Price: £120

The Rum Experience is a new experience for the City of Manchester Distillery; introduced in September, it currently runs only once a month, which means I attended the second experience they'd run. These experiences need to be booked in advance; the booking experience on the website was nice and straigthforward.

It was raining heavily on the night I attended the experience; I should have looked the distillery up on line first to pinpoint its excact location, as it was quite hard to find (Google Mpas had it shown on the wrong side of the street). The distillery is under the railway bridge in one of the arches; there is metal lettering of the distillery name to the side, but in the rain at night this didn;t stand out too well.

When you arrive, you are booked in and given a Painkiller cocktail in a tin cup while you wait for the tour to start. I failed to take an accurate count, but I think there was about 20 people on the tour; from the website, I think the maximum permissible is 28.

The experience starts with a brief introduction from Dave Rigby, owner and Master Distiller, before a short video is shown. This is a brief history of Manchester; the sound level was very high for the video. He also said we'd pretty much always have a glassof rum in our hands, which was true, so make sure you're not driving or you will seriously miss out.

The next part is a slide show presentation from one of the guides, Pete, where he expalins the history of sugar cane production from 6000BC as well as the origins and history of rum.

During this presentation we got to same sugar cane juice and Cachaça, a spirit made from fermented sugar cane juice. The latter was better than the former, but I understand why people moved onto making rum.

The experience so far had lasted about an hour when we moved downstairs, to where the stills ware. There was a TV set up to the side of the stills and rows of chairs facing it. Next to the chairs was a rum tasting glass and our second cocktail, which was a Dark and Stormy made the correct way with Goslings Black Seal Rum, ginger beer and lime over ice. It was poured so that the less viscour rum floated on top.

The video which played was accompanied by one of the guides narrating and explaining how rum is produced. They also covered the different types of rum and different methods used to produce it.

We then moved onto a rum tasting which was five rums in thirty minutes; this part of the experience is covered by Dave (not Dave Rgby, but a different Dave) with assiatance from Sherel). The glass the rums were served in was a NEAT glassm which is billed as the ultimate tasting glass. I'll be honest, I much prefer a Glenclairn glass; this might be because I've toured so mny whisky distilleries that I am used to the glass, but I thin that it makes nosing the spirit much easier.

There was a mix of rums in the tasting, from white rums to aged rums to agricole rums and spiced rums. I'd had a couple of them before, but the others were new to me.

After the tasting, we moved down to another part of the distillery, which is under another arch of the railway bridge, for the hands on part of the Rum Experience.

I this part of the experience, you get to distill your own rum. There is a small 1 litre Alembic still which is on a hotplate; you have a bottle of water, a bottle of spirit and the measuring containers.

You're talked through adding the spirit to the still, heating the still and then when to cut the spirit to remove the foreshots (heads) and feints (tail) and take only the middle (heart) of the run. This removes the methanols and other bad alcohols, leaving you only with the ethanol.

I was stood at the back of the room, and with twenty people in the room doing the experience, hearing instructions from the guide at the front was difficult, buit they were aware of this and came round to repeat to make sure everyone understood.

Once the still is switched on, you need to wait for it to heat up and then you catch the heads in a small measuring cup, before making the cut by switching to a larger measuring cup. The heart takes a while to run off which is when we got our next cocktail.

This one doesn;t come ready to drink, but is served in a cocktail shaker which you shake yourself; the cocktail was a Classic Daquiri made of white rum, lime juice and simple syrup shaken with ice.

We were warned that the spirit could come off still quickly, so to be ready for making the cuts, but it actually came off in a small trickle which made making the cuts easy to do. I suspect we were told this to make sure people paid attention and didn;t get the cuts wrong.

To makwe the second cut, to only take the heartg and not the tails, you switch the measuring cups back to the original one. Your hearts is then diluted with the de-ionised water; my rum came out at 44.2% ABV.

Your decant the rum into the little wooden cask; the casks are prone to a little leaking, but they have some caulk for sealing which gets rubbed into any of the joisn which are leaking.

They suggested leaving the rum in the cask for a week and trying it before moving it to the bottle they provide. You can always leave it a little longer to take some more characteristics on from the wood.

We finished back in the original distillery space for a final cocktail; I missed hearing what this one was, as I was still getting my mini cask sealed. I've since contacted the distillery to ask, and it was a Zombie made to the original recipe.

The cask survived my drive home without too much leaking, but after I got home it leaked quite a bit. After getting the fire lit and warming the house up (I'd been away for a few days), the leaking subsided. Obvious in hindsight, but a cold cask will see the wood shrink causing more leaking. Putting it in a warm room will cause the wood to expand and reduce the leaking.

This is the first experience like this I have done; probably the nearest I have come is the Ultimate Distillery Experience at Tullamore Distillery where you get to blend your own whiskey. This is a very different experience as you are ahnds on with a still; something I've wanted to do for a while (unfortunately, it is illegal to distill your own spirits in the UK).

The history of sugar cane and rum was also very interesting. The experience lasts for three hours, but the time flys byan you pretty much always have a rum in hand. The cocktails you try are done to traditional recipes; I've only really tried the rum runner cocktail before so it was nice to have the opportunity to try four more. I enjoyed all of the cocktails we tried, which surprised me as I don't like ginger beer, but the Dark and Stormy was very nice.

There was a couple of issues with timing on the experience, around the start and end times, but this was only the second time they have run the Rum Experience, so I would expect these to be ironed out in short order. All of the people involved on the tour know there stuff and are able to convey the information in an entertaining way.

The Rum Experience isn't cheap at £120, but I felt it was worth every penny. It is the only non-gin experience I've seen where you get to distill your own spirit. Being able to take it away to give it a litrle aging in the mini-barrel is a nice touch after which you can decant it into the supplied bottle (all carried away in a branded tote bag).

A lady I was talking to mentioned she had previously done the The Gin Experience and it was also very good. It looks like the City of Manchester Distillery is turning out good experiences across the board; they'll soon be adding a Vodka Experience which sounds interesting, so I may be back to this distillery in the new year.