Maggie’s Farm
In the News
Over 3,000 spirits, including several hundred rums, are judged each year at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition (SFWSC)
The SFWSC is the oldest spirits competition in the US, dating back to 1980, and the second oldest in the world. Its judges include some of the world’s leading experts. The competition has an unrivaled reputation for the quality of its judging, as well as for the scope of the categories of spirits that it judges…
Most of the recent entrants have been pineapple-flavored rums, often nodding to the influence of Tiki culture. Consider Tiki Lovers pineapple-flavored rum by Germany’s Bitter Truth, wherein aged and unaged rums are “infused and rested” with pineapple extract. Or Cutwater’s Bali Hai Tiki pineapple-flavored rum, a flavored gold rum that was released in 2018. These rums all signal the Stiggins influence, from the dark rum hue to the more nuanced pineapple and less sweetness compared to traditional flavored rums.
But one in particular, Maggie’s Farm 50/50 pineapple rum from Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Distilling, makes it clear that it pays homage to Stiggins, seeking to make a craft version of the popular pineapple rum. The new bottling was released in December 2018…
Even if you don’t typically drink rum, it’s worth giving it a shot at this new rum distillery hidden behind the Strip District. These small batch distillers make a handful of white and brown rums in various alcoholic strengths, none of which are cloying. The staff holds regular tastings and recently opened a long bar and added a couple of tables from which you can watch the young rum distillers, the first in Pittsburgh, work their magic.
Excerpt from Article by Bob Batz Jr., Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Hidden Harbor, the tiki bar in Squirrel Hill that has some national acclaim, will be pouring a special rum starting with the party celebrating its third anniversary Saturday night.
The owners collaborated with award-slaying Allegheny Distilling, aka Maggie’s Farm Rum in the Strip District, to create Hidden Harbor White Rum. It’s a custom blend of 80 percent Pittsburgh and 20 percent assorted Caribbean rums meant to sing in daiquiris and other tropical cocktails.
Excerpt from Article by Maggie Weaver, Pittsburgh City Paper
Rum is the new whiskey. Forget Captain Morgan and Bacardi — it’s not college anymore — this rum is for sipping, not chugging.
Thanks to a trio of Pittsburgh distilleries, Wigle Whiskey, Maggie’s Farm Rum, and Kingfly Spirits, rum is headlining the next spirit obsession.
Each distillery takes a unique refining approach. It’s the diverse spice bill that sets regional rum apart from its commercial relatives. Pittsburgh’s distilling triad focuses on intentional flavor, rising above the typical over-sugared party spirit.
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Maggie’s Farm Rum
About five years ago, Maggie’s Farm Rum debuted its first spirit, an unaged white rum. A few months later, using the young rum as a base, Tim Russell and his team bottled a spiced rum.
Maggie’s Farm spiced rum (the world’s highest-rated in rums submitted to The Spirit Journal) infuses the signature turbinado sugar-rum base with a long list of spices, holding to the distillery’s all-natural mindset. There are no added sugars, extracts, or artificial flavors, each sip fragrant, dry, and balanced.
Photo: Rachel Vanni/Tasting Table
Spirits are typically “cut” into parts after distillation: heads, hearts and tails. The hearts usually get bottled, while the heads and tails may be discarded or blended into new batches. Mixing subpar portions with the hearts helps produce higher yields. But Privateer and award-winning, Pittsburgh-based Maggie’s Farm Rum use a method called Queen Share. They collect batches of tails only—“the really heavy, funk, oily portions,” Maggie’s Farm Rum owner Tim Russell says—and redistill them for a smooth, rich and intensely flavored rum.
Excerpt from article by Rachel Spiegel.
Photo by Jessie Wardarski/Post-Gazette
Article by Bob Batz Jr.
With beer and wine, yeasts turn the sugars in the solution — a grain tea or a fruit tea, if you will — into alcohol that people consume with the rest of the liquid. It’s the same thing with spirits, except that the fermented solution is almost boiled to extract the concentrated alcohol, which then frequently is aged in wooden barrels or otherwise for additional flavor.
