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Bacardi 1873 Dark Rum – Review

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Nov 272010
 

First Posted 27 Nov 2010 on Liquorature

A pleasant mixer but not worth it as a sipper…like a date you want to kiss but really aren’t sure you want to bring home just yet.

I’m at a loss to say what Bacardi 1873 is, based on what I’m reading. Research is maddeningly inconclusive: is it a solera, as some bottles advertise themselves to be, or a standard blend of some kind? Some sources suggest that it’s an aged blend that has now been replaced by the eight year old. I hesitate to commit myself to any of these positions, because while I can tell my bottle is definitely not marked as a solera (that is usually clearly identified as such on the bottle, and the one I sampled makes no mention of it), I can’t ascertain anything else.

It would also appear that the few rum reviews out there are at odds on whether it is discontinued or not, and if so, replaced by what. Bacardi’s own (woefully inadequate) website is hardly a fount of information on the matter and thus far they have ignored my inquiries. On the other hand, Chip Dykstra of the Rum Howler Blog was as helpful as ever, and responded that while the 1873 started life as a Solera made in Puerto Rico, production was subsequently moved to Mexico and the specialized solera method was discontinued.

Faced with this dilemma, a reviewer does what he can: he directs an inquiry at the distiller, does as careful a tasting as he is able, and puts a picture of the bottle up to ensure that readers know precisely what they’re reading a review of. And this is what I’ve attempted to do.

Price wise, nothing to say. About $35. Bottle, not the rounded shape of the standard Bacardi’s like Black, Gold or White, but more squared off. Cap is a cheap crap tinfoil press-on. I won’t go so far as to say these initial indications denote low-end, but it does seem to be trending that way. On the other hand, I like the rich and deep amber-gold colour of the rum as the light strikes it (something I’ve attempted to show in the picture I took).

Working on the assumption that this is a blend, the trick is to see if a decent tasting can suggest, with a fair degree of assurance, whether it’s an old or young one running up the spine.

On those nose, there is a surprising lack of any kind of spirit burn on the initial sniff, just soft vanilla notes wrapped around a caramel and burnt sugar core. There is a hint of oaken tannins on the back end which suggest some level of ageing, but it’s impossible to say how much: the relatively simple nose doesn’t lend itself much to dissection. I need to mention, though, that after I left my glass to stand for a bit, a sly citrus hint came sliding out of the softer background of vanilla.

The palate confirmed the overall lack of complexity the nose had suggested. The body of the 1873 was lighter than I expected for something of this copper-brown/amber coloured hue; and slightly sweet without overpowering you with sugar, and a shade dry (not as much as the Bermudez, however). The rum is spicy, packing a light stinging burn on the tongue, yet perseverance elicits the taste of dried fruits as well, the non-sweet kind, like dates, perhaps; this last is very faint and is no more than a light impression. As for the finish, it’s short and sharp, and the medicinal fumes which thus far escaped you are back to claw their way up your throat and spoil what so far had been an unremarkable, but also not particularly bad, rum.

I’m really not impressed with the 1873 on its own – this one seems to be tailor made for a cocktail base of some kind, and indeed, as a mixer with the usual suspects, I really enjoyed it. I believe it to be a blend of rums aged no more than five years. As a sort of general product, it doesn’t try to be any one thing, but too many, and there we may have hit on the reason for its lack of success with me. The makers never got around to hanging their hat on any kind of flavour profile, while trying to please everyone: that marks it out as a low-ender, to my mind.

I sometimes wonder how much rum-lovers’ tastes the world over are formed from early exposure to the best selling rum in the world. When you think about it, drinkers who start with scotch appreciate the drier, not so sweet variations that hark back to whisky and cognac, while also liking the sweeter, more full-bodied stuff; but drinkers who began with Bacardi and never strayed from the true faith tend to like the former somewhat less, and concentrate their love on the latter. This private theory of mine is anecdotal at best, but who knows.

