Rum Runner

Located just outside Bridlington on the East Coast of England, the Twisted Roots Distillery is the only producer of rum in East Yorkshire, and also one of the very few in the entire country actually making rum from scratch, as opposed to buying in spirit from the Caribbean.

Piers Moat founded the small distillery in 2016 and uses dehydrated sugar cane juice from Mauritius along with extremely long fermentation periods with Champagne yeast. The pot still also runs for around 18 hours at a lower temperature, meaning dilution with water is minimal and flavour complexity is maximised.

The Dark Rum was originally marketed by Piers as his Spiced Rum, but he discovered that drinkers  would more often describe it as a stright dark rum due to Piers not wanting to go overboard with the 'spiced' element. As a result, he's rebranded this as a 'Lightly Spiced' Dark Rum.

And yes, there is a touch of soft spices - ginger, nutmeg, sweet cinnamon - but they are dark and deep. What comes to the fore is masses of molasses notes, treacle, dark caramel, cinder toffee. It's sweet and unctuous without being syrupy and overly sweet. For fans of Kraken this is absolutely the next level up - it sips incredibly well, goes with cola but also works in cocktails such as an Old Fashioned or even an Espresso Martini.