El Dorado 50th Anniversary Grand Special Reserve 33 YO Rum – Review

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Apr 232018
 
El Dorado 50th Anniversary Grand Special Reserve 33 YO Rum - Review

#504 Two of my favourite metaphorical rum-terms are halo rums and unicorns, which are monikers coming to our awareness from opposing points on the spectrum. A unicorn is a desperately sought-after personal wanna-have, usually characterized by rarity and only sometimes by a high price; Examples of unicorns would be the G&M 1941 58 year old, Velier Skeldon 1973 or Port Mourant 1972, first editions of the Rum Nation line issued in 1999 and 2000, Appleton’s 1960s decanters, or aged agricoles from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s (or earlier). A halo rum on the other hand is a massively hyped special [Click here for the full review…]


Rendsburger Port Mourant 1975 32 Year Old Rum – Review

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Apr 072018
 
Rendsburger Port Mourant 1975 32 Year Old Rum - Review

#503 If you’re looking at this title and muttering to yourself “What the hell is Rendsburger?” you’re certainly not alone.  Aside from Spirits of Old Man out of Germany or Norsk Cask from Denmark, they may be among the least known independent bottlers out there and before a bunch of samples drifted across my scope, I sure hadn’t heard about them either. Strictly speaking, Rendsburg is the north-west German town close to Flensburg in which the parent company Kruger – a small, family-run whisky and spirits specialist  mainly known for its large whisky auction house – has its home. Therefore [Click here for the full review…]


Chalong Bay White Rhum – Review

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Apr 032018
 
Chalong Bay White Rhum - Review

#502 Asia may be the next region to discover for rummies.  Some companies from there already have good visibility – think Nine Leaves or Ryoma from Japan, Tanduay from the Phillipines, Amrut from India, Laotian from Laos and so on – and we should not forget Thailand.  So far I’ve only tried the Mekhong “rum” from there, and that was a while ago…but for the last few years I’ve been hearing about a new company called Chalong Bay, from the resort area of Phuket; and when John Go and I traded samples a while back, he sent me one of [Click here for the full review…]


El Dorado 3 Year Old White Rum – Review

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Mar 312018
 
El Dorado 3 Year Old White Rum - Review

#501 If there was ever a standard strength, filtered white rum that could drag the Bacardi Superior behind the outhouse and whale the tar out of it, this is the one.  I bought the thing on a whim, tasted it with some surprise and ended up being quietly impressed with the overall quality. I know it’s made to be the base for cocktails, and when it comes to badass white-rum-bragging-rights from Mudland the local High Wine is the Big Gun – but you know, as either a trial sipping experience, a cocktail ingredient or just to have something different that [Click here for the full review…]


The 500th Review

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Mar 272018
 
The 500th Review

Both of my eagle-eyed Constant Readers probably observed that I skipped the 400th review essay last year: I brought the 60+ Rumaniacs reviews into the numbering and so jumped right past it, but in any case, 500 seemed like a better number to be going on with.  Am I happy to reach this milestone? Oh yes. But that I have done so is a testament less to my own efforts, than those of readers, commentators and friends who continually provide encouragement and advice (and lots of corrections and criticisms). Even Mrs. Caner graces my work with an occasional nod of [Click here for the full review…]


Damoiseau 1953 31 Year Old Rhum Vieux – Review

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Mar 252018
 
Damoiseau 1953 31 Year Old Rhum Vieux - Review

#500 In one of those odd coincidences that crop up from time to time, I was polishing up my essay for one of Damoiseau’s ultra-premium halo rums – a 31-year-old inky bad boy from 1953 which is usually too rare or too pricey for most to bother with – when Single Cask posted his own in-depth evaluation.  We had a good laugh over that one, but in a way it’s good too, because while one person’s review of a single rum is fine, a better opinion can be formed with several people putting their snoots and their pens in. Age-wise, [Click here for the full review…]


Velier Port Mourant 1997-2012 15 YO Rum – Review

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Mar 212018
 
Velier Port Mourant 1997-2012 15 YO Rum - Review

  #499 Velier’s 1997 Port Mourant expression announces its presence with the sort of growling distant rumble of an approaching storm system, igniting emotions of awe and amazement (and maybe fear) in the unwary.  It’s 65.7% of fast-moving badass, blasting into a tasting session with F5 force, flinging not just bags but whole truckloads of flavour into your face. You think I’m making this up for effect, right?  Nope. The nose, right from the start, even when just cracking the bottle, is ragingly powerful, shot through with lightning flashes of licorice, blueberries, blackberries, off-colour bananas, citrus, pineapple slices in syrup. [Click here for the full review…]


El Dorado Rare Collection – Port Mourant 1999-2015 16 YO PM

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Mar 192018
 
El Dorado Rare Collection – Port Mourant 1999-2015 16 YO PM

#498 By the time we get to the third Rare Collection rum issued by DDL to the market in early 2016, we have to move on from our preconceived notions of how these rums were issued: okay, so they booted Luca out and us rum junkies were pissed, but from a purely business perspective, perhaps we should have seen it coming.  And anyway, the world didn’t come to an end, did it? Life continued, taxes got paid, rums got drunk, and civilization endured. Time to move on. It was surely nothing personal, just business, caro amico.  Lo capisci, vero? Which [Click here for the full review…]


El Dorado Rare Collection – Enmore 1993-2015 22 YO EHP

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Mar 162018
 
El Dorado Rare Collection - Enmore 1993-2015 22 YO EHP

#0497 “A cheap shot,” muttered Henrik, referring to DDL stopping Velier’s access to their rums in 2015, and surely channelling the feelings of many. And it was therefore perhaps unavoidable that the initial DDL Rare Collection rums issued in early 2016 were instantly compared to the Age of Demerara Veliers upon whose success they wished to capitalize and whose street cred they sought to supplant.  That’s hard cheese and perhaps unfair to the rums, but it was and remains DDL’s cross to bear and they must have known that going in. The question was whether they maintained the standard and [Click here for the full review…]


El Dorado Rare Collection – Versailles 2002-2015 13 YO VSG

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Mar 142018
 
El Dorado Rare Collection - Versailles 2002-2015 13 YO VSG

#496 It’s been two years since the furore created by the inadvertently premature publication of the Velier catalogue entries for the El Dorado Rare Collection ignited in the minds of the Velier lovers, and I’ve been sitting on the three bottles almost since that time, waiting to get around to them. One of the reasons the reviews were not written immediately was simply that I felt the dust needed to settle down a bit, so that they could be approached with something resembling objectivity.  Two years might have been just about enough for me to forget the original reviews that [Click here for the full review…]


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