Be that as it may, Bacardi 1873 is a pleasant blend of no great sophistication, and sports its youthful physique and unpretentious nature like any teenager that ever lived but fails on the finish line. It’s main selling point might be that it’s a cut above the black and gold variations, and works exceedingly well as a mixer. For some, it might work as a low-end, none too stellar sipper (something like the El Dorado 5 yr or English Harbour 5 yr)…not for me, though.

(#049)(73.5/100) ⭐⭐½

Cadenhead’s Green Label Demerara 12 year old – Review

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Nov 272010
 

First posted November 27th, 2010 on Liquorature

A dry, slightly overproof schizophrenic rum that is just on his side of being a whisky, and not recommended for purist rum mixologists who like their libation darker and sweeter.

Rum is traditionally matured in used bourbon or other whiskey barrels, but this is the first one I’ve ever seen and tasted which was finished in a Laphhroaig cask. Was that an accident? Did it just sort of slip and fall over and said “Oops!” as it boinked into a cask of whisky? I dunno, but Cadenhead Green Label 12 yr old Demerara rum is a rum with an identity crisis, a crazy overproof schizo that doesn’t know what the hell it is, and, like the Green Label Classic we tried way back in February 2009, it does not rank high on our list in spite of the $83 price tag.

The source of this pale yellow rum is rum from Guyana (I wonder if DDL has been sneaking into Scotland again), and part of its claim to fame – aside from the aforesaid Laphroaig casks and some water brought in to bring it down (up?) to drinking strength – is an absolute lack of additives or subsequent processing of any kind to make it a different colour, or adulterate the taste in any fashion. This was also a characteristic of the Green Label Classic we had last year, except in that case it had no age statement. Both are made by the Cadenhead Distilleries now owned by the Campbelltown distiller J.&A. Mitchell and Co., which runs the Springbanks distillery in Argyll, and is primarily a single malt brewer. One is left to wonder whether they are copying Bruichladdich’s Renegade line, or indulging in some experimentation of their own.

Appearance wise, the Classic was actually better, with a rounded cardboard box; this one was a fairly straightforward design and label of rough paper. A lot of the pale liquid inside was visible, and I imagine that alone would catch many an eye more used to darker hues. The nose is sharpish, not quite medicinal, but not gentle either (the rum is 46% so that’s certainly part of it), and asserts its woody character without apology. I’m not a whisky drinker by habit (I’ve tasted enough to get the rudiments down and one can’t be a member of Liquorature without picking up something about Scotches) and I have no real sense of Laphroaig aside from its peatiness – I imagine that the woody bite I got on the nose hearkens to this. It opens up after a while, revealing a fruity note, leavened by – I swear! – sea salt. Like I said…not a normal rum.

The taste to me is flat out whisky. There is no way I could do a blind test on this and know it was a rum except, perhaps, for the slightly sweet hint to it which is uncharacteristic of whiskies as a whole. It’s dry as hell, as arid as the Sahara, and yet there again was that salty-brine undernote. It burns and stings of oak, finishes in the same fashion – dry and burning – and this is where I question the decision not to do any further processing on it. Aside from some kind of purist’s bragging rights, what exactly has this decision led to? Not a rum, to me, but some kind of bastardized in-the-middle product that isn’t fish or fowl.

The peat-heads in the group were vocally disapproving and dismissive – even contemptuous – in their assessment. “Motor oil.” “Rubber.” “Noses like a Barbie doll fresh out of the plastic,” sniffed the Hippie (how does he even know that smell? I wonder). I don’t know if they actually disliked it, smelled and tasted what they said, or were afraid that rums were starting to approach whiskies in taste and nose and were terrified of the thought, but to my mind the comments were just a shade harsh.

Myself, I must admit to sort of liking it. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s not quite my thing, and I wouldn’t blow another eighty bucks to add it to my “special” shelf where I keep the stuff I really like (as opposed to those bottles I buy to review and share) – but there’s an odd underlying harmony to the balance of driness and sweetness in the Green Label 12; and the depth imparted by the slight overpoof nature of the rum added to a profile that I found just intriguing enough not to dislike it outright. Not quite recommended, unless you’re in the mood to buy something really different, but you won’t be entirely disappointed with it if you do.

