Fear not loyal libationeers, 'cause there's a new rum in town and it's just waitin' to be consumed. I'm, of course, speaking about Redrum, the blended tropical fruit flavored rum beverage that comes in the wicked red bottle and has the name that invokes visions of a Kubrickesque Kingdom.

Actually, for those of you hung over sticklers in the house, Redrum ain't exactly new. In fact, it's been around for several years now. Yet it's far from being a household rum name a la Captain Morgan's or Bacardi.

At any rate, in the interest of shedding light on a neglected segment of the rum population (and, of course, to hip you to one of the coolest alcoholic beverages around) IGN Formented made the trek to Redrum HQ in San Francisco and gained an exclusive audience with Redrum mastermind Dan DaDalt.

IGN For Men: Most obvious question: the name, where did it come from. Most folks think The Shining when they hear the word Redrum.

Dan DaDalt: We didn't take the name from The Shining, but that's what 95-percent of the people that see Redrum think of. They think of The Shining. So name recognition is there, it's been established. When people see Redrum it makes them think of something, it makes them think of 'murder' backwards, even though it really is a red rum in a red bottle. It's like red wine, you know? But it's kind of a coup, 'cause you could never trademark 'red wine,' but we were able to trademark Redrum as one word under the Distilled Spirits category. We also hold the trademark for sporting goods, so if we ever want to do Redrum snowboards or skateboards or things like that.

IGN For Men: Since you brought up The Shining angle, you have never tied into that as far as publicity and advertising goes, right?

Dan DaDalt: We've never done that. We've just wanted to keep the name, it's a cool name, everybody remembers it the first time they hear it, it really is red rum and we just leave it at that. If people want to have fun with the name they can, be we just let them do that. We don't hit them over the head with 'Redrum spells murder backwards.' That would be kind of reckless for us to do that because it's a distilled spirit. We have to be careful that way. Let people have fun with the name on their own, let 'em just kind of think of whatever they want. People always have something to say about it . We don't need to tap into that, it's just 'Here's the product.'

IGN For Men: How did you get into the distilled spirits business to begin with? Was you dad or grandfather a moonshiner back in the day?

Dan DaDalt: Not at all. That would probably make for a better story, though. I went to Chico State, number one party school in the country, so that kind of got me interested in liquor [laughs]. And then I was a marketing major. So I studied marketing and I drank a lot. When I moved to The City [San Francisco] I did PR and marketing, I was actually a film publicist. I started as an intern with a company that did publicity for major film companies. That's how I got started. I studied marketing, but Public Relations was my major. Then I got a job working for a small PR agency and I had some random clients like this dentist who dressed up like a giant tooth and he went around to schools, Doctor Happy Tooth. It was crazy. Such a random thing. Then I got a job with the San Francisco International Film Festival and that led me to this guy who had this idea for a vodka.

IGN For Men: And that was Skky, right?

Dan DaDalt: Correct. The owner of Skky Vodka was on the board of directors for the San Francisco International Film Festival and that's how I met him.

IGN For Men: At that point had he made Skky Vodka?

Dan DaDalt: No. He had the idea and the name Skky. He had done one batch of this vodka that was ultra pure. He wanted to create a vodka that sensitive drinkers would drink, that was consistently pure. This was when Stoli and Absolut were really the leaders. There wasn't this influx of all these new brands. Smirnoff was the number one seller overall and then Stoli and Absolut were the top two imported brands and that was it. They were the best. And then he had this idea for Skky Vodka. He hired me at that point. It was just him, he'd done everything on his own but he hadn't done any marketing or PR and I had a PR and marketing background. He hired me on a 20-hour a week basis to write a brochure that would explain to people what's different about Skky Vodka. That was my first project. And that job turned into a full-time job and three-and-a-half years later I had 15 employees underneath me and we were doing 15 million in sales.

IGN For Men: So during the three years you spent with Skky you learned packaging, marketing, etc. of a start-up distilled beverage company.

Dan DaDalt: That's how I got the experience where I believed I could go start my own company.

IGN For Men: Why the shift from vodka to rum?

