Fairytales can come true

Twice, we walk straight past the entrance to the Fairytale Bar in Winsviertel – a cocktail joint of some renown. Just as I’m starting to curse Google Maps, we spot a discretely signposted, matt black door tucked away on the corner of an unassuming apartment building.

I press the doorbell and hear, somewhere inside, the opening chimes of The Dance of The Sugar Plum Fairy, moments before the door is opened by a woman dressed as the Queen of Hearts. I quickly adjust my expectations for the evening, trying to look unphased.

Stepping inside is like entering another realm. With no windows, elaborately costumed bar staff and décor dripping with kitsch fairytale knickknacks, it feels like entering another realm. I even find myself resenting the arrival of other customers, as it slightly spoils the illusion; as a lover of traditional pubs, this is most unsettling.

Our host for the evening, Stefan of Meermaid infused rum, picked the venue. It was the first bar to stock his spiced, fruity tipple three years ago, and the owner is an old friend. “He used to serve drinks at the Tiki bar I owned about ten years ago, and now he’s this big shot,” laughs Stefan.

It was Stefan’s Tiki bar that arguably sowed the seeds for Meermaid. Specialising in rum, at a time when craft spirits were niche bordering on non-existant, he struggled to find a spiced rum with more character than Captain Morgan’s. Undaunted, he had a go at making his own, filling a large jar on the bar with white rum, spices from his kitchen and macerated fruit.

But it wasn’t until several years later, when the Fairytale Bar was conducting a similar search for a good spiced rum, that it occurred to Stefan that his bar-top experiments might have a wider audience. 

“My wife and I were spending Christmas with my parents’ house; we got 20 jars of base white rum and added two ingredients to each. A week later, we went through them one by one to see what worked. It was a disaster – we were doing all sorts of crazy stuff with cumquats and odd spices, and nothing worked. We’d got to the last jar – to which we’d added bananas and raisins, because we’d run out of other ingredients – and both instantly knew we’d found our starting point.”

The first batch of Meermaid rum only had around seven ingredients, and was made using large tubs of base white rum from Trinidad. Today, the recipe has 17 ingredients, and is put together by a distiller around three hours east of Berlin.

“Everything about Meermaid has developed through conversations with bartenders and drinkers at the spirit conventions we attend,” says Stefan. “To make sure it works well in a cocktail, I didn’t want any one ingredient to dominate – that’s why I dropped the cinnamon and winter spices we used in the first batch. Bartenders sometimes ask how to use it, but it really works well in any of the classic spiced rum cocktails.”

But why ‘Meermaid’? The answer is more esoteric than I’d expected.

“I found a cup years ago at a flea market. It had the design on it, and the old German word ‘meermaid’. It’s an old word that doesn’t really get used any more, but I was fascinated by it. For the label, I commissioned an illustrator who had once drawn a mermaid mural in the ladies’ at my tiki bar. I like to keep these connections going!”

The bottle itself is distinctive, with its unusual shape and jet-black coating. You can tell Stefan is a stickler for detail, as the rum’s packaging has gone through many changes over three years, as he searches for perfection. The characteristic mermaid and sailor motif though has never changed.

Athough he’s no longer doing the blending himself, Stefan keeps very busy visiting customers and selling the rum. It’s his dream though to give up his day job and build his own distillery, so the spirit is his from beginning to end. “It’s the part that I love, so of course that’s the dream,” he concludes.