Exploring the Rums of Maine’s Newest Rum Distillery: Three of Strong Spirits
When Three of Strong Spirits opened in Portland, Maine, back in June, I immediately took notice for three reasons:
It wasn’t just a new American distillery that happened to be producing a rum—it was a new American distillery specifically focused on rum. While this doesn’t guarantee the rum will be good, the hit rate tends to be better with rum-focused operations than those that throw in a rum to fatten up their portfolio of spirits.
The founders, Sam Pierce and Dave McConnell, hired a head distiller with two decades of experience (Graham Hamblett, who was formerly head distiller at Dogfish Head Distilling after making wine and spirits at Flag Hill Vineyard and Winery).
They were launching with a somewhat unconventional lineup of rums (more on that in a minute).
In other words, Three of Strong had focus, experience, and novelty on its side from day one. So I was optimistic and interested in what they were making.
The only obstacles to actually experiencing the distillery’s rum were the 1,210 miles between my home in Nashville and Portland, Maine, and the arcane laws that make it exceedingly difficult for craft distilleries to sell and ship their products across the country.
Fortunately, Sam and Dave were kind enough to send me oversized samples of the distillery’s four-rum lineup in bottles that look delightfully undersized thanks to the full-sized labels affixed to them:
From left to right: Brightwater Rum, Stone Pier Rum, Parchando 12 (yes, it says Colombian Rum—as I mentioned, it’s an unconventional lineup for a freshly opened American rum distillery), and Merrymeeting Spiced Rum, the distillery’s latest release.
Below, I’ve written notes not only on each rum’s taste and characteristics, but also the approach Three of Strong took to creating each expression, and why they chose to produce each one the way they did.
#1: Brightwater Rum (Unaged, Pot Distilled)
Brightwater is Three of Strong’s current core rum expression. It has a base of food grade molasses and raw cane sugar that’s fermented over a week at a low temperature with wine yeast before it’s pot distilled and bottled unaged at 80 proof with no additives.
Why the combination of raw cane sugar and food grade molasses?
“We wanted to make a historical New England style rum, but there are a number of problems with that, not the least of which is that a lot of the historical New England rum was not very good,” McConnell said. “And second, the molasses in 1780 had a lot more fermentable sugar in it than commercially available molasses today.”
As for the decision to use wine yeast, that’s tied to head distiller Graham Hamblett’s background rather than any local rum-making traditions.
“Graham’s background is in wine making, so he wanted to bring out in a more gentle way some of those fruit and floral notes that the wine yeast gives,” McConnell said.
Whether owed to the wine yeast or not, there are certainly strong fruit notes on the nose of this rum—specifically, citrusy aromas of lime and orange peel. I also get agave in the background before familiar rummy notes of caramel and toasty sugar come through. The citrus sticks around on the palate while some subtle floral notes join in along with a marshmallow-like sweetness. It’s quite soft and the finish is brief, as you can expect from a young rum primarily intended for mixing.
They’ve stashed some of the distillate used in Brightwater in 25-gallon new American oak barrels from Kelvin Cooperage with a variety of char levels. The plan is to see which char levels they like the best and then move up to 53-gallon barrels when they’re confident they’ve found the right combination.
#2: Merrymeeting Spiced Rum
Three of Strong’s newest expression features the same based used in their Brightwater Rum, but this time rested in ex-Jamaican rum barrels with a variety of botanicals and spices that macerate for a brief amount of time before it’s bottled at 80 proof.
Distillers seem to increasingly be aiming for something beyond the basic “some rum + baking spices” formula that’s created a glut of predictable (and often overly sweetened) vanilla/allspice/cinnamon bombs on store shelves. As I mentioned in Report #17, there are more and more spiced rums hitting the market with an emphasis on botanicals and gin comparisons in their marketing.
While there aren’t references to either on the Merrymeeting label, they did come up when I talked to Hamblett about the process of creating the spiced rum:
“The inspiration was a lot of ingredients that I've come across over the years, especially from doing some gins. I had this filing cabinet in the back of my head of all these flavors that would be really cool to play together,” he said.
So which ingredients from his mental filing cabinet ended up in the rum? Some interesting stuff:
Rooibos tea
Ginger
Cardamom
Orange peel
Kaffir lime leaves
Fenugreek seed
Szechuan peppercorn
Beetroot
A touch of raw sugar
I am not a tea aficionado, but tea was the first thing that stood out when nosing this rum. Then came the citrus and more traditional notes of cinnamon and ginger. Everything’s there on the palate, and you even get that unmistakable tingle that comes from Szechuan peppercorn as it fades.
It’s sweet by design, but not overly so. An ice cube is your friend if you want to balance that out and sip it by itself. Of course, as is the usual intent with spiced rums, it got even better when I tried mixing it with a few usual (and a few not-so-usual) suspects.
I started where I always do when mixing a new rum: a daiquiri.