Dan DaDalt: Well just being in the industry. [When I was at Skky] we really came in from the outside. The owner had no previous liquor industry experience and I had none, other than drinking it. Maybe that was one of the reasons it was so successful is that we kind of looked at the industry from the outside and we were able to capitalize on some of the things that were missing. So the vodka craze was exploding by the time I quit and I saw opportunity in the rum category. Sales were increasing for a few base brands like Captain Morgan's and Malibu, the flavored segment. And flavored vodkas were starting to catch on, so I thought there'd be room for a flavored rum, just by looking at the industry and how many brands there were. I knew I didn't want to get into vodka and compete against Skky and [the other brands of vodka]. I knew I wanted to stay in the industry 'cause I thought there was a lot of opportunity. And rum was intriguing to me because I saw it as a growing category in the industry. You know, you read the trade publications and they tell you where stuff is going. So I wanted to do rum. I had that figured out. And I knew I wanted to do it in a colored bottle because we'd had a lot of success with [the Skky colored bottle].And we didn't want to use the wine bottle green or the whisky bottle brown, 'cause those colors are just standard.

IGN For Men: Ahh, the origin of the red bottle...

Dan DaDalt: There was new technology in packaging at the glass factories across the country and internationally. They had developed a new technology that allowed you to color the glass either from the outside with a coating or to actually change the molten glass. I knew I want to do something along the lines of the Skky bottle, but with a color that had never been used before. I'd seen some samples of the red glass and no one in the industry had ever used red glass before. I thought it looked so cool. So I knew I wanted to do a rum and I wanted to do it in a red glass. That's how the name Redrum came about.

IGN For Men: So what about the tropical flavoring?

Dan DaDalt: I went on a road trip. I quit my job, I turned 30 years old and my best friend turned 30, five days apart. He was a stockbroker and I was working at Skky. We quit our jobs and...we turned 30 in December and quit our jobs like the first week of January and a month later we got into my car and drove across country, all four corners, Canada, Maine, Florida Keys, Mexico, I mean all the way around. Niagara Falls, Devils Postpile...

IGN For Men: Drinking all the way, no doubt.

Dan DaDalt: Drinking all the way. We had snowboards, mountain bikes, camping equipment, skateboards...we just brought all our toys and we just wanted to go on this 2-and-a-half month trip and then come back and find a new direction. So on this trip we were in Maine and we met this couple who invited us into their home and cooked us all this fresh seafood. So we were partying with them and the guy brings out this bottle of rum that he brings out for special occasions. It was from the Bahamas, you can't get it in the U.S. It was a coconut flavored rum. We started doing shots of it. We were hammered at this point, but I thought 'This is interesting. We're doing shots of rum. That's kind of cool. Everybody's doing shots of Jaeger and Tequila, but no one's ever done shots of rum. Maybe if we did a rum that was flavored, kind of sweet so you could mix it or you could do shots of it. It would be good enough to do shots of. Yeah, that's it.' So then I knew that I wanted to do a rum that you could do shots of that was flavored and kind of sweet. And I knew I wanted it to be in a red bottle. So on the trip from Maine to New York I started thinking 'Rum in a red bottle...what are we gonna call it?' And then all of a sudden it hit me, 'Redrum.' And we just started laughing because redrum we knew from The Shining. I was like 'Oh my God! What a classic name. The younger generation, our target market 21-35, they would think that's classic. If I think it's funny I would hope that they'd think it's funny. And if nothing else it's kind of cool.' The next day usually when I've had these ideas that I think are so great when partying I usually think that it was a stupid idea, you know 'Aww man, I can't believe I thought of that.' Well the next day I went 'Wow, that's still a good idea.' So long story short, we came home eventually and I immediately decided I wanted to put a business plan together and try to raise money and make it happen. Actually the first thing I did was a trademark search. I had a friend who worked at a law library do it for me for free to see if Redrum was even available before I got too excited. I wanted to make sure the name was even an option to use. So instantly, I didn't have any money, but I spent the $245 for the application because nothing came up in the search. I went for it and started Redrum. There was no packaging, no product inside but I had the name and I knew it was gonna be in a red bottle and it was gonna be a flavored rum.

IGN For Men: Without giving away too many trade secrets, how did you come up with the tropical flavoring? I mean did you guys buy large quantities of rum and then add flavoring to them?

