Just a Distillery serves up more than Just Rum

Just Rum’s cocktail menu often includes some seasonal choices.

We’ve all been there: dragged down the rabbit hole by curiosity over some random topic we find fascinating, whether it’s Wikipedia-ing your favorite artist’s life story or searching the depths of the internet for that discontinued product you have to have.

For John Hasbrouck, his rabbit hole was the history of rum, and from that deep dive came the award-winning business: Just Rum.

According to his master distiller Jonathan Crosby, before that long night on the internet, Hasbrouck was a whiskey guy. But while traveling for work all over the world, he’d often pick up a bottle of the local distillate from wherever work had landed him, and take it home.

One night, in a twist of fate Jack Sparrow would envy, Hasbrouck ran out of whiskey. He’d just worked to fix a problem for his boss for multiple days straight with little sleep, and was dismayed to not have his favorite spirit to drink. All he had was rum.

So, rather than get dressed to go out to the store, and despite the fact that he wasn’t a rum fan, Hasbrouck popped open a bottle of rum.

“It blew him away,” Crosby said. “It was flavorful and he’d never had a rum like that before.”

And thus went another 12 hours as Hasbrouck availed himself of any and all information on the history of – and how to make – rum, and even ordered what he’d need to attempt his own batch.

His operation, like many great startups, began in his basement. Then Hasbrouck began sharing the rum with his friends and family at parties and found that people loved it.

When Hasbrouck decided to take his rum distillery from a hobby to a business, he realized he’d need to upscale his operation and decided to move from Washington to a piece of land in Sandy in 2019.

Later that year, Crosby met Hasbrouck at the Mount Hood Farmers Market, was “blown away” by the rum, coincidentally, a few years later, ending up with a job at Just Rum as a distiller.

“I enjoyed learning how to do distillation,” Crosby said. “As a little kid, I wanted to be a mad scientist, and I think I’ve achieved that now.”

What some don’t know about rum is that it is much more loosely defined than other spirits like whiskey. Pretty much every country has their own interpretation of rum, because it is simply any alcohol created through the fermentation of sugarcane.

With that as a base, rum lends itself to quite a bit of variation, and Just Rum has explored that at length. They offer several different flavor profiles of rum, including a seasonal spiced, a blackberry-infused, and many others, varied by the type of barrel they were aged in.

Just Rum’s simple mission is to “craft historically inspired rums free from artificial colors or flavors.”

And from those rums, the tasting room at 17020 Ruben Ln., Sandy, offers a creative cocktail menu besides bottles to take home.

“We make very good cocktails,” Crosby said. “We offer more than just a mai tai or a pina colada. Rum can be used in so many more ways. It has this very broad structure; it’s like the jazz of spirits.”

Aside from the cocktails (and mocktails), Just Rum also offers an interesting food menu, ranging from housemade salsa and chips to steamed dumplings to a flatbread pizza with ranch, pickles and bacon. While some may question that last combination, Crosby said the Briny Swine pizza is actually quite well liked.

The team at Just Rum has had the tasting room on Ruben Lane in Sandy since December 2023.

For those slightly (but not much) less adventurous, they also offer a Hawaiian flatbread featuring cinnamon sugar dusting, a Caribbean jerk chicken flatbread, a Cubano style flatbread, and the trusty tried and true pepperoni, but with a balsamic glaze drizzle to elevate it a bit.

While the cocktails are top notch and the salsa is apparently so good people request to buy jars to take home, Crosby said that Just Rum also is really trying to push the educational aspect of the distillery by offering distillery tours and hosting events that teach people about the complexities and history of the rum they’re drinking.

Outside of the distillery and tasting room, the Just Rum team also has a presence at many different markets and shows — at least 160 so far this year — where they not only sell bottles but sell the philosophy of rum and an educational experience. You can often find them at the Mount Hood Farmers Market in Sandy and the Gresham Farmers Market during their seasons.

For more information about Just Rum, visit justadistillery.com.