(#051. 76/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Tuzemak Czech Rum – Review

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Nov 262010
 

First posted 26 November 2010 on Liquorature.

Herbal, different and like few other rums (we’ll be generous with the term) ever made; will add variety to cocktails and cheer to any Czechs you booze with, but my take is to exercise care when you have it neat.

We must establish from the outset that all labeling to the contrary, Tuzemak is not precisely a rum. This is because it was originally made from potatoes or beets, not sugar cane, and while you might find it in the rum section, it’s simply because the Czech manufacturers have in the past included colouring and taste additives to make it more like a real rum, and called it as such — you will note this label has no such word, not even “room” which some Central European spirits makers have used to get around EU regs. I’m no fan of over-regulation, and the EU has whole warehouses crammed floor to ceiling with them, but in this case their ruling that to be classified and sold as rum in Europe, the thing can’t be made from pommes-de-terre, finds much favor with me.

Which is not to say I actually despise the drink I bought on a whim at Willow Park the other day (my curiosity and nosiness will be the undoing of me one day, I fear). As a confirmed internationalist and pretender to cosmopolitanism, I try to take a more tolerant view of differences, and if this thing more or less looks like a brown drink, tastes sweeter than whisky and smells a bit like the good stuff, while being trumpeted as a rum in Czechoslovakia even though they have been forbidden to do so…well, I’m not averse to taking it at face value (The Last Hippie, who refuses to concede that there is any other whisky than the Scotch kind even as he snootily reviews what he terms “lesser offerings” in an effort to call himself fair, would probably be horrified at my laissez-faire attitude, but them’s the breaks).

Tuzemak actually means “domestic” in Czech, and simply refers to its down-home origins (not a maid). Called Tuzemský rum until January 1, 2003 — when the country became subject to the EU regulatory regime on spirits as a condition for entry — it is, like Stroh’s, something of a local institution, and made with an old, supposedly traditional recipe. Czechs are great beer drinkers, but they do like hard stuff as well: aside from the rum, there is both slivovice (a kind of plum brandy) and Becherovka, (a herbal 38% liqueur). This one seems to take the best part of tose and creates a drink for the people who never have drinks…just a drink, and then another drink and then…

Enough temporizing, then: what’s the story on the rum?

On the nose, it’s not too shabby. It’s a little pungent, a shade sharp, but as it settles, wafts of vanilla billow gently into your nose without too much sting or burn. There is a very slight medicinal undertone that kind of spoils the taste, but not so much as to seriously detract from the overall quality, just to show it’s not an aged product. What kind of blend it is – that is to say, what’s in it or how many differing ingredients there are – I cannot say. There’s too little information available.

The palate continues enhancing what the nose promised. As one tastes, the vanilla becomes more pronouced, keeping in step with a gradually increasing floral note, some kind of herbs (similar to the Stroh 54) and a faint liquorice hint that blends pretty well into the overall balance. It’s like a light sweet semi dry cognac, and for once I do not mean this in a bad way. It’s young and a little rambunctious, not too sophisticated…yet nice too, even as a low end sipper. The finish is short and dry and without serious sting or burn, the warm breath of the fumes come up the back of your throat and linger gently before dissipating

In summary, I think this is a very workmanlike entry to the genre. I’d drink it neat, yes; but it makes a phenomenally different and pleasurable mixer too, largely due to its unusual herbal properties which give even that old faithful, the rum and coke, a uniquely different perspective. Remember how I despised the plasticine taste of the Stroh 54? This delectable local tipple from middle Europe avoids the pitfalls of that overproof, and is a decent rum, an interesting sipping tipple and something that I’d recommend for any who want to try something a little off the reservation.

Na zdravi!

