The California Spirits Company is a fully licensed and operating rum distillery in San Marcos, CA. We’re currently working with 4 distributors and have recently been informed that Whole Foods and Total Wines are interested in placing orders for the CA market. We make our rum from molasses in-house at our distillery and we’ve won a silver medal at the 2015 San Francisco World Spirits Competition.
We received our final approval on November of 2014 and are on about 30 different shelves in Southern California. Currently, we only produce a AVALON Silver Rum. We are in the the R&D process for multiple line extensions at this time and are considering a barrel house for an aged product as well. We have production capacity at normal operations (8-hours/day 5-days/week) to produce ~6,000 bottles of rum (10 pallets).
We currently have 2 employees: myself holding the office of President and a foreign national on an H-1B visa. We met at UC Irvine during our MBA program and shamelessly used student labor to develop some of our business documents and strategies. We’re at a point now where we’re looking to source international suppliers for bottles and packaging to start reducing costs.
I built this distillery myself, designed a few pieces of equipment that are required in the process, and custom designed the still that was hand-made in Germany. I also paid for everything in cash. The company is debt free (aside for less than $10k in credit debt for operating overhead). We’re hoping for our first full-pallet order in April.
AVALON Silver Rum is an award winning rum designed from the cocktail backwards. This is the first rum who set out to make a better cocktail rather than simply put a rum on the market and leave it to the consumers to make it taste good. We’ve designed our own unique fermentation method, custom distillation, and use only pure RO water to bring the rum to bottle proof: no additives or sweeteners of any kind.
This rum is light and sweet on the pallet and a marked improvement to almost any rum cocktail. It’s also a white spirit smooth enough to take straight.