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You are what you eat. And we say, you are what you drink too. So it’s only right you know exactly what goes into our rum, just like you know exactly what goes into your favourite foods. Our pal Pete, from thefloatingrumshack.com, made an excellent point:

“Even bottled water has a composition analysis. But pick up a bottle of rum and you’ll find a list of ingredients is absent. Is that OK? I mean it’s just rum, right? Well, I don’t think it is. Rum and other bottles of spirits shouldn’t need any kind of contents list - it should be Rum and water and nothing more; But more often than we’d like, we find sugar, vanillin, and other ‘flavours’ (or ‘adulterants’ they should be called) when an analysis is made. In an era when the regular consumer wants to know exactly what's in their glass, the fact that these sorts of things are still being hidden is pretty damn frustrating, and I don’t like it”

And Neither. Do. We.

*HOLLERS RUM WAR CRY*

In the rum world, you could be forgiven for thinking that there are no rules.

Pete say’s “The Rum world is often described as the Wild West, devoid of rules and law and order.” and of course we’ve heard that as well “But the reality is that every Rum producing location will have its own set of regulations governing production” Peter thinks that sometimes the basics can be quite different country to country. In one place the entirely sensible notion of age statements being based around the youngest component in the blend. In some countries average age and solera statements are permitted, but unless the consumer knows that, or knows what to look for it’s going to be potentially very misleading. There are plenty of styles and production techniques out there, they just don’t have an overriding classification system that truly works (more on that in another blog post).

It’s true a whole rainbow of rums bless the shelves but, more often than not, you won’t get the lowdown on any additives thrown into the mix. Sure, they’ll say it’s just a case of a drop of caramel here, a sprinkling of sugar there - what’s the difference? Oh yeah, great fun but, just how much?

We all know (and if you didn’t, you do now) that a factor in rum colour is the use of spirit caramel, or E150A. Using a little more than needed and you’ll see a change in the Rums complexion. We asked ourselves, is it being darkened to deceive?

Now we’re not on the sugar-hate train, no sir. We love variety as much as the next person but, what we are going to do, is tell you all about it - all the contents. This means you can make the best choice for your rum consumption, just like you would expect from your food.

We have nothing to hide, we’ll shout it from the rooftops: “OUR RUMS TASTE FANTASTIC” - there, that’ll show them.