Spirited Union

Launching in 2019, Spirited Union is a distillery and cocktail bar in Amsterdam - solar-powered, the building itself is fully sustainable. Founder Ruben Maduro previously worked in the Dutch Antilles and the contacts he made there enabled him to source rums from a variety of distilleries, that he then redistills and macerates with a variety of ingredients to create a selection of botanical rums that offer a new dimension into the category. These aren't flavoured rums per se - in which the vast majority of brands will add artificial flavourings to the rum spirit before bottling. Similar to gin, Spirited Union use the rum as a base to then enhance through maceration and redistillation with quality botanicals, without the use of sugars and god knows what else.

Here, Jamaican rum is infused with Valencia and slightly more bitter Curacao orange peels, alongside fresh ginger root. The difficulty here is getting the freshness of the orange without being too sweet, the heat of ginger with being too fiery, and still letting that classic funky ester note of the Jamaican rum come through. And boy do they nail it. It's fresh, juicy, spicy and funky in one go, and a joy to drink with ginger ale - not a spicy ginger beer though, which combats a bit too much. Just a sipper on it's own out of the fridge - great stuff.