Boozehounds - Blended Beverages

In the world of booze, quite everything has been made. Having an impact often is a thin line between quality, luck and mad marketing. In the end, it comes to continuously reinventing yourself, holding par on a good "bang for bucks" and finally trying new stuff out! On one of our walks for enlightenment, we recently ventured further from the bartender series and maybe closer to our inner wish. Which is to blend like crazy! Making exciting flavour profiles and hopefully blowing peoples minds on combinations they didn't expect in a marketed bottle. Long intro short: RUMBLE WHISKY! When Bookz&Booze told us about their anniversary and the eventual release of a private bottling, our heads turned to each other and we instantly knew we had something special in stock. A few months prior to that, we tried blending Jamaican rum and Islay whisky. Laying them to rest on our incubator barrels (5-10L) to see if both power houses could find a common ground. Which spoiler alert, they did! It fell perfectly in line with what Ief wished for, so we started working on the bottle design. This was also a step in the unknown as for the first time we went for a screen printing technique on a octagonal bottle. The process was nerve wrecking to finalise, but Hans from printclinic.be made it work. This resulted in 15 highly customized bottles, which sold out in about 4 weeks. Quite the success and a lingering taste for more! Have a look for yourself!

The story behind Immohrtal. Impactful & life changing work is sadly not what we are doing.. although if you count all the pallets we've helped develop or the cocktail menus we helped rescue, pretty sure it's been life saving for some! This intensive work has always been fueled by coffee and of course happenstance forcing our hands, the neighbors are baristas... So cappuccinos and americanos is our daily ritual. Anyway, enough about addictions! Point being, we saw them disposing kilos of used coffee grain and came up with a Collab. Recycling it in barrels of neutral rum, to let it further infuse, then adding some zzzing with nice hard English rum. We created something out of the ordinary. It's lower in sugar, which gives control to any drink and packs a punch without overruling. Safe to say, we like it a lot! N.b. ImMOHrtal is not a typo. https://www.moh.coffee/ is were www.De dingen.be roasts their own brand. So yeah, pun intended!

Bartending a 💯 is a challenge! But we haven't just got taste, we've got speed too! It's like Dionysus and Hermes joined hands and started cocktail catering! So all in one options like Draft cocktails, bottled batched cocktails & bulk spirits are easy as pie and fully customisable to your grade of quality & size event. Well, The Lab Social Club catered Femini and served 550 cocktails in 3h using 2 staff members to prepare and garnish the cocktails.

let's introduce one of the bartender series! Seriously dark - black rum Well, let's not fool anyone. Is black rum even a category?! Not really, but it might be just an easy to understand concept that became a category. Without going into much depth, let's just start at the beginning and the birth of the product. The idea started while making a Dark & stormy. Damn, we love that cocktail! As it may be trade marked by Gosling black seal rum and authentically made with the latter (in north America), we, all of European bartending or maybe just us Belgian bars, tend to throw anything in there. Ranging from commercial (mostly expensive) spiced rums, to Spanish style contract enforced gold rums. Imagine the wide range of profiles, representing one very distinctive cocktail. More white space was needed to let the sentence carry some weight. Certain cocktails characterize themselves, like margaritas or daiquiris and some cocktails just are, like a Cosmo or a Sazerac. Maybe some wild examples, but you get the point.. What does gives the D&S its flavour profile?! Dissecting 'black strap' rums; "there is no such thing as ‘blackstrap rum,’” says Richard Seale “dark as a moonless night and with distinct flavors of molasses and maple syrup.” says the bartender Well, we don't care, it's made up, it's a blend, they are all blends, let's make our own. Part Guyana Demerara, part English style rum Tadaaaaaaa (disclaimer, this is not the recipe) Well of course a lot more tweaking went into it, but we managed to capture the coffee and toffee notes, caramel, chocolate and spices while keeping it fairly dry. More importantly, we've managed to add depth and tanines by choosing more adequate aged products. Versatile and great to drink neat, probably the best received among our rums. No need to trust our word, it's a front spirit, go make a cocktail! Check the website boozehounds.be for our best suited cocktails, or just make a sour, then a dark & stormy, fall in love and make a sour again..

TAVOLA XPO 2024 was a revelation for us. It has been certain that non-alcoholic would make serious wind, but we did not anticipate such thirst. Out of all interest regarding private labels, 85% was focused on alcohol free. 50% of passersby did not want an alcoholic drink. This brings two thoughts to mind: First, a change in alcohol consumption was a needed fact. Not necessarily banning, but thoughtful savouring, safe driving and maybe healthy living. We all have that uncle telling stories of how drunk he was when driving home. Well moving forward, more non alcoholic products of quality will definitely join the market. We might be thankful for this (re)evolution and be happy for tasteful products! Second, alcohol is bad and we all know it. Don't wake up now as if you never knew. Spirits and liqueurs can be amazing works of art, carrying centuries of know how and heritage. The kick it gives is probably irreplaceable and its own. Try to distinguish between the mondaine and the extraordinary. Make your sips count and drink for the art and not the buzz. Bottom line, we love flavour and applaud all additions! With our cocktail background; syrups, cordials, bitters and scrubs, all have been made non alcoholic and used in heavy dosage while manning our bar. We realize the demand to put these on the market and our energy will be spent to share this know how in a creative process bringing new products for our customers. In the end Tavola also confirmed to us the importance of small productions. All can be saved with heavy marketting, but launching a product shouldn't be about extravaganza in budget. It is about flavour and how it is received by the consumer. Small batches gives you time to tweak, adapt and improve. An edge on a saturated market. The best example we have is www.flavourtailor.com, which has been growing steadily since it's launch in october. We are proud to be part of this adventure. Only misleading fact in this message is 'booze' in Boozehounds. Think about it, Drinkhounds... just doesn't cut it. Who knows, we might split in two and start Juicehounds!