(#050)(73/100) ⭐⭐½

Other Notes / Updates

  • In 2018 the Tuzemak was pulled aside by the EU and told to remove the “rum ether” which gave the beet-distilled spirit its rum flavour (it was a carcinogen).

Bermudez Ron Añejo Anniversario – Review

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Nov 192010
 

First posted November 19, 2010 on Liquorature.

Bermudez is the second rum I managed to find from the Three Bs distilleries in the half-island of the Domincan Republic (Brugal, Bermudez and Barcelo), and is both less and more than its possibly better known sibling, the Brugal Ron Añejo which I took a look at the other day.

J. Armando Bermúdez & Co., C. por A. is a distillery located in Santiago de los Caballeros in the north central region of the DR. It was founded in 1852 (hence the year on the label of this Anniversary edition) by Erasmo Bermúdez, who created the formula of the Bitter Panacea, an early rum meant to be taken as appertif, and which soon became very well known. To this day the descendants of Erasmo run the show, but there are stories about how the various members of the family have squabbled among themselves on the direction of the company, and so it no longer holds the pre-eminent position it once had. It certainly is the oldest of the Three Bs, Brugal being established in 1888 and Barcelo in 1930.

There is no age statement on the bottle, so one is forced to resort to external resouces to see what’s in this baby. Wikipedia refers to the Anniversario as a golden high-end premium blend (not particularly helpful), and Chip Dykstra’s notes suggest it has either a twelve or a fifteen year old backbone, based on the supplier’s say-so, but añejos are usually under ten years old so I take that assertion with a pinch of salt. Given its middling price of just around forty dollars, he may be right, but I find it frustrating in the extreme to find the company website unavailable, and no other notes of consequence anywhere to inform the casual reader on the matter.

Anniversario is a tawny gold colour, however hidden it may be in a nearly opaque dark green bottle. I can’t say the tinfoil cap impresses me much – if this is a premium rum you’d think something more would be added to the initial presentation to justify the price, not a cheap covering and an equally cheap sigil on the front above the label. But it’s another indicator, pointing to its less aged pedigree than others claim it has.

A thin oily film devolves into slow thin legs that meander slowly back into the glass; on the nose, the medicinal sting and reek is more pronounced (much to my surprise) than the Brugal I had right beside it and ten minutes previously (I promptly poured another glass of it to make sure this was not an accident and yup, it was confirmed). After I left it to open up a bit, other flavours emerged: a sort of earthy, dark taste, like rich chocolate, balanced off by a dry and woody flavour and a hint of citrus. Later it developed a sweet floral hint, though not as light and clear as the Brugal: it was more…heavy, a bit like lilies as compared to white roses.

The Anniversario is a dry, unsweet medium-bodied rum which seems to be characteristic of the Latin islands. Tasting it confirmed some notions, dispelled others. A sweeter taste shyly emerged from out of the nose, and the driness became more pronounced, as did the slight bitterness coming from the oaken tannins. On the back end and leading into the finish, the faint traces of molasses and caramel I so like could finally be discerned. The finish is short and spicy, a slight burn that just misses being sharp (for which I give thanks), but again, is nowhere near as smooth as the Brugal.

I wish I knew more about its distillation and provenance: it smelled and tasted like a single digit rum, yet it was obviously aged and seemed to be marketed as something more. And against that, the 3-5 year blend of the Brugal has a phenomenally smooth finish which this one can’t even approach. In fine, I’m underwhelmed by the Anniversario. It has a relatively modest price tag, but if it is true that it is a blend of double digit teen rums, then it has a pedigree I simply cannot see as justified (on the other hand I must say that it’s a matter of what one reviewer has said, plus some anecdotal evidence gleaned from hours of searching online – no real hard facts I can hang my shapka on).

At the end of it all, it must come down to my opinion based on what I tasted. The Bermudez Ron Añejo Anniversario tastes like a dry cognac, not a rum, is not sweet enough and lacks a real body. The blend just doesn’t work as well as it should for me, in spite of the fact that it may have a blended series of aged components in the double digits. It has an interesting marriage of flavours, but this groom, alas, ain’t buying today.

