreau in this. Could use like a Pure Ferrand Dry Curacao. It's another one of the famously mispronounced cocktail ingredients. People ask, do you have any curaco? Blue curaco. Curacao is the name of a Dutch island in the Caribbean where they got these little teeny, bitter oranges that they use to flavor an orange liqueur. What makes it blue? Just die. Blue Curacao came about much later. That's what makes all your 80s drinks electric. Yeah, exactly. Honestly, too, I was always of the school from bartending and house bartending to use cheap triple sucks, and the first time I tasted Pure Ferrand Dry Curacao, I never went back. There really is a big difference. Yeah, there is. In lieu of having this beautiful 17-year-old rum, which just doesn't exist anymore, what they even started doing back in the heyday of the tiki time, because they became so popular, that they ran out of supply even back in the, I think in the 50s, that it already became a problem. They started mixing a Jamaican rum with rum from Martinique, like a rum agri-col, which is why that Denzian is so perfect that we tried earlier. That's like a pre-mixed rum for you. So instead of mixing two together, which is what I did, I used our hand-picked JM. Rum Jam Single Barrel. Rum Jam Single Barrel, that is barrel number 729, is that it? I catch a niner in there. The sticker on the side. Oh, yes, 729. All right. So I used that. Then I used El Dorado 8. We've talked many times about our love for the El Dorado brand of rums. They make exceptional rums from Guiana. The Cointreau, like I said, and then the Orgeat syrup is a small hand foods. So that's legit Orgeat. So again, like the cheap triple sex that are fakey and flavored, you want to go to a higher end one that's actually using real ingredients. Check out the blog for these recipes. We're going to put these recipes up on the blog so you can get them, download them, mix them, drink them. Jeff Berry writes volumes about the Mai Tai controversy, but there's no doubt that Trader Vic, Vic Bergeron, made it famous. He kind of was the Barnum that made it the Tiki drink. Started to get legs. Everyone started making it. They started adapting it. And if you were to order a Mai Tai nowadays, this is kind of what I gave you is mostly booze. I mean, the only thing in it that's not booze is the Orgeat is alcohol free, but the lime juice is about it. You've got a lot of for the volume considered in the drink. It's you know, you could easily drink these. They're easy to drink. You can get pretty wasted. And yet it's still so light and fresh. Yeah. It's a lot like a margarita. So they started adding fruit juices to it. So the second Mai Tai that I gave you is a little closer to what they call like a Royal Hawaiian Mai Tai, which was an adaptation that came about a decade or so later in Hawaii. So Mai Tais are super popular in Hawaii, and the Hawaiian versions almost always have at least pineapple juice, and then they might add other kinds of fruit juices in there. Orange is common, sometimes a lot of passion fruit. So this, as you can tell, it's a little bit lighter. It's obviously fruitier. It's not as intense, but that almond still comes through. The almond is a key ingredient. I feel bad for liking this one more. Yeah. Well, is there darker rum in here? Yes. So the other thing that I did, I switched out the rums in the second one. The second one does not have any Martiniquan or rum agri-col. So rum agri-col is not always the easiest thing to find. It's also more expensive. So nine times out of ten, if you order a Mai Tai somewhere, it's just going to have Jamaican rum in it probably. I use Myers, which is one of the higher quality, like dark, richly flavored. There's definitely a little bit of pot still rum in this, I believe. And then the El Dorado still. So a little bit of a taller drink, not as intense. I think it's delicious. I love the pineapple. It's a little bit like somehow creamier or something. It's like weightier, but still super refreshing. The pineapple juice will do that though. I mean, it doesn't have that citric bite the first one has. So if it's really hot outside, I would drink the first one. But as somebody sitting in an air-conditioned room right now, the second one is really speaking my language. Yeah, I hear you. Yeah, I'm digging the pineapple. They're both delicious. This tastes like what you imagine Amitai tasting like in a modern sense. Exactly. And there's no red. Yep, no red. The one thing I will say about the red, sometimes if you want your Amitai to be red or you like the idea, or the red you shouldn't get from grenadine, which is what a lot of bartenders are doing. However, if you can't find an Orgette syrup, you can substitute creme de noy, which is red. That's a higher quality option for almond. It's not as good as the Orgette that we use, but it's acceptable. Is that where that came from, that red? I mean, it's grenadine in a lot of places. I think it's more often than not grenadine. But a creme de noy would give you the color without as overwhelming sweetness. What if I just use for red like maraschino juice out of the cherry jar? You can do that. Is that acceptable? Yes. Does that make me trashy or something? Yes. Can you make the- Cement your position on being our resident chain of lakes person? Can you make the stem? Can you tie it in a bow in your mouth? What about Starburst wrapper? I also want to take this minute to point out that the young lady next to me literally has a pineapple tattooed on her arm. So it's no surprise that she likes that other Mai Tai. Yeah. I enjoy the pineapple accents on this one. It's absolutely wonderful. This Mai Tai recipe, the second one is just basically if you modify and start putting other juices in it, you basically have a planner's punch. So once you learn how to make this, start experimenting with whatever you want. You can put orange juice in there, lemon juice in there, passion fruit, guava purees or