FAQ
How rum is made
Rum is made by harvesting sugar cane from tropical regions. This is traditionally done with machetes, but these days machines do the work. The leaves are removed and the long stems are sent to be crushed to squeeze out the delicious juice.
This juice is very sweet and gets sent to a sugar refinery such as Tate & Lyle in London, were they boil the sweet liquid until it starts to form what we know as sugar crystals, the crystals are spun to remove the remaining juice. Because of the boiling the juice has now turned black and is called molasses or black gold as it was known in the old days.
There was even a famous pirate ship named after it "Black Pearl". This thick black liquid is 70-80% sugar. The molasses gets transferred to distilleries were it is mixed with water and yeast. Fermentation takes about 3 days to complete before what is now known as the wash this is added to the still at 8-10% abv, the distilling takes about 4 hours from start to finish and what comes out is a clear rum at between 80-90%.
Next we take this new spirit and age it in oak barrels, we allow the spirit to sleep for as long as needed and when we are ready we wake it up for all to enjoy.
Are Sea Dragon rums made at the distillery?
Yes all the rum's we make are fermented, distilled, aged and bottled right here at Coles Distillery from molasses, yeast and water, making it 100% Welsh.
Do you use ordinary tap water?
No all the water we use comes from our own private well, that is over 300 feet below the distillery so the water we use is thousands of years old and it has been filtered through limestone rock, ask to try some if you visit.
What do you do to protect the environment?
All the ingredients we use are ethically sourced this allows us to have 100% traceability in our manufacturing, we also have a zero waste to landfill ethos Waste from the still gets used to make gas at a local anaerobic digester. The water we use to cool the condensers gets used to make the next wash.
Are you an innovative distillery?
I would like to think we are, as we are the first rum distillery in Wales to actually make its own rum as there are so many these days that just buy industrial rum add some welsh water from the tap and call it a Welsh rum.
Did you know?
white sugar starts its life as brown sugar but gets washed to clean it and this is what make it white sugar.