Hooker Matt Moulds is planning for a post-rugby career in what many would consider to be a dream job.

Moulds, a summer recruit from Super Rugby team Blues, hopes to run his own rum distillery on New Zealand’s North Island when his playing days are over and he is already gaining valuable experience in the business by spending time working at Worcester-based Piston Gin.

A knee injury, which required surgery, has delayed Moulds’ Warriors debut but he is putting is spare time to use by spending his days off at Piston Gin’s distillery in the former Worcester Porcelain works, learning all aspects of the business from distilling the spirit to sticking labels on bottles.

Moulds arrived at Sixways with a family background in brewing and distilling having produced his rum, Shack Life, with his former Northland team-mates Dan and Kara Pryor.

“My grandad brewed beer for a long time. When he got Crohn’s disease he decided to make his own rum,” Moulds said.

“My Dad then bought a quality still and he also started brewing rum. It was coming out at 96 per cent pure from the still and they will filtering it pretty well so it was good quality alcohol.

“Every Friday night they had a brewery night and half the neighbourhood came down. Where I’m from is a just a small little farming town but word got out about the rum and we had some fantastic nights.

“Then the Pryor brothers and myself started experimenting with different flavours and we came up with a rum that had a nice spiced flavour with a cinnamon background. We produced ten or 15 bottles for my sister’s wedding and they just flew off the shelves.

“We called it Shack Life because of the area we were living out at Ngunguru which is a pretty cool area out on the coast.

“People said we should make more of the rum and that got us thinking about doing it seriously when  we all finish playing.

“Kara Pryor has a marketing degree, Dan is quite creative so he’s looking at bottle designs now.

“There’s a lot more to it than just producing the rum. You need to learn about the licensing and the premises you have to have and a bit about the process too.”

In his early weeks at Sixways Moulds had a meeting with Lynette Cutting, Warriors’ Education Officer, who encourages all the players to prepare for life after rugby by gaining academic and vocational qualifications and gaining valuable work experience with local companies.

Cutting used her contacts to line Moulds up with Piston Gin, a company that has developed rapidly since it was established last year.

“Piston Gin is pretty new on the scene but they have a quality set-up and the company has really taken off,” Moulds said.

“I’ve been going in on my days off and learning a lot from them in all areas of the business, from distilling to distribution. One week they were actually distilling the gin so I got to work with the main brewer there.

“But I help out wherever I can but it’s more about me learning the ropes at the moment. They are pretty cool people and they are into sharing knowledge so it’s been good for me.

“Having Lynette at the club has also been really helpful. I had a chat with her not long after I arrived in the summer and mentioned that I’d been thinking about the rum business.

“I’ve seen lots of people starting different businesses and when it comes to doing it you just have to kind of pull the trigger really.

“In my early twenties I went to university and got a degree but life after rugby was an after-thought for a few years.

“Now I’m 28 and you never know what is going to happen with your career so it makes sense to start looking at other things.”

Moulds will continue to develop his business and distilling skills on his weekly visits to Piston Gin who are happy to help the rugby player.

“Matt was very interested in the end-to-end distillation process and the business functions, as his family work with rum back home. So he comes up on a Wednesday and we work through various things, such as distilling and labelling,” said Andrew Sankey of Piston Gin.

“Matt has been fantastic, we try to help him as much as we can and hopefully he can take some of the things he’s learnt back to New Zealand for his life after rugby.

“We’re trying to teach him everything from start to finish. We buy in our neutral grain spirit and then turn into globally award-winning gin. It comes in at 96% and we turn it into to 48.5% before putting it into out still with the botanicals and distilling the alcohol off at 78 degrees and then turning it into the different flavours of gin.

“We are relatively new and it’s fantastic. A number of Warriors players have been before including Francois Hougaard and Wynand Olivier last year. We run a gin school on a Friday and a Saturday and we’re going from strength-to-strength.”

More information about Piston Gin can be found at: www.pistongin.com/

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