(#048)(73/100) ⭐⭐½

Brugal Ron Añejo – Review

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Nov 182010
 

First published November 18th, 2010 on Liquorature.

Ron Añejo Brugal is one of two rums from the Domincan Republic which I tasted side by side last Friday. Not to be confused with Dominica, the Dominican Republic is the Spanish speaking eastern half of the island of Hispaniola…the western half is Haiti. Three distilleries known as the Three Bs operate in the DR: Bermudez in the Santiago area, the Santo Domingo distillery called Barcelo, and Brugal in the north coast. Brugal, founded in 1888, seems to be the largest, perhaps as a result of being acquired in 2008 by the UK Edrington Group (they are the makers of Cutty Sark), and perhaps because Bermudez succumbed to internecine family squabbling, while Barcelo made some ill-advised forays into the hospitality sector and so both diluted their focus, to Brugal’s advantage

The term añejo simply means “aged”, and in this case it’s just a question of how long. Given the cheapness of the bottle (~$30 in Calgary Co-op) you can sort of assess that it’s not a double-digit rum, and indeed, after doing some research, I confirmed it to be a blend of rums aged three to five years in the usual used oak barrels that once held bourbon. The rum itself is a solidly mid-tier offering, golden in colour, in an utterly undistinguished, average looking bottle with a white plastic cap (plastic? sigh…). I don’t always agree with the Arctic Wolf in Edmonton on his assessments of rum, but both he and The Bear share this one thing: they despise cheap crap, in particular, bottle caps made of tinfoil or plastic (against this, you have to understand that the Bear in particular hates being dinged for extra crap which adds only to presentation…it gets a bit confusing at times).

All this preamble aside, what’s going on with the profile? Well, if you want me to cut to the chase, the bottom line is that Brugal Anejo is a solid mid-tier rum, with a smooth finish that makes it just barely edge into sipper territory. Stop reading now if that’s all you needed.

In the glass it’s a clear dark toffee colour, which leaves a nice clear film on the side of the glass which gradually disperses into thin legs. The initial nose is sharp and medicinal (did I ever mention how much I hate this?) which, once the rum sits a while, devolves into light vanilla and caramel notes with a clear sweet floral note that I quite liked. Gradually, a second and third nosing will take you back into the comforting arms of the caramel, molasses and burnt sugar flavours, but they are light and clear in a way that is at odds with the heavier, darker flavours of the Guyanese El Dorados (or even the Jamaican Appletons).

The body of the rum is medium light… in fact, it’s almost thin, the way Doorly’s XO was. Be warned: this rum is not sweet, and this means that the overall feel on the tongue is more like a cognac, an opinion reinforced by its overall driness. The lack of sweet translates into something almost salty, like an ocean breeze tang, or something autumnal (which may be the oaken flavours coming through), and it’s intriguing without entirely being something I cared for. And as with the nose, after a moment you can taste the burnt brown sugar flavours coming subtly through on the back end – much more so than the Doorley’s I could not learn to appreciate. On ice Brugal’s is not recommended – the ice will close this baby up faster than a nun’s habit in a brothel – but as a mixer? Hmmm. Pretty damned good.

The delight of this rum is the finish: Brugal is astonishingly smooth. I don’t like the lack of sugar in the flavour profile because this to some extent affects how long the finish lasts and how heavy the rum feels, but even with the short time you feel the rum on the swallow, you get no burn or scratch or bite whatsoever. It’s nothing short of amazing, and for this I gave it a high thumbs up. Overall, this is not quite my kind of rum – I’ve made mention of my liking for heavier, darker and slightly sweeter variations – but I must be honest about it. If your liking is for less sugar than I prefer, then this low priced mid-range likker from the Caribbean will be right up your alley and is absolutely a good value for your thirty bucks. If that’s your thing, go for it.

