Hang on. A rum review on a gin review website?
Well, you’ll have to indulge me for this one! I might love my gin but, in late 2019, I took the plunge with a couple of spirits-loving friends (Chris and Neil) and decided to bring a new spirit to market. Gin or whiskey might have been the obvious choices for us to pursue (and we still might!), but all three of us share a passion for rum. So that’s where we’ve started our journey from interested outsiders to spirits market entrants.
How do you bring a rum to market?
That’s a good question and, in late 2019, we really didn’t know. I’ve been blogging about gin for some time, and Chris has some background in the whiskey industry, but we’d never done anything like this. The obvious thing was to set up a company – that’s actually the easy bit. However, we found ourselves plunged into a world of alcohol license applications (personal alcohol licenses that allow you to sell to the public; and seeking membership the of AWRS – alcohol wholesalers scheme that allows you to sell business to business) and the world of spirits duties, VAT, website development, brand development, trademarks and marketing. Oh, and the fun part of actually developing a new spirit! You can read more about that bit on the Timber Botanical Rum website.
Timber Botanical Rum review
Our aim for Timber Botanical Rum was for a drink that would appeal to a wide range of spirits drinkers. We wanted it to appeal to gin drinkers, rum drinkers and whiskey drinkers in particular. We also wanted it to be a spirit you can drink neat, but also one that would make for a great cocktail base. That’s why, with the help our distillers, we took the route of a botanical rum.
Like a gin uses a neutral spirit that’s distilled with botanicals (and the all important juniper), botanical rums like Timber take a base rum and are often re-distilled with chosen botanicals. For Timber Botanical Rum, dark Caribbean rum from Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Guyana is re-distilled with our carefully selected botanicals including raspberries, oak bark and kola nut.
On the nose, there are soft notes of honey and caramel to Timber. It’s slightly sweeter than a traditional rum, with a smooth, subtle heat with notes of toffee and hazelnut to taste. That smoothness is courtesy of that re-distillation mentioned and those botanicals; a year of recipe development went into getting the balance right for the final spirit.
Perfect neat, and a treat on the rocks, the signature serve for Timber is the TLC – a Timber, Lime and Cola. It’s also great as a cocktail base too – just as we’d wanted – and you can see some suggested serves here.
Thanks for reading this very self-indulgent review. Bringing Timber has been a labour of love for us, and we’re really proud of the result. We launched our online website and shop in late 2021 and have been delighted by the feedback we’ve been getting from customers. We’d love you to try Timber too; you can buy it from our shop here and it’s heading into a growing range of stockists too.
Cheers! Andy
