London Cocktail Week : Monday - Smatts Rum Shack

After the whisky show it was straight to my first official LCW event held at Smatt's Rum Shack, a pop up in Seven Dials, for an event hosted by "Terror" Tim (try calling him that, he loves it) of Twist London who now have an offshoot - Twisted.

We started off with a Dark 'n' Stormy and a brief history of Smatts, which I had not come across before. Smatts is the lovechild, shall we say, of two school friends. Having gone to university and launched their careers, they both felt something missing in life - rum. Ashley Smatt, one of said school friends, was from Jamaica, a rather important fact considering company laws there, and went about sourcing where their rum was going to come from both in terms of location and distillery to use. The number of distilleries on this island has dropped from 600 to 6 over 150 years so they also wanted to invest in the heritage to revive the industry. They have a white rum and a 5 year old gold rum.

So to the event, 3 cocktails twisted (see what I did there?!) into 3 very alcoholic ice creams.

#1 Dark and Stormy - very nice drink, very nice ice cream. Quite different, with the ice cream showing more ginger, which as a ginger fan I loved, and was also yoghurty. Finished with some fire and gingerbread. Note these also have 1 unit of alcohol per serving and it is all too easy to forget this after an hour's tasting...

#2 Smatt's Passoin - I am afraid that I have a deep psychological issue with passion fruit in drink so not one for me however I loved the showmanship of the fire to finish these off (other events were called ice and fire!) and the drink was very close in taste to the ice cream. The smell was like a banana brulee!

#3 Apple Crumble - ice cream won here again witha spicier more complex "drink" and it would have been even better with a crumble through the ice cream for texture. 

I have made alcoholic ice cream myself and the creamy texture is very easy to achieve with the alcohol preventing ice crystals however I am not sure mine were ever 1 unit per scoop! It was an interesting session, and would have been up there as excellent if one or two unnamed had not been enjoying the drinks and ice cream down to the last drop/lick...sore heads for some the next day I believe...

Good effort, look forward to more from the Twisted guys in the near future.