(#047. 74.5/100) ⭐⭐½

 

Rivers Royale Grenadian White Rum – Review

 1 Response »
Nov 022010
 

First posted 2nd November 2010 on Liquorature.

My trip to Toronto last October permitted me to taste rums that never would have made it to Calgary (one or two would never have made it anywhere), and since my circle of friends is admittedly small, and few of those travel to rum producing states, it’s not as if I would have gotten any of the last five subjects of my reviews from them either. So kudos and thanks one last time to John, who opened his cabinet to my inquiring snoot, and let’s get to the review of the last rum in this decidedly odd series.

Rivers Royale is from the Spice Island, as is the Clarke’s Court, though River Antoine Estate Distillery is in Saint Andrew’s Parish on the Northeast coast of Grenada, while Clarke’s is from the south…apparently there is healthy competition for bragging rights on the island as to which is stronger (both are white overproofs), or simply better. Because I had the “bush” variation of the Clarke’s (which was, by the way, quite good), and because Antoine’s white lightning has a surpisingly robust flavor profile for an overproof, I’m not going to get in the middle of that particular dispute except to make this observation: Rivers is made the same way as it was way back in 1785 when the place was founded.

On the smaller islands like Grenada, commercial cane production is a thing of the past (partly this is a space issue, partly it’s the economics of world sugar trade), and most distilleries import molasses or raw rum stock from other places with more space available for economical cane cultivation (like Guyana)…except for River Antoine. These local lads don’t muck about. They cultivate their own cane, reap it, process it and make the rum like they always made it, crushing the cane with a press whose motive power is drawn from an old waterwheel, concentrating the juice in open vats (John, who’s been there, noted rather sourly that it’s not impossible for bat guano to be a part of the mix, but I digress) then boiling it down in cast iron pots over an open fire fed by the cane remnants.

After fermentation, the resultant is distilled in an ancient copper pot still (copper supposedly imparts better (and subtler) flavours to the distillate than stainless steel)…the entire process takes abut ten days from cane to finished product.

It’s perhaps the only remaining distillery in the Caribbean that can make the boast of using such old fashioned technology, and it’s quite a tourist draw. What you get if you go to the estate-cum-distillery in person (and at factory prices, apparently) is the local version, bottled straight out of the still, at about 75-80% alcohol (stories vary), which is to say 150-160 degrees proof. I won’t swear to it, but I think John had the real McCoy, not the watered down version sold to western homeys so they can get through customs, and I say that because it was an overproof for sure, complete with the deep burn and raw sting of real moonshine…though I gotta tell you, surprisingly robust flavours came through.

The clear liquor I tasted that night had a medium body, with middling legs in my glass. The claws struck at my nose without hesitation, but after my eyes stopped watering and I rolled my medium rare tongue back off the floor, what I got was a rather welcome waft of…well, schnapps. A slightly floral hint. Salt, brine, olives. As I’ve noted before, I don’t spend too much time trying to taste test an overproof, neat or otherwise, because the spirit burns out anything I might think I’m tasting (or which my imagination conjures up for me as my stomach ties itself up in complex knots and I try to turn myself inside out): on the other hand, I have to say that I don’t know what they did down there in Granada, but if you stick with Rivers Royale, you will taste cherries, fruit, maybe some orange peel. Quite amazing. And as for the finish, well, come on…who’re you kidding? On an overproof? It’s a potent likker with real power behind dem claws, and it sears deeply, and farts acid, but not in a way that makes you scream: it sure ain’ smooth like a more commercial rum, and that’s the best I can do for you.

