Make Your Own Rum And Whiskey With World’s First Bespoke Barrel Ageing Programme

By Nida Seah

Chartered by Compendium Spirits allows you to choose your preferred ingredient and create your favourite spirit

Fancy making your very own rum, arrack or whiskey from scratch? Now you can, thanks to Compendium Spirits. The Singaporean distillery, which previously made headlines for its unique spirits such as Rojak Gin, Chendol Gin and Kopi-O Liqueur, has launched Chartered by Compendium Spirits, the first bespoke barrel ageing programme in the world that allows customers to create their own spirit with customised input. 


That means choosing your base spirit and letting it age according to your taste. There are no neutral grain spirits involved here; just familiar Southeast Asian ingredients, an oak barrel and time.

You can make honey spirit from honey, whisky from Thai hom mali rice, arrack from gula melaka, or rum from molasses. Choose the size of your barrel, starting from four to 32 litres. Each one-of-a-kind barrel is fashioned by hand from top quality American oak. The ageing process ranges from three to 12 months, depending on the barrel size.


You’ll have tasting sessions with the craftmaster, founder Simon Zhao, where you can decide if the spirit is ready or needs a bit more time. Finally, your own barrel-aged spirit will be bottled with a customised label. The empty cask can be refilled for another batch.


You can even have the opportunity to explore different sequences for various flavour possiblities. For example, if you fill your first barrel with rum, then you will have a rum-aged cask for your next Chartered by Compendium Spirits experience.

Prices for Chartered by Compendium Spirits start from $1,188 for a four-litre cask  about 13 bottles) to $8,888 for a 32-litre cask (about 103 bottles).

Knowledge