The citrus brought out certain flavors that were more subtle when tasting the rum neat, particularly ginger and cardamom. It worked, but a citrus-forward cocktail didn’t feel like the best way to really unlock Merrymeeting’s potential.
In Coke, however, it felt completely at home. The combination took on the characteristics of a sweeter amaro, like Averna. It’s the spiced-rum-and-coke for people who don’t drink spiced-rum-and-cokes. In fact, if I regularly stocked Coke in my fridge, I’m almost certain it would quickly earn a spot in my pantheon of go-to “I’m feeling lazy” drinks.
But if I had to pick one drink in which this spiced rum truly shined, it would be the one I least expected: hot chocolate.
The inspiration here was the verte chaud (AKA hot chocolate + green chartreuse). While I wouldn’t describe Merrymeeting as similar to green chartreuse, it does possess certain similar qualities—it is herbal, it is rootsy, and at 80 proof, it has enough heft to balance out its sweeter qualities.
As much as I’ve recently learned I love verte chauds, green chartreuse is so damn expensive I’m usually hesitant to make them. The rest of this sample of Merrymeeting will undoubtedly stand in to create a few more cups worth of this affordable alternative. Given the reddish hue owed to the beetroot and rooibos tea, perhaps an appropriate name would be the rouge chaud?
#3: Parchando 12 Colombian Rum (Aged 12 years, column distilled)
Parchando 12 is a molasses-based, column-distilled rum sourced from Casa Santana distillery in Barranquilla, Colombia, where it spent 12 years aging in used bourbon barrels.
Why is a rum distillery in Maine selling an aged Colombian rum alongside its own? According to McConnell, it’s to give customers a roadmap to the quality of aged rum Three of Strong would like to offer one day.
“We came to the decision pretty early on that we wanted to provide an aged product that was aspirational for where we want to be,” he said.
While some might interpret this reasoning as window dressing on an excuse to quickly expand their portfolio of spirits, I think there’s more to it. American rum distilleries are, in a sense, little rum embassies. For most customers walking through the doors for a tour and tasting, it’s the first time they’re really learning about what rum is and what it can be beyond whatever bottom shelf brands they associate with memories of their college dorm’s bathroom floor. Whatever they taste and learn at their local small distillery impacts their perception of the entire category, for better or worse.
By offering them an example of a long-aged, imported rum with no additives, you’re not just selling them on that particular bottle—you’re selling them on the potential of the entire category.
“The concept of sipping rums, for most of most of our non-industry friends, is fairly uncommon. It's not something that people associate with rum,” Pierce said.
Parchando 12’s job is to make sure those same people do start thinking of rum as something to be sipped. And for that job, it’s suited fairly well.
If the rums you’re used to enjoying neat are heavy-bodied, cask-strength flavor bombs, it might not offer the level of intensity you crave. But if you’re newer to rum, or sipping spirits neat in general, it’s a nice introduction to what you should expect from an unadulterated, long-aged rum. You get classic notes of toffee, dried fruit, coffee, and a bit of chocolate on the finish, without anything punching you in the face. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of rum I could see opening the uninitiated drinker’s eyes to the category. And it’s likely to continue playing that role for Three of Strong for at least a few more years.
“Until we've got something that is, maybe not 12 years old, but of an aged quality that's similar to this, we'll continue to source product,” McConnell said.
I’ll also add that it made a phenomenal rum old fashioned, which I appropriately enjoyed on the couch, on a Saturday, with the afternoon sun going down.
#4: Stone Pier Rum (Blend of pot and column distilled rums)
Stone Pier is a blend of Three of Strong’s Brightwater rum and a five-year-old rum that’s also sourced from Casa Santana in Colombia. Like the rum in Parchando 12, the five-year-old is also molasses based and column distilled.
Besides just giving Three of Strong a rum that plays well in cocktails calling for a lightly-aged rum, it also, much like Parchando 12, can play an instructive role for visitors to the distillery. When you taste it alongside the young, pot-distilled Brightwater and aged, column-distilled Parchando 12, it gives you the chance to experience the nuances of two distillation methods in a new context. Rather than just comparing and contrasting, you can see what happens when the two work together.
To McConnell, that’s the whole point.
“I'm not embarrassed or put off personally by blended products because I think there's something really amazing that can happen when you blend a column stilled and a pot stilled rum,” he said. “Because we don't have a column here, I could see us continuing to source column stilled product even after we've got our own aged product.”
Mini daiquiris had to be made for the sake of comparison.
What’s Next for Three of Strong Spirits?
Beyond an aged expression to watch out for in the next few years, a closer potential release could make an already unconventional lineup even more unconventional.
Through a few connections, Dave and Sam got in touch with a company in Louisiana that’s developed a way to stabilize fresh cane juice and prevent it from fermenting (to their knowledge, the process involves a type of flash freezing). They received a small shipment of around 80 gallons that was enough for Graham to make a test batch, and seem pleased with the results.
If it goes to market, it will add another interesting twist on the tagline printed on the back of their labels, underneath the logo: from cane to Maine.