Article by Tony Sachs, Liquor.com
Rum is finally becoming respectable. Not that the best of it hasn't always been worthy of respect, of course. But for long as the most decrepit boozehound can remember, rum has gotten the short shrift in the spirits world. It's the stuff you put in frozen daiquiris, the stuff that has a monochromatic vanilla flavor, the stuff that's too sweet and goopy to be taken seriously. And there's still plenty of that kind of rum out there. But as happened with American whiskey over the last 10-15 years, the hardcore fans, the connoisseurs, the geeks, are coming out of the woodwork and into the blogosphere and chat rooms and social media. They're the ones who are, more and more, dictating the conversation about rum. And they're steering us away from the more unsavory brands and towards the good stuff.
These seven aged rums are, in my opinion, the good stuff. For those who came of age thinking, as I did, that syrupy sugar-added brands like Angostura or Diplomatico were the best of the best, the flavor of some of these may come as a bit of a shock — something like a Johnnie Walker Red fan trying an Islay single malt for the first time. But they're all terrific, each in its own distinctive way. They run the gamut, taste-wise, from smooth and approachable to the potable equivalent of riding a bucking bronco, with lots of interesting stops in between. They're made all over the map, from the Caribbean to the Alleghenies. And they all point away from Captain Morgan and the like, towards the future of the rum category. At least I hope so. (N.b.: I've listed the rums in ascending order of price. The only downside to rum gaining whiskey-like levels of appreciation and respect is that it's getting more expensive, too. But compared to single malts or high-end bourbons, these bottles are still a relatively good deal.)
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Maggie's Farm Queen's Share Rum (Sher- Rye Finish) (55% ABV, $65). Made in Pennsylvania, Maggie's Farm is an oddball even for rum, which is perhaps the most oddball of booze categories. Their rums are distilled not from cane juice or molasses, but from raw turbinado sugar. And their "Queen's Share" rum is so called because it uses the "tails" —the last part of each run of liquid through the still — from multiple runs, which are then combined and redistilled. In other words, it's the hearts of the tails. The tails have a lot of flavor, but they've also got a lot of congeners, or the stuff that gives you a hangover. This combo of rye barrel-finished and sherry cask-finished rum is aged for about two years before blending; The rum's natural sweetness, matched with the spiciness of the rye influence and the dry nuttiness of the sherry, is fascinating. It's definitely a young'un — a wee bit hot and unbridled — but I kept going back to it in hopes of getting a handle on it... or maybe I just wanted to keep drinking the stuff, I'm not sure. Oh, and no hangover resulted, in case you're wondering. Maggie's Farm makes plenty of other products, including a fantastic rum-based coffee liqueur and a falernum. I'm looking forward to checking out the lot.
Article by Kristy Locklin
Tim Russell can relate to Bob Dylan.
Bored by the 9-to-5 grind, he decided to take a cue from “Maggie’s Farm,” the folksinger’s freewheeling anthem, and find something more meaningful to do with his life.
He found a reason in rum.
Today, he’s the owner of Allegheny Distilling, producer of Maggie’s Farm Rum, some of the most awarded spirits in the United States.
Photo by Philip Friedman
It’s official: 2017 is all about rum. From classic formulas to bottles that tinker with its time-tested blueprint, here are our current favorites…
Article by Emma Janzen
When Wayne Curtis’ book And a Bottle of Rum was published in 2006, it sparked a trend of spirit-focused books. Ten years and 14 editions later, we caught up with Curtis—also an Imbibe contributing editor—to chat about how the rum category has evolved in America since the book was released.
Imbibe: What sparked your interest in writing a book on rum?
Curtis: I wasn’t much of a spirits or cocktail drinker, but I was very interested in American history. I had been working for Preservation Magazine for a few years as a contributing editor, and rum just kept cropping up. I’d see it mentioned in connection to the slave trade, the American revolution, piracy, etc. I went to see if there were any books on it, and there was one from the ’60s or ’70s that was decent, but I thought it could use a more “popular history” approach. I thought it would be fun to spend a couple of years researching it, found an agent who agreed with me and then a publisher signed on, too.