Dan DaDalt: Well kind of, yeah. Initially we...there's things called flavor houses, these giant companies that people like Kraft would hire. Suppose Kraft wants to come out with pizza flavored chips. SO they would call up this flavor house and say 'We want to do potato chips that taste like pizza.' So they get the lab going, they come up with a variety of flavors and then they give you sample. Usually they'll do the lab work for free as long as you sign something that says that they'll come up with the flavor profile and then you buy the flavors from them. That's how they make their money. So we had one house going and we told them we wanted like a tropical fruit punch flavored rum that was 70 proof. They were in New Jersey and they'd send up these samples. So we'd wait for weeks and then they'd come and they were horrendous. Cough syrup, really bad. So we kept having them try this or that, papaya, mango and all these different flavors. We'd tell them 'You're not gettin' it. Try Hawaiian Punch. Go get the Hawaiian Punch can, taste that, and go from there.' So this went on for about six months and they couldn't get it. I thought, 'This in not happening.' So I had this idea, send me the flavors. Send me 25 different flavors from cola to coconut to mango, guava, exotic, tropical flavors, berries, you name it. So I got my own samples of plain rum and in my kitchen with eyedroppers my partner and I and my wife would sit there and experiment, just do these little batches. I would sit there and do this all the time. We'd have friends come over, 'What do you think of this?' 'Ehhh.' That went on for many weeks. And we'd already now raised the money, we'd already designed the bottle. Everything was going on and we were still trying to get the flavor together and it wasn't coming. But everything else had to be moving along 'cause it takes a long time to get molds made for glass and all the other things. So the flavor was the last thing that came. And it came in November and we were ready to launch in December. I mean I was freaking out. So we finally narrowed it down to some flavors and we decided to do some informal focus groups. We got a bunch of friends together at a bar in town that my friend owns. We had everybody come in, sit down, and we gave everybody questionnaires and we gave them the samples. And they tried samples A-through-D and wrote their notes about each one. But the first focus group turned into a drunk fest. The information on the survey wasn't usable. We had fun, but we learned a lot about doing a focus group. So the next time I did it was up in Chico. Perfect target market. I got together a bunch of young people in another restaurant situation, but more controlled, didn't let them get drunk. So this was more controlled and the questions were revised so we could use the information. I tried to find out what they liked and didn't like. And really from those two taste tests we were able to narrow it down to four flavors, which made it simpler. I mean at this point we didn't know what tasted good or bad. So we finally came up with a flavor that we were happy with and we filed for it in December of '96 and really launched in January 1997.

IGN For Men: So what's the four flavors combined to make Redrum?

Dan DaDalt:Mango, pineapple, coconut, and berries. It used to be secret. A secret formula, a secret blend of exotic, tropical flavors. And then over the last couple of years, what we found is the reason why we tell people what the flavors are now, just recently, is 'cause they'd say 'Redrum. That looks cool.' But they were thinking cinnamon when they see the red rum in the red bottle they were thinking spicy. What I thought they'd think was red and fruity. People are used to seeing cinnamon schnapps that is red and whatever. And they're used to Captain Morgan's spiced rum. And the Redrum bottle didn't say 'fruity' on it. It said '...a blend of natural tropical flavors...' and that didn't even explain enough. SO now we have on the little neck tags it tells people what the fruits are. And then we found that when people actually know they say 'Oh really? Mango, papaya, that sounds appetizing.' We think that people are more willing to try it [if they know what fruits are in it]. Everyone thinks it's cool when they look at it, 'Oh, this is the coolest bottle.' They might even buy it but not even open it 'cause they don't even care what it tastes like because they like the bottle. But we need to get them beyond that and get them to drink it. So we found that by telling them what the flavors are that they're more likely to want to drink it.

IGN For Men: So what's the best Redrum concoction?

Dan DaDalt: We keep it simple because we want it to be easy for the bartender to make 'em. The Knockout Punch is the drink I promote the most. I think it's the easiest to make and the best all-around Redrum drink. It's Redrum, pineapple juice, and cranberry juice.

IGN For Men: Do you drink your own product?

Dan DaDalt: I drink so much of it.

IGN For Men: How do you drink it?

Dan DaDalt: I drink it three different ways mainly and that's Knockout Punch, Redrum and Coke with lime, and if I'm in a more upscale restaurant I'll drink the Redrum Cosmo.

IGN For Men: You actually order your own product when you go out?

Dan DaDalt: I'll only order it when I go out. I mean you have to [laughs]. And I try to only go to places that carry it. I mean we're a small company, so everything I do has to be important. I gotta just support it entirely 100-percent, 200-percent. I can never support it enough. Even if I don't want a drink I'll order one and maybe drink half of it.

IGN For Men: You do this everywhere you go?

Dan DaDalt: Everywhere.

IGN For Men: Do you always carry a bottle with you, you know like AmEx, never leave home without it?

Dan DaDalt: Yeah. You really should always have something, a brochure, a sticker. And I've got these little guys [holds up single serving airline styled bottles of Redrum]. I'm on the airplane and I'll hand it to the person next to me. And they're also sellable in the stores. They retail for about 99 cents. SO I give these things away like candy.

For tips on more enticing Redrum drinks, check out the Redrum Lounge at the official Redrum website.

Spence D. like his Redrum on the rocks.