Gnightmare

This rum was the last of the required rums I had to be able to produce for me to feel like I had a complete plan. I felt like if I could not produce a dark rum then there was not enough of a product to even bother opening. I did a ton of research into the history of rum and how the primary varieties were made back in the day. The lore is incredible, I am not a history person but researching and reading the old texts was a lot of fun and very interesting to me.

One key piece that stuck with me during my research is the basic idea of where "Dark" rum came from. Long story short, the sugar producers while producing sugar from the cane would cook it in huge vats. On the edges of those huge vats would collect some of the juice, concentrated as the water evaporated it would eventually start to caramelize and burn. Well this burnt edge is no good to the sugar producers, you don’t want to taste burnt sugar in your white sugar bag. Well those employees that were making some rum on the side would take and add this burnt edge to it. This gave the rum a very distinct burnt sugar taste and darker color. This color is not always black or enough to color the whole bottle a dark color, in fact mine is only a medium color at best. Some variants would age their rum, further darkening the color, and many companies will add caramel color or other darkening agents to make it as dark as possible.

This variety was a fun one to name and create the art for. It was fast and just fell into place. The Gnightmare worked to play with the silent "G" which we are having so much fun with. The art is the result of an incredible artist who we later found out was from right next to where I grew up. I grew up in Eau Claire, WI and she was from Chippewa Falls, WI. She threw out an idea and we barely made any adjustments to the original.

This rum tastes our White Wizard and adds burnt sugar. The secret here is that I burn it myself. I have played with a ton of varieties here too. We added more or less sugar, some burnt and some plain, burnt sugar versus molasses. In the end a winner rose to the top and it was decided. Burnt sugar is not an easy ingredient and we have found that there is a fine art just in burning the sugar consistently to produce the same flavor time and time again. In the future I would like to explore some aging options with this one. There are still variables that I can play with to create new products.