155: The Search for the Best American Rums with Mainland Rum's Seth Benhaim

Anyway, this, this was a, an interesting interview to do.

Just I was thinking today, uh, you know, before we hopped on, and I was thinking about, you know, my first foray into the world, uh, the, the rum content world was doing American Rum Report and just trying to read up on all these American distilleries making rum, making this big directory of all them.

There's hundreds of hundreds of distilleries.

Going to all these websites.

I still have all these, like, random names of tiny distilleries-

Yeah

... few people have ever heard of rattling around in my brain.

Yeah.

And I remember back then just thinking, like, "Man, there's so much of this stuff, and there's so little knowledge of so much of it out there." And, you know, then I got a little bit more into it.

I started trying some of them, and, and you discover some stuff that's really good.

You discover some stuff that's mediocre, some stuff that's bad.

And as I got deeper into it, I started wondering, like, I wonder when independent bottlers are, are gonna start trying to bottle some of this stuff.

And, you know, at that point, it was probably circa 2020, 2019, sometime around there.

And you really, you, not, not only did you not have an independent bottler, like, focused on these distilleries, you really didn't have any independent bottlers at that point, I wanna say, doing even, like, a single cask of American rum.

I remember it was a really big deal when Velier did their Privateer bottlings.

Oh, right.

I don't know if you remember the, they did the Habitation ones.

Right.

And they did some in the, the non-Habitation bottles as well.

Yep.

And that was, like, a big, big deal.

And I can't remember if that predated, you know, like, Holmes Key and kinda this, this new wave of American IBs that, that we've had.

And slowly but surely, you started to see s- some more of those IBs do some single casks.

I know Raising Glasses recently did a Rhumison-

Mm-hmm