Spiced Rum Cocktails

Spiced Rum is on the Rise! We’ve loved hearing from all of our Jacobite friends and customers over the last few months and it’s been great to share ideas on how you like to drink Scottish Spiced Rum! We’ve also had some requests to pull together some of our cocktails so that you don’t have to search our social media to find the recipes.

So, over the last few days we’ve put together some of our favourite cocktails so that you can try them for yourselves. Of course, we’d love to hear your own take on them and we encourage experimentation and design changes. We love that The Spirit of Rebellion can be so versatile.

Enjoy responsibly (ovbs) and drop us some pics of what you make. Thanks for the continued support and look forward to seeing what the Spirit of Rebellion inspires you to create.

Scottish Spiced Rum - Rum is perfect for cocktails

The blend of strong flavours in The 45 Scottish Spiced Rum makes it perfect for cocktails.

Why? Firstly, rum’s potential for diversity is greater than that of any other spirit in colour, aroma, and taste.

This has led to booming popularity amongst consumers of all ages. In particular, we have seen an interest among millennial consumers in the craft, artisanal approach of many small-batch distilleries and have seen them venturing into the space in great numbers.

Secondly, market demand for new cocktails and different drinking experiences has fuelled the gin boom and the rum expansion to date, with a high potential for further opportunities.

With rum being an integral part of one third of all cocktails sold, the taste is already there and the discerning cocktail drinker is opening up to new ways to taste rum.

This necessity, driven by a thirst for new cocktails, has led to innovation and there are now close to 200 brands of rum available, compared with just 50 in 2006.

In pubs, bars and restaurants, our willingness to experiment with new and exciting cocktails on a night out, which has helped gin to become so popular, is accelerating rum quickly up the charts.

It is earning Spiced Rum a growing proportion of a UK spirits market whose overall value increased nearly £1bn to £11.6bn in 2019.

Scottish Rum Distillery- origins story part 2.4

So this is a story all about how our lives got turned upside down...

But enough about lockdown.

Our lives had been turned upside down even before that - by Scottish Spiced Rum.

Who remembers the part of 2020 when we were still social drinkers, rather than social distancers?

Talking of drinkers, that’s how our company started out. Last year, eight friends with many things in common - including their appreciation of drinking - embarked on a mission; a mission to make Scottish Spiced Rum.

You can read more about that elsewhere but I’d like to share the story of how our dream suddenly got real, how we realised we’d outgrown our garden distillery (the rum shack), which was set up in a secret location on the outskirts of Glasgow in the shadow of the Campsie Fells.

We secured a suitable location for our new, bigger distillery in February, with grand views of the majestic M74 motorway that runs through the heart of Glasgow.

We are advocates of the ‘recycle reuse reduce’ philosophy and sourced our materials that way - from oak casks fetched from deepest Clackmannanshire to the steel tables where the rum-making magic now happens, found in the loft of famous Glasgow pubs such as the Horseshoe.

Luckily we have a man with a real job amongst us.

Stevie, armed with his welding mask and probably other bits & pieces, created some sensual video clips for us of sparks raining down everywhere. Think Magic Mike, only filmed in Rutherglen. And, happily, he also created some perfect distillery furniture in the process.

The distillery is now up and running - sadly, at the moment, in government-mandated single person shifts, and producing tons (not literally - yet) of the good stuff.

Most importantly the pirate flags have arrived - you can’t have rum without pirates - and adorn the wall to inspire us further. Once this lockdown finishes, we’re so getting the place properly designed! 

One day there will be tours but until then, if you want to be part of our Scottish Spiced Rum story, you know what to do.

(by Marcus)

Toilet Paper Alternatives for the Apocalypse!

As all good Jacobites know, the key to any disaster is survival.  And as the threat of Corona Virus spreads throughout the country and the masses have taken to panic-buying, we thought it would be useful to detail some of the tips that keeps Jacobites going with The Spirit of Rebellion, no matter the disaster. 

Surprisingly, the first item on on our list is not food, no, it’s the other end that starts our apocalyptic survival guide.  Nothing causes such feverish pangs of mortal fear amongst any good Jacobite as running out of bog roll.  Yes, as our graph shows, it’s only Germany and the USA that out-wipes us and true to form, the supermarket shelves are as bare as a team-full of Rugby arses on a coach outing to Leeds.  So, what are your options should the dreaded, cardboard tube appear too soon. 
Our research has shown there are many smart and many full-on, terrifying alternatives to the rolling, softened-paper sheet.  Our favourite list comes from Homestead Survival and some options might just surprise you (they definitely surprised us).

Number 1 on the list is the trusty newspaper.  Despite seeing a decline in sales over the last few years, the humble broadsheet or tabloid is the best alternative should you exhaust supplies of the good stuff.  We recommend rushing out to buy as many copies of The Daily Mail as possible, especially as we approach the climax of their endless Harry coverage.  Nothing better than a fulsome delivery cleaned up with a soon-to-be ex-royal.  Magazines on the other hand, well, we all know the shiny, tracing-paper texture of primary school toilet paper of the 80s and 90s…unless it’s a decent, heavy print like Cosmo, it’s probably going to make more mess than you started with.  

The list continues through the usual banal entries of Bidets- known to most as “holiday foot washers”- sponges on sticks, rag cloths and of course, the leftover, cardboard tubes but it definitely gets a bit more interesting further down the list.  Clearly written by a Male survivalist, he suggests using Sanitary products…erm, ok, but what if we run out of those, too, Rambo?! 

The charge into the ridiculous continues with Snow! First off, it mostly rains here.  Waiting for the first decent snow will not work and given that we are already into March, it’s only going to happen if we plan a barbecue in May.  Rope?! Rope!?! Yes, apparently the sailors out there managed a quick wipe on the way past before some poor deckhand found his hands, well, full.  
Yes, yes, of course, leaves we all know about- the famous Dock Leaf is not only regularly used to sooth nettle stings but it is also the ultimate, emergency wipe.  Millennials, probably need a bit of an elaborate introduction to this given the propensity of portable, synthetic “wipes” by the time they’d come along. We will leave it to you to discuss with any you know.

Corn on the cob was a bit of a curve ball but we expect the leaves could work, albeit slightly rough and oh, the irony of sweetcorn being part of the solution...
Finally, and perhaps our favourite is the inclusion of “receipts”. Yes, those overly-long stretches of worryingly shiny paper, spat out at you by machines after they do that “DO NOT CHALLENGE: CLEARLY OVER 18” bit at the self-service till.

For years, we have wondered in awe at the archive of receipts stored by our mothers. Covering transactions from antiquity such as "C&A Shiny Cardigan and Tie Combo” for the Christmas Disco circa 1989, “just in case it doesn’t fit” alongside “Pancake Place lunch, because I didn’t feel the toilets were very clean”. This finally explains the sense in all of the madness. Smart mums know best.  

So, you have some ideas. But there’s bound to be more out there. We ask you all, with the survival instincts of the Jacobites and sharing, The Spirit of Rebellion, what will you stockpile!
Watch out for our next instalment of “Survive” with The Spirit of Rebellion.