Non-Alcoholic Spirits
Taste 5: Non-Alcoholic Spirits
What we loved: Rumish Non-Alcoholic Dark Spiced Spirit
Okay, I’m just going to say it. There aren’t a lot of great non-alcoholic wines out there. Beer? Yes! Beer has long made N/A options that taste good. So we went into a non-alcoholic spirits tasting with some trepidation and concern.
And sadly, some of that trepidation and concern was warranted. The category still has a long way to go.
Happily we found one out of five we liked. Or liked just enough. Rumish is made with Madagascar vanilla and nutmeg by ISH Spirits, which makes a slew of products from its base in Denmark, including Ginish and ISH Agave Spirit and a canned ISH Spritz, which is also pretty good.
Interestingly, since being sent a bottle of Rumish, the company appears to have renamed this product Caribbean Spiced, saying on its website that it is not allowed to call it an alcohol-free rum, since to even whisper the word rum requires it to contain a minimum alcohol level of about 40%. Otherwise, ISH says it uses similar distillation methods to make the rum-ish bottling.
That includes extracting alcohol through the use of carbon dioxide, keeping the extraction at a low enough temperature to preserve some of the original taste. They then add vanilla, nutmeg and baked apple (I don’t understand this last one) to the de-alcoholized base and a proprietary distillate using shells from chili seeds to give it some lingering heat.
We thought it tasted pretty good, and definitely delivered the heat. Try it.