Hello, I am back from a busy summer and just as busy fall. It’s been a while since I have written anything so here I am on my day off doing just that.

Quite a while ago I came across a website (no longer running) that talked about spiced rums. Now I am sure we all love some great spiced rums and there are quite a few new ones that are coming on the market every other month it seems. But what this website did talk about was not just store bought spiced rums, but about spicing your own rum at home.

I read the article many times and on my way home from work that day I bought the ingredients and started spicing my own rum.  This is what you need to do to get started at spicing your own rum.

• A bottle of cheaper priced “Aged” rum. I used Appleton Estates Special Rum
• Whole Vanilla Bean - You can use pure Vanilla Extract, but do not use the imitation stuff. The whole bean is the best and you should be able to find it at better grocery stores or health food stores.
• Whole Cinnamon - Cinnamon is a strong spice and it can easily dominate over the other spices, so use it smartly.
• Whole Clove - Cloves will spice a rum up quickly so you only need one clove.
• Star Anise - Star Anise will give a black liquorice flavour to your rum.
• Nutmeg and Mace – Nutmeg is the signature spice of Grenada, it will put some character into your rum. Mace is a interesting flavour that I really like, but a little goes a long way.
• Allspice – Allspice adds a great flavour to the rum
• Peppercorn – you know what pepper tasted like, this will add a spicy heat to the rum. Be careful of how much you add and for how long. This should be added at the end.

Recipe for spicing your own rum:

Start with you Aged rum, pour out about 4 ounces into a smaller bottle or flask. You will use this for quality control. The best way to do this is to add one ingredient in at a time and then remove it once you are happy with what it’s done. For example, place in the vanilla bean into the rum, shake it up for a minute and let it sit for a day. The next day, have a sip of the rum, if you like what the vanilla bean has done, then you can remove it. Or leave it in for a few more days until you are happy with the flavour. Then add the next ingredient and do the same until you are finished with your own spiced rum.

Or, I started out that way, but I got impatient so I added everything over a two day period. Everyday I would shake up the contents and then have a small sip to see the progress. I would also have a sip of the 4 ounces of quality control rum to compair the flavour difference. After about 2 weeks, it got really spicy and I went to the next step. It can take 2-3 weeks to steep and infuse the rum with the spices you added. Be careful to not overdo the cinnamon.

Once you are happy with what you have spiced, you can leave the spices in and it will get more flavourful at the end or you can remove all the spices. What I did, is that I took some cheesecloth and layered it a few time then put it in a funnel. I did have a second bottle that I was going to put my new rum. But you can strain in into a big bowl as well.

Pour the rum into the cheesecloth and let it fully strain. You can do this a few times depending on the sediment in your rum. Rinse out the bottle of sediment, then you can pour your new spiced rum back into the bottle.

I did find that over a few months that my spiced rum “settled” down quite a bit. At first I wasn’t too happy with my rum, because it was very spicy and really intense. But it smoothed a lot over a few months, and I had my home spiced rum at one of my rum tasting events.

I hope you have fun trying this, once you have finished your rum, you will have more experience in this. Then you can tweak your next spiced rum to something else that you are looking for.

Here is the before and after photo of my own spiced rum.

Cheers!