nectars. It's really like the sky's the limit. So the last drink, again, I want to pick something that is on the drier side. It's got some nice depth of flavor. It again is by no means like sugary sweet. This is called a test pilot. Don Beach was in the military and always had an interest in. Especially in the 50s, everybody was into the idea of jet planes. It was precursor to the space race. So they created this drink that is fresh lime juice, dark rum, light rum, Cointreau, the secret ingredient here in the tiki sphere is Phalernum, which is an interesting liqueur from Barbados. This has got some rum in it. It's lime, ginger, a touch of almond, and clove. This is a nice bartender's ketchup kind of thing. Like an all spice kind of thing, literally. Is that where I'm getting all that anise? No. So that is the other secret ingredient. The double secret. The double secret ingredient. If you noticed, I had literally a tiny, I had a quarter teaspoon that I brought in here. I rarely measure things, but this you absolutely have to. This is absinthe that you're tasting. It's kind of the licorice-y kind of spicy je ne sais quoi ingredient that's in a lot of tiki drinks, but a little goes a super long way. It's really giving this cocktail the business down there. It is. It can easily take over and give your palate the business. Wow. Roger, you made my new favorite cocktail over here. Thank you. I love the anise flavors, licorice, and it has all the tropical rum and fruit qualities, but then with that wildness too. What's crazy is that the only juice in this is lime juice. I really like the clove and that ginger kick in the clove. This is delicious. Again, you got to be careful. It's all booze. There's a lime juice, but everything else is rum. What rums did you use in this? Myers, dark rum, and then Bacardi. It's very traditional, not necessarily the most complex. They're more workhorse rums, but the heavy lifting is being done by the oddities, like Angostura bitters. There's a couple of dashes of that, the absinthe and the flarenum. If this were served in the two-ounce coop underneath a bird cage in a bar upstairs in New York, they would charge $28 for the strength. The guy's twisting his mustache the whole time he was drinking it. That's the twisting the mustache is the cocktail equivalent of the black turtle neck. The black turtle neck and wine, with all due respect to the mixology industry. Would this also work with an absent wash on the glass instead of actually mixing in the cocktail? Yes. In one serving, if you were to make it for yourself, and I would say that a good rule of thumb for Tiki drinks, since they're so involved, is to make two at a time because odds are there's somebody with you, or if not, enjoy two for yourself. Pineapples everywhere. Yes. The measure for one drink though, is an eighth a teaspoon, so it's apparently anything. You could definitely do a rinse if you want. A little bit of absinthe goes a long way. Yes, for sure. You can also substitute if you want. For most of its existence, it was made during the Absinthe Ban in the US, so they were using like Pruneau or Herb Synth. You can use a pastis or one of those if you want. Sambuca, if you have to. No, too sweet. Yeah, I don't know about that. Not strong enough, too sweet. I'm just thinking of what people have in their cabinets. We got plenty of Herb Synth at every store. You know you got a bottle of Rocky in your basement? I do, but that's because Billy didn't want it. If you're in a tiki bar and they might be making one of the future derivations of this, it was originally called the test pilot. Probably the most common name it was under is jet pilot. Jet pilots sometimes have some other stuff in them though. I actually prefer the original. The jet pilots usually have grapefruit juice in them, which is nice, but it's again different. Then they also sometimes incorporate some other liqueurs. Sometimes they put- I would think overproof rum or something with the name like jet pilot. Yeah. Sometimes they have much more rum in them. This was like the normal instead of the insane one. Roger, tell me you had a choice of making us two drinks, one that's normal and one with quote, much more rum, and you left that one at home. Well, you already brought quite a few ingredients for me today, so I didn't want to add insult to injury. For 151 is not to be trifled with, but much more rum. When you're at home, you can add a 151 of this. You could do like Edward Hamilton's 151 is a really nice Demerara 151. You could add a third rum, and if you wanted to do like a rum agri-col, you could stick that in there. The beauty of these drinks is that, like I said, I know all these classics, I have tons of these books, but I usually just mix drinks and just screw around with it. Once you get a knowledge, Smuggler's Cove has a great tiki book that you should check out. The best. They just talk about like once you understand the ingredients, and what gives you spice, what gives you richness, what gives you herbaceousness. These cocktails are so fun to play with. And then you just dial in the kind of level of tartness or sweetness that you want. And then the fruit juices, again, you can just go nuts and use whatever you want. Blood oranges when they're in season are cool to throw into these. Like I guarantee that once you get bitten by the tiki bug, like it's a fun road to go down to. And when you have friends over and you just make these kind of drinks, they really can be impressive to people. That's true. I didn't, because of to learn a conference room and stuff, I didn't do the full bore and bring garnishes and stuff. I was really hoping to drink one of these out of a coconut. How many phalines are you going to expose in one day? I was hoping for a pineapple. Where in the illustrious Binny's Barrel to Bottle Studios International? Someday, I'll do some of the garnishes I do. I've made a lime shell island with lime shell, cinnamon