About — Contemplative Spirits

Founders

Duncan & Georgiana Davenport

We collect spirits at home — nothing fancy, just bottles that make us stop and take a second sip. In November 2024, Duncan got the idea that it would be pretty cool to hand-pick a whole cask of rum himself and bring it in — something you couldn't just walk into a shop in Arizona and find.

We thought that would mean clicking “buy” on a website. It did not.

As it turns out, you can't legally have a cask of rum shipped to you in Arizona unless you're a licensed distributor. So we called the very generous folks at Raising Glasses, who walked us through what licenses to get, what a distributor actually does, and how you go about importing and bottling a cask once you finally do get one.

Some paperwork later — okay, a lot of paperwork — and there we were: two brand-new Arizona rum distributors, wondering what to do with the rest of our lives. We decided to share.

“We're not experts. We just want to bring in rum that makes you go ‘hmm’ — and then keep drinking.”

Duncan and Georgiana Davenport in the Sonoran Desert

Why Rum

Rum is huge, and that's the fun part.

It's made from cane grown in more places, using more stills and traditions, than pretty much any other spirit. Which means there's always another bottle worth trying.

Terroir

Cane variety, soil, climate, water, yeast — every rum picks up fingerprints from where it's made. A Martinique agricole tastes nothing like a Guyanese Demerara.

Craft

Pot stills, column stills, dunder pits, solera systems — rum producers use just about every technique in the book, and many of them are refreshingly open about it.

Community

There's a global crowd of drinkers, writers, and distillers who've decided rum deserves the same conversation whiskey gets. We're happy to help carry some of it to Arizona.

Philosophy

How we pick what we bring in.

We taste a lot. We ask a lot of questions. We say no a lot more often than we say yes.

We look for producers who are transparent about age, method, and additives, and we like bottles with a distinct point of view. We try to keep the range wide — weeknight pours at the front, milestone bottles at the back.

How we accidentally became rum distributors.