The day after the Iron TikiTender competition at TikiKon 2014, Mrs. Cocktail Wonk and I had an afternoon to spend in Portland. We made the requisite trip to Pok Pok for amazing Thai food, and the rest of the afternoon was spent at the Pearl Specialty Market and Spirits, as well as several distilleries. Portland has become a hotbed of small producers, and six of them are close enough to have banded together as a collective known as Distillery Row.
On this particular Sunday, we had the opportunity to go behind the scenes at Eastside Distilling with the owner, Lenny Gotter. At the end of our visit, Lenny generously provided me with bottles of the Below Deck Silver Rum and the Burnside Oregon Oaked Bourbon. In this post I’ll cover the Silver Rum, while a subsequent post will cover the Oregon Oaked Bourbon.
Although Eastside Distilling is only six years old, they have a fairly large and diverse product line. Most of their operations including fermentation, distilling, and bottling fit within a medium-sized room at the back of a single-story industrial building. There are numerous big blue plastic vats containing mash and distillates that take up a big chunk of the room. Eastside has an interesting, locally built still setup utilizing 100, 35 and 8 gallon kettles. In addition there’s both pot and column still “heads” which can be fitted to any of the kettles. The output from one head can be fed into the kettle of another to create a multi-still configuration.
The Silver Rum is distilled using a pot still configuration up to 65% ABV before being bottled without aging. Lenny told me that he has aged some of his rum, but not yet released any as of yet. As it is now, his existing barrel space is primarily devoted to whiskeys, but he’s considering the future release of an aged rum after he acquires more space for barrels.
To my taste, the Silver Rum is on the slightly sweet side relative to other silver rums and has a subtle fruity essence. To validate my initial tasting notes, I had a friend blind-taste the Eastside Silver Rum, Bull Run Distillery’s Pacific Rum (also from Portland), and Cana Brava, an aged, filtered white rum from Panama which I’ve covered recently. Although these three rums are substantially different in how they’re made, they are good representations of the spectrum of the non-blended white rum used in cocktails. My friend and I agreed that the Eastside rum was the sweetest of the three and was smoother than Pacific Rum. Separately I put it side by side with the well-regard Plantation 3 Stars Silver Rum and was surprised at how similar they were. At $18 per bottle, I’ll happily use the Eastside rum in daiquiris, mojitos, and similar cocktails.
To take the Silver Rum out for a spin, I chose a daiquiri variation I particularly enjoy, using both a spiced-infused syrup and maraschino liqueur:
Eastside Daiquiri
- 2 oz Eastside Silver Rum
- 1/2 oz lime juice
- 1/4 oz Clement Sirop de Canne
- 1/8 oz maraschino
Shake over ice, strain into a chilled coupe.
While you could use 2:1 simple syrup here, the Sirop de Canne makes it substantially better, and it’s worth the effort to find it at around $15 per bottle. The Clement website describes it thusly: “…fresh pressed sugarcane juice is slowly reduced down over a low temperature with a maceration of crushed rolls of cinnamon, pulverized cloves, and cracked vanilla beans to make our spiced sugarcane syrup.” In short, yum! You need this!
Besides the Silver rum, Eastside also offers other rums that start from a base of the Silver–Spiced, Ginger, and Coffee. I found their taste to be pleasing and nicely restrained in sweetness, i.e., they weren’t sugar-bomb liqueurs. I could easily picture experimenting with them to come up with some interesting cocktail recipes.
Eastside Distilling currently has distribution within Oregon and Washington State, and their spirits are offered in a number of restaurants and bars (listed on the Eastside web site). And as mentioned earlier, stay tuned for a post covering Eastside’s Burnside Oregon Oaked Bourbon.
