Why I Made Barti

Barti was created for a pretty simple reason. I wanted to drink a great spiced rum, and I couldn't find any.

Sure, there were fantastic aged rums and some beautiful golden rums. But spiced rum? Spiced rum felt like an afterthought. A category dominated by big companies where too often the brand and the story were better than the liquid in the bottle.

And yet spiced rum was always my fun drink. It's not serious like whisky. It doesn't need rules about the right glass, the right ice or the right way to drink it.

Back in the early 2010s, I was starting my street-food business and travelling around the festival circuit. We worked stupid hours, usually in a field, often in the mud, with some of the greatest live music acts of the time playing in the background.

One of many festival set ups, this is Glastonbury 2015.

We were cooking the finest Pembrokeshire lobster and crab, drenched in seaweed butter, and when the music stopped, the cooking finished, the customers disappeared and everything was finally packed away, we'd celebrate.

Usually with spiced rum.

Kraken. Captain Morgan. The usual suspects. They were fun drinks. We partied with them. Mixed with Coke or ginger, they did the job brilliantly.

But here's the thing. Eventually, the mixers ran out. And when we drank those rums neat, I always thought the same thing: Why isn't this better?

The flavour was often harsh, thin or unbalanced. Too much artificial sweetness, too much flavouring, not enough depth.

Smoke and mirrors.

Around the same time, we'd visit my good lady’s family in Poland. They made their own flavoured vodkas, not cheap, flavourless vodka designed simply to get you drunk, but beautiful drinks infused with fruit, botanicals and sweetness. Drinks with layers of flavour that seemed to sing through the night.

That planted a seed.

Then I learned just how simple the basic idea behind spiced rum was: take rum and flavour it with spices and botanicals. My chef's brain immediately kicked in.

Surely spiced rum could taste so much better than this?

Why couldn't it have balance? Why couldn't it have layers? Why couldn't the flavour change as it moved across your tongue — first notes, middle notes and a finish, like a great song?

And most importantly: Why couldn't a spiced rum be good enough to sip neat, but still fun enough to mix however you wanted?

That was the beginning of Barti.

Foraging for laver seaweed at Freshwater West beach.

The years I had spent cooking with foraged seaweed gave me another piece of the puzzle. Laver brought something different: umami. Not a taste of the sea, but depth, another dimension alongside spice, citrus and sweetness.

Spice. Citrus. Sweetness. Umami.

The four dimensions of Barti.

For me, a brilliant, spiced rum should dance on your tongue and tell you a story. It should stand up on its own, neat, but never become so precious that you feel guilty pouring Coke over it.

Spiced rum and Coke tastes good.

Spiced rum and ginger tastes good.

Spiced rum and apple tastes bloody good.

Spiced rum and fruit juices mixed in a big punch bowl tastes good and is fun.

Drink it however you want.

And if you're going to put all that effort into making a great liquid, I think everything around it should work just as hard. The bottle should do its job. The label should do its job. The glass, the story and the experience should all add something. That is how you create one of best spiced rums in the world.

But the liquid has to come first.

Because if you strip everything else away and what's left in the glass isn't good enough, none of the rest matters.

Ten years on, the spiced-rum world has changed enormously. There are far more interesting, quality spiced rums being made now than when I started.

And that's great because making Barti was never really about creating another rum brand.

It was about answering the question I had in those muddy festival fields all those years ago: Why can't spiced rum be better? 

Life's too short for mediocre.

Jonathan Williams