Spirit Hound Distillers Releases “Flood-Aged” Rum

20 Dec 2013 --- Spirit Hound Distillers is releasing the first bottles of its new Mountain Bum Rum. These debut bottles are filled from a single barrel of Mountain Bum Rum that was floating in the distillery during the historic floods that swamped Lyons last September.

“This rum,” says Spirit Hound distiller Craig Engelhorn, “is 80-proof and flood proof. It was aged in a used Buffalo Trace whiskey barrel for five months,” he says, “and for one day in flood waters. It’s like no other rum in the world.”

The first bottle of these specially marked “flood-aged” bottles will be donated to J.J. Hoffman, chief of the Lyons Fire Protection District, in recognition of his and his department’s efforts during the flood.

Bottles 2-24 will be signed by the District’s crew on Friday at 4PM at the distillery. These signed bottles will be auctioned off Friday evening and over the course of the next few days. All money from these 23 bottles will be donated to a fund to rebuild the District’s Lyons Fire Station #2 that was destroyed in the flood.

Ten percent of all subsequent sales of the flood-aged rum will also be donated to that fund.

Engelhorn says the rum was made of a 50/50 mix of Caribbean molasses and cane sugar, double distilled in the copper still he hand built for Spirit Hound.

Spirit Hound’s Neil Sullivan says the rum is especially significant. “This batch,”
he says, “commemorates what our distillery and the rum went through the past four months. We really hope these are ‘once in a lifetime’ bottles of Mountain Bum Rum.”

The barrel of flood-aged rum produced about 500 bottles of rum. Spirit Hound hopes to release more barrels of Mountain Bum over the next few months.