Creating Rockfall Spiced Rum

Two years ago, we moved out of London to Buckinghamshire and had the brilliant idea to start a spiced rum brand. Easy-peasy we thought…we’ll make some amazing rum, build a website, and sell it, yeah?

We toasted this idea with a drink, not with spiced rum though. We’d already worked out from a blind taste test that most mass-market spiced rums taste like they’re setting fire to the back of your throat, and not in a ‘sipping a delightful aged whiskey’ kind of way.

It turns out starting a spirits brand is a lot of hard work, but when you’re as determined and as passionate about spiced rum as us, you’re willing to do it. You’ll even go to a rum festival in a town hall, wear a flower garland and drink many different varieties of rum with lots of strangers for your research. Rum drinkers are the best fun FYI!

Fast forward a LOT of months and we finally have a beautiful premium base rum in our hands. Ready for us to work our magic. So we bought a whole load of ingredients and started experimenting.

On our first date (some fifteen years ago) Tristan asked me “do you like food?”. Strange question I thought, but the answer was definitely yes. We love food and eating out and are both currently dreaming of a time when we can go out for lunches and dinner again. Tristan’s passion is cooking, and he is so knowledgeable about ingredients and flavours, so through years of training from him I feel confident I know what tastes great too.

Because our base rum was already so smooth, lots of combinations tasted ok, some quite nice, and some great. But even great isn’t amazing, so we had to keep plugging away drinking more and more spiced rum (such a hardship). Eventually we found two flavours we loved and had samples made of both.

When we received the two samples there was a stand-out winner. There was no contest, this spiced rum could be drunk neat with ice, stunning. Or when we added a mixer, still stunning. Or when we made a cocktail…you get the idea. Stunning.

So we had the perfect drink, and now we needed the perfect name. Weeks and weeks of indecision, seventy thousand names later, two days of calling it something completely different…

We had an epiphany…our rum should be called Rockfall.

Our rum is beautifully smooth and is best served on the rocks. The image of rocks falling down a mountain first led us to Rockfall. We could picture rocks of ice falling into a glass ready to pour a measure of our spiced rum. Even better it tied into the idea of our inspirational brand concept perfectly. The strong and powerful image of a mountain, evoking adventure and encapsulating a need for discovery.

We want people to be like us, to go out there and grab life by the horns, to not accept second-best, to explore the world, go and climb mountains (metaphorical or actual), to be risk-takers and make life changing decisions, be adventurous pioneers searching for the undiscovered, find that perfect view, build that perfect life. Wow I feel inspired all over again after writing that…

Life was pretty good:

We had moved from London to a beautiful village in Buckinghamshire…tick

We had decided to create a spiced rum brand…tick

We had designed a unique flavour which is so smooth it can be drunk on the rocks (or with a mixer, or in a cocktail…you can probably cook with it too, let’s say definitely. I’ll find a recipe for our next blog post.)…tick

The last thing was the name, Rockfall. If you’re going to make a drink that’s smooth enough to be drunk on the rocks, it needs rocks in the name right. Rockfall…tick.

All joking aside it really did feel like at that moment everything had come together perfectly to create the dream we had envisaged. And now, we like to talk about moments a lot, and #rockfallmoment(s) in particular.

However, after all that momentum had built, inevitably things slowed down again. Life got in the way, we moved house which created a delay, various setbacks, alcohol licence applications, Covid, home schooling, Covid and a bit more Covid.

The final hurdle was designing the bottle label for Rockfall. Tristan is an animator and trained graphic designer, so he’ll smash through a design in hours right…wrong. Designers are perfectionists and when it’s your own product you care even more. But we are quietly confident that the label design is spot on.

Throughout the last two years our desire, vision and focus have never wavered. Finally, we are here today with Rockfall spiced rum in our hands, ready to tell the world, asking you to give it a whirl and knowing that you’re going to love it as much as we do.