Rum: Spice it Up to Create a Truly Unique Aroma and Taste

Captain Morgans Spiced Rum, and a couple of others, use to be the popular avenue chosen by anyone fond of spiced rums or trying to achieve a different vantage point on the old taste buds. As a way of offsetting or switching gears from rum complacency, many rums like Appleton and Bacardi, were passed over in favor of their cousin, the spiced rum. There are currently, over fifty different brands of spiced rums such as Voodoo, Sailor Jerry, The Lash, Foursquare, The Kraken, Brinley Gold Spice and Cruzan 9 Spiced.

Presently, rum has become so popular that it ranks third, behind vodka and whiskey, in the United States in terms of sales. With this comes a deluge of different brands, various blends concocted by master blenders and ages, as a direct correlation to the number of years the rum has been able to sit in oak barrels til maturity or the right flavor has been obtained.

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing better than a extremely smooth, 20 year old blended rum from Venezuela. In fact, a prestigious rum like that is meant to be drank neat, or with a couple ice cubes, not used to serve up a rum and coke. Sometimes a spiced rum may be in order, however,as a nice change of pace. There are two ways of going about this. You could head out to your local wine and spirit shop and purchase a bottle of spiced rum or you could be creative and concoct your own spiced rum.

Purchasing spiced rum is convenient, though their is such a broad spectrum when it comes to rums, you may need to try multiple brands to find your niche. Each spiced rum is different form the next. Some are more exotic and taste better than others. Some are infused with real spice and not imitation garbage. Some spiced rums are prepared in small volume dedicating time to create an extraordinarily rum instead of like an assembly line producing exuberant amounts of rum, often times, while overlooking quality.

The other alternative, is to create your own bottle of spiced rum. This is actually an easy alternative to the first scenario. It allows you to personalize your spiced rum based on your own taste preference. All that making your own bottle of spiced rum would entail is a bottle of rum and every day spices used in the kitchen. You can be as creative as you want and use any brand or kind of rum, though I would hesitate from using the more expensive aged rums and white rums which are either filtered or lack flavor due to reduced time to age in the aging room. A mid grade rum in the twenty dollar range should do just nicely. Now, the fun part in producing your own unique bottle of spiced rum.

There is no wrong way of creating your own personal kind of spiced rum. You really can't mess up like if you were baking a cake or preparing an alfredo sauce. Some of the spices that you may want to consider for your own spiced rum are cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, mace, vanilla bean, cloves and star anise. These spices compliment the flavor of rum exceptionally nice. The spices can offer a very nice detailed spiced rum with just a hint of these spices or you can really provide an intense flavor by adding more to your spiced rum concoction. There are two ways of intensifying the flavors of the spices employed in your personal bottle of spiced rum. You can either add more of the particular spice, or you can increase the amount of time that the spice is able to sit in your bottle of rum. That is all that it takes! Take the spices and throw them into the bottle of rum and let the flavors infuse the rum for a couple of days, or more, depending on the desired flavor and strength of the particular spice. The nice thing is that throughout the infusing period, you can taste your rum and determine when, or if you need to remove the spices at all.

I can tell you that cinnamon and cloves are very strong. A small amount goes a long way as does the amount of time you leave it in your bottle of rum. So, you will want to keep your eye on the cinnamon and clove part of your spiced rum. Use the whole cloves and the cinnamon bark as opposed to grinding these spices up. This allows you the flexibility to remove them easily and at any time from your spiced rum. As for the vanilla bean, all that is needed is, to cut the fresh bean lengthwise down the middle to let out the intense flavor of the seeds inside to be exposed to your rum. Star anise is a spice that tastes and smells like licorice and really adds a unique pungent flavor to rum. Mace is collected from the outer shell of nutmeg and is red in color, rich and fragrant, more so than the nutmeg itself. Allspice is like having nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves all in one. Allspice is the dried, unripe fruit of the pimento dioica tree grown in Mexico and Central America.

Creating your own spiced rum is as easy dropping the spices into a bottle of rum and let them sit there for a couple of days or not removed at all till the bottle of rum is gone. Again, the benefit in making your own spiced rum is that you can determine what goes into the rum and the time involved to produce the taste that is right for you.

Enjoy...