Serious rum lovers spend a fair amount of time bashing the decisions of both major and minor rum producers. It’s a natural thing to do when you care deeply about something you perceive to be in jeopardy.
And while it’s important to call these folks out for moves that negatively impact the category, that negativity can snowball to a point where the positives are lost. I am as guilty of this as anyone in the rum community, so I thought I’d take some time to highlight some of the positive movements in the rum market right now.
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3. More Great Domestic Rum
Early in the craft spirits boom, a lot of distilleries were putting out rums that were pretty terrible. Those days are (hopefully) coming to an end now, and we are seeing a host of really respectable offerings from domestic rum makers. Examples include Siesta Key, Maggie’s Farm, Treaty Oak, KoHana, Lost Spirits, Privateer, and Malahat.
Article by Margaret Ayala
Q: What is your full name, title, company name and company location?
Tim Russell, Founder and Head Distiller, Allegheny Distilling, 3212A Smallman Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit about Allegheny Distilling and what inspired you to start your own distillery?
We’re the first commercially-available rum to be made in Pennsylvania since Prohibition. All of our rums are a little different in that, rather than molasses, we’re using 100% turbinado, a raw sugar that we source from a farm in Louisiana. All of our rums are pot distilled on 100% copper pot stills imported from Spain.
I had always had a passion for brewing beer and considered opening a brewery. Conveniently, the state of Pennsylvania opened up legislation to allow craft distilling to become a viable enterprise at right about the same time I had lost my job as a project manager for a defense contractor that had just gone through a large buy-out. So I decided it was a good time to go for it, and at the time, the only spirits being produced in Pennsylvania were whiskey and vodka. I knew I had to do something different.
Ernest Hemingway put away 15 frozen daiquiris in one sitting, while John F. Kennedy sipped daiqs when he beat Nixon in the 1960 presidential election—at least according to legend. Today, daiquiris are the beloved beverage of cocktail aficionados and wannabe vacationers to the newly reopened Cuba. Below, every single thing you need to know about one of the most classic of classic cocktails—history, tips and techniques, recipes, and variations.
Article by Bob Batz, Jr.
Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania distillers cleaned up in this year’s American Craft Spirits Association Spirits Judging Awards, where a rum made in Pittsburgh was named the best spirit of them all.
Allegheny Distilling, the Strip District maker of Maggie’s Farm Rum, won the big one -— best of show spirit -— with its Maggie’s Farm Single Barrel. That rum won the gold medal for rum, as did its Queen’s Share Rye Oak Aged Rum.
The Single Barrel also was named best of class rum and best in category -- a subset under best of class -- for aged rum.
Tim Russell’s distillery also won silver medals for Maggie’s Farm Queen’s Share Unaged Rum and Queen’s Share Bourbon Oak Aged Rum and won bronze medals for Maggie’s Farm White Rum and Spiced Rum.
Photo: Michael Tercha/Chicago Tribune
Article by Brandy Gonsoulin
A happy accident of tossed molasses that fermented in the Caribbean kicked off the beginning of the lucrative rum industry and thousands of rum-soaked parties. Centuries later, rum remains one of America's favorite spirits, yet sugary drinks, an iconic pirate brand and spring break dominate the image. A complex spirit worth sipping neat or on the rocks? Probably not so much. But as one of the world's most versatile and underappreciated spirits, rum may be trending up.
Article by Marc Fisher and Holly Yeager
Government shutdown’s effects ripple out to more than the federal workforce
The reality of the government shutdown is finally hitting Americans who don’t get their paychecks from Uncle Sam.
In Pittsburgh, Tim Russell was on the cusp of living his dream: After two years of work, after lining up federal and state licenses and buying equipment to make rum, he started making his first batch last week. Then the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau closed shop. With no one to approve the “Maggie’s Farm Rum” labels, Russell can’t sell a drop.
