Fun with Rum

Siesta Key Rum recently released the second batch of a limited-edition label in recognition of the celebrated Siesta Key lifeguard ‘Scooter of the Beach.’

BY ERIC SNIDER CONTRIBUTOR

Troy Roberts didn’t know the first thing about distilling spirits when he founded Siesta Key Rum in May 2007. He had just come into a financial windfall by selling a collection of sports car forum websites that he’d founded with a friend.

Roberts considered retiring. Briefly. “Theoretically, I could have,” he says.

“I did well on the sale, but it was not the kind of money that would support the type of retirement I wanted. I like nice things, and I like traveling.”

He was 41 at the time. “Really, I was looking for something to do,” he adds.

Roberts liked baking, so he consid- ered making rum cakes and selling them online. But he realized he’d have to think bigger. “I got interested in owning my own rum brand, and that sent me down a whole new rabbit hole,” he says. “My timing was good. The craft spirits movement was just getting started.”

Continued on Page 34

Continued from Page 32

Backstory

Roberts moved with his father from Plainfield, Illinois, to Siesta Key in 1979. He attended Riverview High School, and skipped plenty of classes to hang out on the beach. After graduating in 1982, he came down with a serious bout of wanderlust. Roberts spent time in Colorado, where he worked as a parking valet at a resort to support his life as a ski bum. He opened a frozen yogurt store in Portland, Oregon, that, Roberts says, “failed miserably.”

Because Roberts had to learn distilling and the booze business from the ground up, he didn’t issue his first bottles of Siesta Key Rum until 2010. Since then, he and his team have built a brand that’s now available in 29 states and sells in “the hundreds of thousands” of bottles per year. The company makes and packages its product in a large warehouse in an industrial section of north Sarasota. Visitors can take tours and sample rums in the facility’s tasting room.

Siesta Key Rum offers four main flavors or, as they say, infusions. These are Silver, Coffee, Spiced and Toasted Coconut — plus an aged Distiller’s Reserve. Toasted Coconut is the best seller. That’s what the company uses for its Sarasota-centric Limited Edition Label series. It includes Midnight Pass, Bahi Hut and one that recognizes Siesta Key lifeguard and local celebrity, “Scooter of the Beach” (his real name is Scott Ruberg), who has manned his “Magical Green Lifeguard Tower” on Siesta Key Beach for 28 years.

The first batch of 2,000 bottles, which rolled out last year, sold out. The company recently released a second run of 2,000. For every Scooter bottle sold, Siesta Key Rum donates $1 to Sarasota Bay Watch, a grassroots environmental nonprofit.

“It’s magic,” says Scooter with his customary effervescence. “All I wanted was the green lifeguard tower on the label, and it came out full on Scooter of the Beach. I went crazy. It came out gangbusters.”

Roberts makes his rums from the finest ingredients available, and

MEET SCOOTER!

Siesta Key Rum has a regular booth at the Siesta Key Farmers Market. On Sunday, May 21, Scooter of the Beach will hang out at the booth and do what comes naturally: schmooze passersby, pose for pics and sign bottles of Scooter of the Beach Limited- Edition Label Toasted Coconut rum.

sources from Florida as much as he can. “Not knowing how to do it at the beginning turned out to be an advantage,” he says. Rather than adopting standard industry practices, he did his own research and made the best smallbatch rums he knew how.

Case in point: Toasted Coconut. While mass-market coconut rums simply pour flavoring into the spirits, Siesta Key Rum’s product results from a far more exacting process. “Most coconut rums smell and kind of taste like suntan lotion,” Roberts says. “We get the coconut shredded and toasted and use a process I developed to essentially force our own silver rum over the coconut, extracting all the flavor out of it. We ended up with a product very different from anything out there.”

It’s safe to say that you won’t mistake Siesta Key Toasted Coconut Rum for something you want to rub on your shoulders.

If You Go

To tour the facility and tasting room, visit SiestaKeyRum.com.

Then, “when I was 25, I decided to do something real,” Roberts says. He got into computer programming and landed a job in California at a small company called Centura Software. When the company was acquired by Compuware, Roberts moved to the corporate headquarters in Detroit and ultimately rose to the title of director of product management. He left that job in 1999 and collaborated with a friend to start CorvetteForum. com. It took off — fast. The partners formed more forum sites dedicated to different sports cars.

Roberts had never completely put Siesta Key behind him, so he returned to town in the early 2000s. He reunited with his girlfriend from his senior year in high school, Nanci Vatovec. They married in 2015 and between them have six sons. The family lives on the north end of Siesta Key overlooking Big Pass.

Troy and Nanci like to take extended off-road trips in their custom-built Jeep into some of the most remote places in America. In February of last year, the couple spent two weeks in California’s Death Valley, venturing down desolate trails that found them 60 miles from the nearest human being.

Needless to say, they brought along plenty of Siesta Key Rum.