In the spirit of cross marketing across tourist genres and time, Tuthilltown Spirits and Historic Huguenot Street are teaming up to launch a new product, Roggen”™s Rum, a limited batch of 750 bottles that will be sold in select outlets in the region.
The rum comes from the 220-year-old Tuthilltown Gristmill in Gardiner, a site on the National Register of Historic places and which now is New York state”™s first and only distillery to open since Prohibition.
The new spirit celebrates the earliest settlers of the Hudson Valley, said RonDeena Ross, director of development for Historic Huguenot Street, a nonprofit organization that is a also a National Historic landmark district featuring seven stone houses dating to the 1770s.
“It”™s cross promoting them and us,” Ross said. “Not everyone who loves rum loves history and this is a way of bringing us to the attention of a whole new group of people.”
Ralph Erenzo, a partner in Tuthilltown Spirits, said the idea was to make a contribution of some kind to the Historic Huguenot Street and evolved into making a rum through research into what spirits were consumed by the early settlers. Examining the archives of the Huguenot Historical Society with Eric Roth, the executive director of HHS, they discovered a bill of sale from a merchant called the Roggen Brothers that along with staples such as sugar and flour also revealed the sale of “1/4 gallon rhum.”
“The Huguenots were fun, not Puritanical,” Ross said.
“The brothers were Swiss immigrants that opened a mercantile here on Huguenot Street in 1750,” Roth said. “One of the staples then, like now, was rum. In fact, the label on Roggen”™s is a replica of an actual order form for “1/4 gallon rhum.”
“Turned out they had quite an operation going,” Erenzo said. “These immigrants came here with nothing and became a mercantile that ran goods up and down the Hudson River.”
On the scenic lawn of the DuBois Fort on Huguenot Street, a small but happy crowd celebrated the introduction of the new rum on July 20. Erenzo said the rum was produced like other Tuthilltown Spirit products, hand distilled and bottled in small batches.
The micro-distillery has been in business since 2003 and has created handmade batches of corn whiskey, single malt whiskey, four grain bourbon, aged in small American Oak casks. The products have received glowing reviews from culinary authorities in a variety of media outlets.
Only 750 bottles of Roggen”™s will be produced. Area retailers who sell the Roggen”™s Rum will donate a portion of each sale amount to the Huguenot Society. That donation will be matched by Tuthilltown Spirits.
While bottles will be sold exclusively in the area around New Paltz, the entire Hudson Valley will have a chance to taste the rum at area restaurants Aug. 1-2. Several chefs will feature Roggen”™s Rum in cocktails, sauces and other imaginative ways that weekend. For a current list of participating restaurants, please call (845) 255.1660, ext. 105.
To learn more about Huguenot Street, visit www.huguenotstreet.org. For more information on Tuthilltown Spirits, go to www.tuthilltown.com.
