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About Us

You could say that distilling is in our blood! Veronica Grant is Great Great Granddaughter of William Grant, the famous whisky distiller! So, it was natural we started our own family distillery.

Our passion first steered down this slightly mad path starting out with a little stove-top copper home-still – these are great fun, and a fantastic way to explore spirit making from home – after better and better results on a domestic level, we were emboldened enough to launch our full-scale venture and distillery at Vault 53. Once we had decided we wanted to craft our own rum from raw materials, the first challenge was finding a home; we all have a great love of Devon, our adoptive county, and Plymouth with a history steeped in both naval history, and distilling excellence seemed a perfect fit.

One of the vital elements in rum production is of course the still; our beautiful, bespoke, hand-crafted Brazilian copper still has a capacity of a thousand litres, meaning we needed a sizeable home!

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We love rum cocktails; in particular though, Richard our Founder has a love of barrel aged, sipping rum and the new home for our distillery needed to be suitable for barrel-ageing our golden rum. In the areas traditionally known for rum creation like the Caribbean and South America, the weather naturally aids this process with higher temperatures and humidity than we can’t rely on here in Devon, so we needed a home that was suitable to coopering our barrels where we could control the heat and humidity. We’ve found our perfect home on Mutley Plain in a former Victorian bank, complete with intact vaults below the street – these are perfect for us; by their very nature nothing gets in or out of the vault that we don’t want in there!

When the pandemic hit, it put a pause on everything, but here we are in 2023 with the still in situ, all the permissions and certificates finally in place and rum being produced. It’s been a long old slog to get to where we are today but Vault 53 Rum flowing from the loveliest of copper pots and the distillery is ready to be hired as a venue!

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