La Revuelta Dark Rum Release

Maggie's Farm La Revuelta Dark Rum is now on sale at the distillery and online for public purchase for $35 plus tax. Here is the link where the rum can be purchased online for mail-order delivery within Pennsylvania and Washington DC ONLY. You must be 21 or older to purchase. Age will be confirmed by ID upon delivery.

La Revuelta has already won a gold medal at the New York World Wine and Spirits Competition. This is the rum where we've broken the expectations of "craft" in the spirits market. So, what is it?

La Revuelta, Spanish for "the revolt" or "uprising" (and, conveniently enough, a looser translation meaning "mixed") is our dark rum, one where we deliberately shifted away from craft spirits conventions to produce the best dark rum we could. We did this by mixing our own pot-distilled raw cane rum (all Maggie's Farm rums are distilled from turbinado sugar sourced from Louisiana) with a counterpart spirit, a Trinidadian rum column-distilled from a molasses fermentation. After some experimentation, we determined this aged, column-distilled rum was a perfect complement to our own. So, why did we do this?

Our recent success as a really small distiller for both unaged and aged rums quickly lead to the problem of a production pinch and the need for an expansion (one that's begun but has since been egregiously delayed by a certain public utility company screw-up that's now being handled by people with law degrees). The latest release of our aged Single Barrel rum, this year's ACSA Best-in-Show spirit, sold out in under four hours, and for the sake of doing what's best for that rum it's been decided that the Single Barrel will be rested for at least 2-3 years before another release. This put us in a position where we lacked any gold, amber, or dark rum among our flagship lineup (our aged Queen's Share rums aside), especially one good for mixing an entire genre of rum cocktails, but still good for sipping neat. I needed a solution.

As a craft distiller, selling spirits made by a another company under our own label (merchant bottling as it's sometimes referred to) is one that's frowned upon and a practice that I've never approved of myself... for one reason: The lack of transparency with most. Honesty and transparency in marketing have always been incredibly important to me. It's the lack of these traits that have always jaded me in my previous professions. Thus all La Revuelta bottles, branded differently than other Maggie's Farm rums, display prominently on every label the source of the rum blend and the exact mixture. And to maintain a satisfying degree of ownership, all La Revuelta rum contains no less than 50% of Maggie's Farm rum distilled in house. This has still allowed us to produce a dark rum with a degree of quality that I will put up against ANY rum, craft or import, within a reasonable $35 pricepoint.

So, as a blend, is this "craft"? We're pretty active on the spirit competition circuit, American craft and international. That being said, (now back to that transparency and honesty thing) I will not submit this in any American craft spirits competition that does not have a merchant bottling category (The American Distilling Institute has one and all international competitions are open to merchant bottlers). The American Craft Spirits Association, the non-profit trade organization representing American craft distillers has taken no stance on a definition for craft. "Craft is in the eye of the beholder," said Paul Hletko, ACSA president and formerly of the organization's ethics committee. So is La Revuelta a craft rum? La Revuelta is a rum we created from our own and one that I take great pride in its quality. At the end of the day is this a spirit made honestly that you love and was it worth what you paid for it? That's all that matters.

Tim Russell
Founder/Head Distiller/Head Janitor