We’ve all heard the phrase, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” So when confronted with historical flooding at its Lyons, Colo., distillery last year, Spirit Hound Distillers turned an unfortunate situation into a unique opportunity.

After flood waters caused barrels of its aging rum to float around the distillery for a day, the company decided to bottle the Mountain Bum Rum from one of the barrels.

“This rum is 80-proof and flood-proof,” said company distiller Craig Engelhorn in a statement. “It was aged in a used Buffalo Trace whiskey barrel for five months and for one day in flood waters. It’s like no other rum in the world.”

The first bottle of the specially marked “flood-aged” batch was donated to J.J. Hoffman, chief of the Lyons Fire Protection District, in recognition of his and his department’s efforts during the flood. The next 23 bottles were signed by the district’s crew and auctioned off. All money from those bottles was donated to a fund to help rebuild the district’s Lyons Fire Station No. 2, which was destroyed in the flood. Ten percent of all subsequent sales of the flood-aged rum also were donated to that fund. In total, the barrel of flood-aged rum produced approximately 500 bottles.

“This batch commemorates what our distillery and the rum went through the past four months,” said Co-Founder Neil Sullivan in a statement. “We really hope these are ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ bottles of Mountain Bum Rum.”

 Although braving the flood wasn’t easy, Spirit Hound Distillers created an opportunity to help revive its distillery as well as its community, thereby “making lemonade” — or in this case, rum — out of “lemons.”