#3 Challenges and Perseverance - Arrival of the rum!

It takes a lot of planning and organisation when it comes to producing a rum. You need to make sure you have a liquid and someone who's going to make it (a tale for another day), the bottle it's going to be stored in, a designed label that's going to be on the bottle, where the product is going to be stored, and all of the legalities that follow.

Bypassing the challenge of liquid development (a somewhat fun challenge, but a challenge nonetheless!), I'll highlight the challenges I faced in the months leading up to the production of The Selfish Spirits' Dark Spiced Rum. From the very early days, I had already chosen the bottle that I wanted to be used for Selfish Spirits. I had a sample bottle in my house for months on end, creating various prototypes with many label variations. This bottle was available from two different suppliers, which I thought was a very sensible choice and gave myself a pat on the back.

My friend Kirby (kirbydoesdesign) designed the label to fit on this bottle (after creating countless iterations beforehand - I still owe her one). Fantastic, let's send these labels off to the printers, get our run booked in for the end of October 2021 and organise the delivery of the bottles to the distillery.

Ah, but did I mention this was all organised during Covid? When businesses reopened again, I was faced with some bad news from my bottle provider: they don't have mine in stock. Okay, well this is why we have back-ups, isn't it? I got in touch with my secondary provider only to be told they don't have any either. They informed me that one of the largest glass bottle manufacturers in Europe had to shut its doors after the last lockdown, and there was now a global shortage.

At this point, the distillery was starting to require the relevant materials to begin production, and I was in discussion with the label makers about quotes. Pressure was beginning to mount. I needed to find a bottle, and fast, since I knew this would mean another label change, which required a longer lead time. I asked the bottle suppliers what they did have. They had a bottle in a similar style and price, but with aluminium caps instead of cork stoppers. At the time, I didn't think this was much of an issue and was under the impression the distillery could seal these types of bottles. So, I purchased a pallet-full and had them sent off to the distillery. In the meantime, I amateurishly adjusted the labels myself to have them fit on the new bottle - little did I know this would come back to bite me later.

The bottles arrived at the distillery, ready to be filled. But there was an issue at the label makers. They said they couldn't use my edited labels. The logo, for reasons unbeknownst to me, was blurry. I also wanted what's known as a screen varnish on the label, to give the texture and impression of snake-skin. But to achieve this, I needed what's called a vector image, an image type which (I understand) can be enlarged as much as you want without losing any image quality. Of course, at the time I had no idea what this was. So, completely out of my depth, I passed this work back onto Kirby who, like a trooper, was ready to sort out my mess.

The distillery rang. There's a problem. They don't have the right tools for attaching aluminium caps to the bottles. They could purchase the required equipment, but it would cost an extra couple of grand on my part. Of course I wasn't going to do that, so now the next issue is organising the bottles to be sent back to the suppliers from the distillery, and purchase another pallet of different ones. I need to decide on a new bottle; but one with a cork stopper rather than an aluminium cap. Back to the drawing board then! I ask my supplier (again) what they have, picking a bottle-type that is considerably more expensive than the previous; but at this point I have no choice. I had to pick it and get started on the labels, out of fear of delaying the distillery any longer. Tail between my legs, I inform Kirby of the change, yet again, and if she can fit the label to the new dimensions. No problem, she says. Okay, the bottles are purchased, they're sent to the distillery and the others have been returned. Now we are just waiting on the labels to be printed after the designs have been sent off and approved. I've been informed by the distillery that they don't currently have the ingredients to create my rum at the moment because they're waiting on a delivery. This could have been unfortunate, but since we were still waiting for the labels it worked out quite well. Go figure!

I had originally planned for the bottles of Selfish Spirits Dark Spiced Rum to be produced at the back end of October 2021. Now, in December, a week before Christmas, everything is in place. The bottles and corks are there, the labels have been printed and delivered, the ingredients have arrived - it's time to get it done. The distillery did their thing: filled the bottles, labelled them and sent them out for delivery. I remember I was in the middle of some Christmas shopping in an IKEA when I got the news. I was ecstatic! Christmas had come early!

A few days later, the bottles arrived. It was a sight to behold, all those bottles of rum stacked neatly on top of each other, ready and waiting to be drunk. It was quite an emotional time, after all the hard work I had put in, to finally see the fruits of my labour had paid off.

Being able to hold the physical product in my hand made all those bumps in the road worth it. The intense feeling of satisfaction from all my efforts was sensational. It was all a valuable learning lesson for me: I now knew that I could put the work in, push through and overcome the challenges, and come out the other side wiser and satisfied. It goes to show just how important perseverance is when it comes to something you care about. And how things don't always go according to plan, but if you keep a cool head and power through you can achieve the results you want.

I understand that there will be plenty more challenges as I undertake this journey, many of them even more arduous. But that doesn't mean these lessons I've learned aren't valuable. It just means I've still got plenty more lessons to learn on the horizon, and I look forward to seeing what comes next.