Cinecane
This rum tastes different than any you’ve tried before
Cinecane is a rum that tastes like popcorn. It brings the taste of cinema into a bottle.
James Bond without a martini – unimaginable. The dude without a White Russian? Just a spoiled old hippie who likes whale songs. And Carrie Bradshaw would have had only half as much to tell her friends without the Cosmopolitan. Films and drinks undoubtedly belong together. At least on the screen. In the cinema, if they are allowed to open again soon, it usually stays with cola and popcorn. Andreas and Waldemar Wegelin from Hamburg wanted to change that: They created a popcorn rum that, mixed with cola, brings the taste of cinema into the glass.
“We didn’t want to make the umpteenth gin”
The two cousins became known throughout Germany in 2017 when they presented their company Tastillery in the start-up show “Die Höhle der Löwen”. The two charmingly present their high-quality alcohol tasting sets, with which you can try different spirits without having to buy bottles of the same size. A deal did not materialize, but the young company benefited enormously from the appearance: If you only sent a few hundred boxes beforehand, around 8,000 sets were dispatched in the first week after broadcast. The most popular boxes include the whiskey trip around the world and the gin trip around the world.
The boxes became a trademark, but now they only account for a fraction of sales. The ever-growing online shop and new products such as elaborately designed advent calendars are now the sales drivers. The biggest hit is though Cinecane, the popcorn rum. He is the million dollar baby of the two Hamburgers: “We had the idea for a long time,” says Waldemar Wegelin in an interview with him star. In 2014 they discovered the recipe for the “Cinema Highball” in a cocktail book by the US bartender Jim Meehan, in which cola is combined with a rum that had previously been flavored with popcorn using complex processes.
“When we were looking for our own product at the end of 2017, the recipe came back to us. But we dismissed that as too crazy. Who wants popcorn rum? But the longer we thought about it, the clearer it became to us: The crazy thing about it is so special. ” Of course you could have made your own gin, “like everyone else,” adds Andreas Wegelin. But you just didn’t want the usual suspects. “We wanted to do something creative, something inspiring. A drink with a clear identity. And this is not the umpteenth gin, even if we would have sold a few thousand bottles of it quickly.”
The Caribbean meets popcorn
But how does the popcorn get into the rum? “As a base we take matured rum from the Caribbean, which we distill from freshly buttered popcorn. In the second step, we add popcorn again. At the end we blend this with the base rum.”
It took a year and a half to develop the final recipe. At the start of the sale, the two were very skeptical: “I don’t know whether our customers will get it. Sales will probably start slowly, nothing works overnight,” says Waldemar Wegelin, who previously had twelve years of experience in advertising agencies, including in Tokyo worked for clients like Nike and Google.
The concerns were unfounded: the first batch of 1,600 bottles was sold out within a few weeks. Since then he has made a name for himself among rum fans and is one of the bestsellers among the rums with taste. It tastes good as a daiquiri or old fashioned with a little salt and maple syrup, the popcorn note gives both drinks an exciting twist. However, you have to adapt the usual recipes due to the high sweetness. A star is born?
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