The Before and After of the Lost Spirits Distillery

Lost Spirits is a distillery founded in 2010 by Bryan Davis and Joanne Haruta in California. Initially, it was a whiskey distillery, but it ceased production of this spirit in 2013, turning its attention to rum. This was when they started producing handcrafted 19th-century-style English expressions, made similarly to single malt whisky. The brand rapidly developed a cult status among rum aficionados due to its revolutionary techniques for aging spirits.

Lost Spirits’ Expressions

• Lost Spirits Colonial American Inspired Rum

Lost Spirits Colonial American Inspired Rum is an aged, navy-strength rum with no coloring or flavoring additives, bottled at 62% ABV. Despite the absence of artificial coloring, it has an intense, dark copper tone. It has coffee, dried fruit, cinnamon, and chocolate notes, with a gentle smoky finish and a spicy complexity. The particularity of this spirit is that it is the first rum crafted by a patented hyper-speed aging technology, which involves heat, light, and charred wooden blocks.

• Lost Spirits Navy Rum

Lost Spirits Navy Rum is made using grade A molasses and stored in toasted and charred virgin American oak barrels. It is bottled at 61% ABV. The sweetness and weight of the molasses balance out the intensely woody char flavor in this spirit, which has a heavier taste and mouthfeel.

• Lost Spirits Ex Machina Rum

Lost Spirits Ex Machina Rum is also made with molasses and bottled at 57.3% ABV. It’s a candied orange peel, tobacco, varnish, and mahogany wood transition to a dense brick of honey-soaked orange rinds, with flashes of dates and coffee.

• Lost Spirits Distillery Cuban Inspired Rum

Lost Spirits Distillery Cuban Inspired Rum is a lighter rum, bottled at 75.5%. It has an intense oily entry with sugarcane juice, spice, and moderate oak and wood notes. Its aroma is of floral sugarcane notes with spice, nutmeg, ginger, tamarind, galangal, cinnamon, sweet tropical citrus, and persimmon notes. 

• Lost Spirits Distillery Polynesian Inspired Rum

Lost Spirits Distillery Polynesian Inspired Rum is distilled in a copper still from molasses, then aged in new American oak, treated with sherry, and finally bottled at 66% ABV. It has smoke and charred notes with aromas of grass. On the palate, there are notes of sugarcane, mint, allspice, dried fruit, lemon rind, and tobacco.

Lost Spirits has been using A-grade molasses for its rums. The premise for the distillers’ practice is knowing which esters they want and don’t want, as well as creating the right conditions so that the desired esters dominate. For the fermentation process, they add “dunder,” a substance made from overripe or rotten fruits and sometimes from a soup of decomposing bats and waste from the last distillation in pits or caldrons.

They use an older style of fermentation that deprives the yeast of nitrogen and stresses it to produce distinctive flavor compounds. When these compounds are added to other parts of the fermentation and distillation process, they make a spirit that has less alcohol than its sisters.

Lost Spirits expressions are made in a handmade copper pot still designed by Davis. In the distillation process, the distillery concentrates on creating the best possible input to obtain the desirable components that need to be filtered out. No sugar is added to the rum post-distillation; still, the Oloroso sherry barrels impart very little sugar content.

Lost Spirits’ rums are prototypes and proofs of concept for a new way to speed up the aging process by bombarding the rum and wood with high-energy photons to make compounds that closely match the profile of a 20-year-old rum.

The Davis Method: A New Mean of Aging Spirits

As we know, the flavor profiles of distilled spirits are enhanced by the barrel’s length and the storage method. In 2015, Davis developed technology to age rum within days, which attracted the attention of the global industry. In the same year, The Spirits Business presented Davis with the “Global Master Award” for innovation. He decided to use modern analytical chemistry and design a reactor to replicate the chemical reactions that occur during the aging process in a laboratory. 

The more complex part of the barrel aging process is esterification, which is when alcohol and phenol, or weak acids, bond together. This reaction results in the creation of medium- and long-chain esters, which are responsible for the flavors and aromas. As it’s all about the esters, the core science behind Davis’s Model 1 Reactor was to encourage esterification in a short period of time. Davis’ aim was to produce the same chemical signature and taste, cutting the processing time by up to 20 years.

The reactor accomplishes this in three stages, taking white distillate and chunks of oak as inputs. The first stage forces the esterification of short-chained fatty acids in the white spirit, turning them into fruity, short-chained esters. The second stage breaks the wood polymers apart, extracting the necessary compounds to complete the esterification process. This pulls out some unpleasant medium-chain acids. The third stage forces the esterification of those acids and phenolic compounds, with simple esters being made to combine into longer-chained esters that are mostly associated with mature spirits.

By 2016, a handful of producers were using the Davis method. Products made with this technology have gained widespread acceptance among the world’s major spirits competitors. However, the company also had to avoid antagonizing certain market segments, as the new technology seemed “unfair” to those companies with an aging reputation. Yet they argued that rather than accelerating the aging process, they could shortcut it by taking new distillate and running it through Davis’ chemical reactor.

In 2018, Davis and Haruta closed the distillery to work on licensing the new technology to other distilleries. They returned to the craft, opening a new Lost Spirits distillery, producing both rum and whiskey.

Lost Spirits Today: Shows, Cocktail Parties & Rum

In 2021, Davis and Haruta moved the Lost Spirits distillery to Las Vegas. Many digital portals have described the new location as “a spirit Disneyland for adults.” Visitors can experience an immersive tour that includes whiskey and rum tastings, modern shows, acrobatics, burlesque dancers, boat rides, undersea train rides, and a special dinner accompanied by world-class spirits.

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Featured image source: Lost Spirits distillery (October 2021).