Until recently, pretty much all rum in Australia was made from molasses, as is 97% of the world’s rum.
But it turns out molasses isn’t the only thing you can use to make rum - so discovered our Founder Paul Messenger during an island-hopping adventure through the Caribbean in 2009.
On the French island of Martinique, Paul found himself sipping a Ti punch in a small coastal bar on the rugged north coast in the shadow of Mount Pele on a lazy, summer afternoon with a gentle breeze wafting across the Atlantic coast.
The locals at the bar proudly proclaimed that their rum, commonly known as Agricole rum, was the Best Rum in the world.
“After a while I began to see what they were talking about – this bright, clean, heady spirit was unlike any rum I’d tasted before.”
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While you can make rum from molasses anywhere in the world all year round, you can only make cultivated rum where sugar cane grows and then only during the harvest season. In Australia, that means along the 2,100km coastal plain from Grafton, NSW to Mossman in north Queensland.
So in 2009 after returning from the Caribbean with a dream of creating an Australian Agricole rum, Paul and wife Mandaley were strongly drawn to the Tweed Valley, northern NSW.
Growing up just across the border and completing his thesis on the volcanoes of eastern Australia, the geologist in Paul saw something about this place, that he knew so well from his childhood, that just made so much sense when it came to making rum with terroir.
The farm they chose at Tumbulgum is situated in the eroded core of the once mighty Tweed Shield Volcano; where 23 million years ago a giant edifice rose 2 km above the coastal plain at its focal point Mt Warning/Wollumbin.
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Ten years of research and development has resulted in Husk Rum - anAustralian expression of this unusual style produced in one of the most dramatic and beautiful locations on earth.
The original concept was to grow select varieties of local sugar cane, chosen for the drinking quality of the extracted juice, to crush the cane, ferment and distil the juice, then barrel age the rum and years later bottle each batch - all on the farm at Tumbulgum.
But if Paul thought this would be easy he would need to think again.
Every step of this farm to bottle process would ultimately be re-thought, re-engineered or re-created from scratch to adapt to the people and place of this Caldera Coast.
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Rum is an incredible varied and dynamic spirits category, with lots of variation and variety of flavour.
For molasses rums the taste we are most familiar with in Australia is characterized by heavy and sweet notes of sticky toffee and vanilla for dark aged rums, while white rums usually have a very light flavour profile.
By comparison, cultivated rums are vibrant, complex and fruity. They tend to have an earthy or grassy character and are typically dry rather than sweet.
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When we set about creating a new style of Australian rum, we naturally wanted to learn from the success of these prestige international spirits.
To that end we registered a trademark with IP Australia and a set of rules that define where and how rum can be made to called Cultivated Australian Rum.
In essence, the rum must be made from 100% fresh cane juice of known cane varieties in a Recognised Australian Cane Growing Region between Grafton, NSW and Mossman, QLD.
It must be unadulterated with no added sugar, flavours, spices or additives.
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