There’s something about the overall interaction of all elements of this overproof that works for me, though. I liked the hand drawn, unpretentious label. I liked the title itself, that air of old time creole French, and the old-fashioned way it was made. I liked the rum. It’s potent likker, and will singe your throat (and eyebrows if you’re not careful). It’s absolutely an island product and I don’t care what anyone says, for me it’s not really a true commercial export product that will one day show up in Calgary (import, strength and quality regulations probably won’t allow it) – I consider it one of those backwoods bashwars you’ll find as you tour the Caribbean, locally made and locally consumed, unpretentious and not giving a damn, rude and cheerful and unsophisticated, and quite simply, one of the best rums you’ve ever tried…one those rums you’ll be happy you’ve had once you’ve had it and will remember with a smile forever.

(#046) (Unscored)

Other Notes

J. Wray & Nephew White Overproof Rum – Review

 2 Responses »
Nov 012010
 

First posted 01 November, 2010 on Liquorature

Raw white overproof, fun to drink mix or celebrate with…as the Jamaicans have long since known.

To be honest, I’m not entirely clear why people – aside from binge drinkers, students and serial alcoholics, whose motives are clearer — bother to drink white overproofs straight on a regular basis. The taste is simply too raw for real appreciation, in my opinion (though I have had several “full proof” rums which avoid this sharp stiletto to the palate, so it’s by no means a hard and fast rule). But I suppose they’re like those long distance runners who believe that twenty six miles is for sissies, and run ultra marathons instead. Tail end of the bell curve, or something like that. Or maybe they got used to in their youth in an old-country beer garden, or some trading post-cum-rumshop in the backdam; or believe it makes them more macho; gets them high faster; mixes better. Who the hell knows? If it’s one thing I’ve discovered in writing these reviews, is that there is as wide a variety of tastes as there are rums, and what is derided by one may be equally praised (fulsomely so) by another.

Whatever the case, there is actually a pretty good market for overproof rums among drinkers: overproofs are supposedly for cocktail bases and cooking purposes, but that never stopped anyone I ever met, male or female: one of my most enduring memories of working (and boozing) in the bush is a young Amerindian girl, passed out dead drunk on the Baramita airstrip, a bottle of Brazilian 99% alcool clutched tight in her left hand, and I know men who simply pace themselves better with strong spirits than with weak ones. That said, as I was researching and reading online readers’ fora about Stroh 54 (and 80), Bacardi’s 151 and the Clarke’s Court Pure White, knowing what I knew about Guyanese “High Wine” and now writing about the J. Wray & Nephew White Overproof, it seems to me that some people simply prefer it. And that’s perfectly proper.

The white I discuss here is bottled at a relatively mild 63%, which would make scotch drinkers quite happy, I suppose. It is, as any rum aficionado can immediately tell you, manufactured by the Jamaican boys who make Appleton Estate rums: and while the Appletons are easily purchased the world over, I get the impression that this white lightning is not easily or commercially available outside the Caribbean – which is indeed where my Torontonian squaddie John had picked it up on one of his sojourns to the Islands. It may be the single most popular rum in Jamaica, and mostly drunk mixed.

Therein lies the rub. Drinking an overproof of any kind is not a matter of sipping it neat, or even on ice. The J. Wray variant in this review is pretty strong, searing stuff without question: a massive, raw, ethanol delivery system that could knock a platoon out by breakfast time with one quick inhale. At the inception the white has almost no taste: it’s pretty flavourless beyond some kind of smoky, oil-fire kero tang coiling behind the nasty burn, which means that it’ll take on the flavours of whatever you chose to mix into it. Sure you might get some hints of orange peel, licorice and a peppery kind of spiciness at the back end (nose? what nose?), but truly, the only way to get any enjoyment at all out of something like this is to mix it, because all tastes are burned to a crisp by the spirit fire fairly fast (and in the distance I can hear the sneers of the Maltmonster as he delicately noses his favourite Ardbeg, neat).