stick, carved lime peel, and then put overproof rum on it, lit it on fire. You can do all sorts of cool stuff. Let's not light anything on fire in the studio. Right. The whole office water system would go off. So rum part three, garnishes. Yes. Tiki rabbit hole. Yeah. Let us know if you want it, folks. The amount of esoterica in the Tiki culture, you can talk mugs, straws, picks, ice cones, ice molds. A Star Wars cups that are out there now. The different kinds of straws, patterns on the umbrellas. Little umbrellas. The everything from down to the napkins. Which fruit to garnish with. Exactly. Which ferns to decorate your bar. How to curve a dolphin out of a banana. Oh, that's super important. It's pretty, the sky is literally the limit. Last time I was at Lost Lake, I had some drink with a banana dolphin sticking out of it. All right. With clove eyeballs. Roger The Garnish King Adamson. It combines my love of fruit and art history. Oh my gosh. It's a beautiful thing. So five new rums. Five awesome rums. Awesome rums. Brand new on the shelf these days. Check them out. Whiskey drinkers to try them too. That's four cocktail ideas, four rum cocktail ideas including tea punch, Mai Tai, another Mai Tai, and a test pilot. If you guys want episode three of rum, let us know and we'll keep it rolling because we're just getting started. Always more to talk. We could do a whole episode just on how a double retort pot still works on all the crazy rums that come out of that. Yeah, diagrams and stuff. We could do rums from all the different, I mean, I don't know, there's a spirit that's made in more countries. There's rums from, I think, all the countries in the Caribbean, all the countries in Central and South America. Southeast Asia. There's stuff. There are millions of rums. Africa, Mauritius, Tasmania. So would you say that rum is the melting pot of spirits? Yeah, in a lot of ways. Get your hippie bullsh** out of here. I think my next tattoo will be like a nice little tiki. It was definitely the melting pot. Like tiki melting pot. Oh, yeah. It was the American drink, like during the colonial times, all they drank was rum. Yeah, be a patriot. Drink more rum. More rum. Well, folks, that brings us to the Q&A portion of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, where we answer your question for a $20 Binny's gift card. Email your question to comments at binnys.com or hit us up on social media at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Well, Shannon will be collecting your questions. Woohoo! Our question this week comes from Bob Bradbury. Bob Bradbury, it's all one word, probably Instagram. Bob Bradbury, but. He hangs out with Sally down at the seashore. Bob Bradbury. The question is, is there a published list of store barrel picks that are available for purchase? If you go to binnys.com/spirits on the navigation bar somewhere up top, you can click handpick spirits. Yeah, there's a link right on the website. And it's what's there. That is what we generally have in stock. Not all hand picks even hit the website like a certain hand pick, cask of like Old Forrester, for example, that we might only get 22 six-bottle cases out of or something. Like we can't put that on line because somebody's going to try to order it all, or it's just too much of a tease. We have 40 stores, so they'll get put to the stores. So your number one go-to is to go into the store and say, hey, I'm looking for hand picks as they come in, let me know. Yes. Number one go-to, always check in with the store, the local store you shop at most often. Let them know you're looking for any new hand picks, stuff like that. Option two, you can always email spirits at binnys.com and either Joe or I will get back to your email, let you know what's coming. Generally, a rough estimate of time as long as we have that available to us. The other option, you can always pick up the old telephone and call the Whiskey Hotline, 888-817-5898. We're there usually, but not always. Just to jump in and say, in general, best practice for customers, if you want something in one of our stores, engage the people in our stores. They're looking for customers to talk to all the time, whether it's beer, it's wine, beer. We want to talk to you guys about stuff. They're friendly. We are a friendly, entertaining, good-looking bunch. Some of those handpicks go quick, so that's why it's good to know. A lot of those handpicks do go really quick. For the other ones, there's not a bad handpick. Between today, we're recording this in early September. Between today and the end of the year, there's probably close to a hundred barrels of handpicked whiskey coming in to the stores. It's really crazy. It's a great project. Way to go, Pat. Check out binnys.com/spirits. There's a link in the menu at the top, you mouse over spirits, and it says handpick casks. Check it out. Look at the whiskey hotline on the web. Check out the whiskey hotline. Updated pretty much every week. Also, Pat Brophy's cell phone number is? 888-817-5898. Thanks for the question, Bob. Everybody else, could email us at comments at binnys.com or hit us up on social media. I have Binny's Beb on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Roger, Pat, thanks for bringing the rums. Yeah, our pleasure. Tiki time, baby. Love it. Wonderful. Rum, the most under appreciated. Arr. Oh, one more pirate joke? Yeah. Do it. How much did the pirate pay for his peg leg and hook? How much? An arm and a leg. All right. So that's been Rum Episode 2, Molasses Boogaloo. It's been a good time. We got some new rums in, some tiki drinks. I've really enjoyed sitting here while Roger made me drinks today. Really, really great time to be had by everyone. Hope you enjoyed listening to it. If you enjoy this content, please do us a favor, leave us a review on iTunes. So until next week, I'm Pat. I'm Roger. I'm Greg. I'm Barb. I'm Shannon. Keep tasting. Keep tasting. And it's driving me nuts.