Cotton & Reed Distillery

What'll it be?

Up next on the Three-Day Weekend Three-Rum Release agenda:⁠
⁠
QUEEN'S SHARE RUM

Rum nerds, assemble!

Normal people, a brief primer. What is Queen's Share? Batch distillation generally results in the collection of three different liquids:

1. Heads: The most volatile stuff. Contains a bunch of compounds that are much worse for you than ethanol. We don't let this into our products.

2. Hearts: The bulk of the distillate. Mostly ethanol. When you drink our rum, it's pretty much hearts that we proof down, age, flavor... whatever the case may be.

3. Tails: The heaviest stuff. Contains some ethanol, some nasty compounds, and some of the richest, rummiest, heaviest flavors and oiliest textures.

Queen's Share is the rum term for re-distilling the tails in order to capture the rich flavors and aromas in there, separating them from the undesirable elements of tails. It's kind of the rummiest rum.

After two years in a used bourbon barrel, this Queen's Share Rum is ready to rock at 54.5% Alc. / Vol. She's a sipper, she's a keeper, she's a queen.

Other than the Emu collab with Silver Lyan last year, this is our first ever Queen's Share release. Usually we use this precious juice as a blending ingredient across our other bottlings. If you all like this one, maybe we'll keep it going.

This drops on Sunday May 26, along with Mango and White Gold Rum. Preorder at link in bio.

Up next on the Three-Day Weekend Three-Rum Release agenda:

WHITE GOLD RUM

It's an amburana barrel-rested 47.5% Alc. / Vol. stunner that lands halfway between our White Rum and our Gold Rum while somehow being all its own.

Our Gold Rum gets some of its character from about 1% of its blend spending 3+ years in barrels made from an overwhelmingly pleasant-tasting wood called amburana. It's a spicy, vanilla-y, floral hardwood from Brazil that gives spirits a ton of flavor in a brief resting period usually measured in weeks.

To produce White Gold, we rested our White Rum in an Amburana barrel for just two weeks, then bottled it at 47.5% Alc. / Vol. That's it. You will be amazed at how much the Amburana contributes in that brief time.

It retains the light-medium body of our White and its signature fruity-marshmallowy character, but layers on a ton of floral vanilla spice. We hate to keep saying "make it into a daiquiri" but honestly what you should do with this is... make it into a daiquiri. It's delicious.

Dropping this Sunday, May 26. Preorder at link in bio.

First up on our Three-Day Weekend, Three-Rum Release docket:

🥭 MANGO 🥭

You know how our Coconut Rum is real good? And you know how you wish there were more flavored spirits out there that tasted like real stuff? Well, while you arguably wasted a third of the the opportunity afforded by that genie you found, consider the wish fulfilled.

We make this in much the same way we make the Coconut. We macerate our unaged rum on a startling amount of the best dried mango we can get our hands on for a few days. We add a bit more rum, filter it, and add a touch of sugar. All the color and all the mango flavor come straight form the Mango.

Bottled at 40% Alc. / Vol. Just 240 bottles made.

It has mango's acidity, an undeniable mango flavor, and a pretty cute label. You'll crush it in daiquiris with enthusiasm.

Summer starts Memorial Day Weekend. We're helping it get off on the right foot by dropping three limited release rums:

MANGO
WHITE GOLD RUM
QUEEN'S SHARE RUM

The Three-Day Weekend Three-Rum Release Party is this Sunday May 26, with cocktail specials starting at 3 PM. The release party will also be a celebration of our White Rum's Platinum Medal from .

Stay tuned this week for more details on each rum.

Pre-order here: https://www.giftrocker.com/secure/Order/?hash=17cba33d

Want to join our team?? We’re hiring full- and part-time bartenders.

The pay is weirdly good, there’s a health plan, there’s a 401(k), we’re doing all that stuff the industry should probably already have been doing for a long time.

Get your resume to [email protected].
Or tag your pal who should get their resume to [email protected].

🎤 Tap tap... 🎤 ahem...

Our White Rum just won an unprecedented 🏅PLATINUM MEDAL🏅 at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition. We've won great accolades in recent years, but this one is genuinely staggering.

SFWSC is called “the Oscars of Booze” for good reason. Its judges are renowned, its medals carry some weight in the trade. When the dozens of judges tally up their blind tasting scores, spirits with average scores above a certain threshold earn Gold, scores in a lower range earn Silver, and so on. Double Gold winners receive not just a Gold-level average, but a Gold-level score from every single taster.

Platinum medal winners are those rare spirits that earn Double Gold for THREE CONSECUTIVE YEARS. This means that for three consecutive years, our little DC-made domestic rum has received exceptional ratings from every single judge that tasted it.

This is a testament to the hard work, dedication, and talent of our incredible team. Thank you to every single person who contributed to this!

SFWSC's website is not cooperating with our search for precedents, but we're confident that no Platinum Medal has ever before been awarded to a White Rum category. Cotton & Reed could not find an announcement of any rum previously winning a Platinum medal at SFWSC, but Worthy Park’s Single Estate Reserve at least should have earned the award in the “Extra Aged Rum” category in 2020.

CLOSED SUNDAY 4.28.24

Due to a cool private party. You can rent us out too, you know. We host events both large and small. We've even been known to do medium ones on occasion.

runs our bar program, and appears to be thinking about offering truly large-format cocktails. Anybody order 275 gallons of rum punch?

Wondering what's shaking this weekend? The answer, as always, is Daiquiris.