Secret Distillery #8 14 Year Old (That Boutique-y Rum Company) 50cl, 65.7%

That Boutique-y Rum Company has bottled up a stunner here, hailing from an undisclosed Australian distillery. It’s given us a few clues – we know that the distillery is located in Queensland, it’s Australia’s oldest operating distillery, and it isn’t Bundaberg. That should give the rum Columbos out there something to work with.

Produced from Queensland molasses, fermented for 12 days before distillation, the rum was filled into a selection of American oak vats and casks in September 2007, where it remained for ten years. Towards the end of 2017, the rum was transported to the UK and filled into a fresh bourbon cask for its final four years.

The label features a marvellous boat with a distillery on board, it’s exactly the sort of unusual scene we’d expect to see on a Boutique-y label, but this time it isn’t made up! The S.S Walrus was a floating sugar mill that could be found sailing Queensland’s Albert and Logan rivers in the late 1800s, with its owner using excess molasses to produce rum.

Batch 1 is a release of 420 bottles.