Do that and this transparent medium body rum fares rather well, I thought (not without a little surprise). It makes a mean bastard of a Cuba Libre, a deep and strong Mai Tai that kicks the crap out of you in labba time, and I can almost guarantee that there isn’t a household of Jamaicans – expatriate or homeboys – who don’t have a bottle of this stuff kicking around. Like Guyanese with their XM five, it has all sorts of social connotations: crack a bottle and immediately you pour a capful on the ground to return some to those who aren’t with you; have a housewarming, and grace the floor with a drop or two; touch of the rheumatiz? – rub dem joints with a shot; mek a pickney…put a dab ‘pon he forehead if he sick; got a cold…tek a shot and rub a shot. And so on. Of course, it must be noted that all the usual safety advisories are in order as well, given the flammability of something this close to pure ethanol.

I have gained a sort of sneaking appreciation for overproofs, including this one, because while it lacks the subtlety of a more refined 40% variation (subtlety? don’t make me laugh…the thing is like a charging brontosaurus on steroids at rutting time), it makes an intense, strong, powerfully tasting mix with whatever you decide to chase it. Try adding cola to a 40% low-ender and then to the White Overproof and try and tell me this one doesn’t have more character, more taste, more…well, cojones. It absolutely is not afraid to charge the gates and get the hell off the reservation. When you drink J. Wray’s clear hooch, reader, there’s no ifs, ands or buts — you know Elvis has left the building; and didn’t just exit, he took off with rocket-powered, turbo-charged steel-toed boots. And a jet pack.

So if you believe that major rum producers have pussied out and are producing too many high end, over-sugared, liqueur-tasting sweet drinks (like spiced rums, underproofs or Pyrat’s) for the masses of the unwashed and the hordes of the rabble (like myself); and if you think your chest lacks sufficient cylindrical, keratinous filaments; and that you are swinging a pair of weighty ones that should be addressed by a man’s drink — well, then it’s entirely possible that you are just waiting to buy a gallon or three of this popskull, made by one company that remembers its roots and continues to distil a real rum.

Always assuming, of course, that you do not already own some.

(#045)(Unscored)

Other Notes

Ten years down the road of the rum journey, I came around to seeing this rum more clearly and appreciating it more — and named it one of the Key Rums of the World

Cavalier 1981 Vintage Antigua Rum – Review

 2 Responses »
Oct 292010
 

First posted 29 October, 2010 on Liquorature.

A discovery you will think all your own and which you’ll be glad you made; smooth, flavourful and velvety as the best kiss of your life, with a finish that doesn’t disappoint.

***

The Antigua Distillery has embraced both developing trends in the rum market: it has aggressively worked to address the emergence of premium sipping rums by creating the masterful English Harbour series of rum (I think the 5 yr old is one of the great mixers around, and the 1981 25-yr old, is one of the top five commercial aged 40% rums in the world), and also trended towards the resurgence in cocktails by marketing a more flavourful series of rums dedicated for the mixing circuit. Both the younger English Harbours and the Cavalier brands genuflect to the latter trend.

While Rum has been distilled in Antigua since 1493, the Antigua Distillery itself was not incorporated until 1932 when, during the downturn of rum and sugar production, some enterprising local businessmen consolidated their production; in 1934 the company purchased nine estates and a small sugar factory. While individual estates were wont to to make their own hooch in crude and small pot stills, usually for internal consumption, the acquisition of the factory permitted the company to create its own molasses, and made both aged and un-aged rums under the Caballero brand name. From these small beginnings the distillery has grown in fame and popularity.

Doing the research for the rum I casually tasted in John’s house in Toronto stunned me at the quality of what he might have, all unknowing, managed to snag for himself on one of his trips down to The Islands. You have to understand that aside from the El Dorado 25 year old, the other rums on his table that evening were a mixed bag: overproofs, bush, five year olds and so on…and this one, which didn’t remark itself as special in any way (and none of them had price labels affixed). So while we all know enough about the English Harbour suite to know what we want, few of us in Cowtown have ever seen anything else from the Land of 365 Beaches. The Cavalier Rums are the Gold, the Light (a white rum), the white Puncheon, the 151 overproof, the 5 year old and the extra Old. And the 1981 Vintage I had that night…it was quite something.

The 1981 Vintage derived from copper stills is matured – the company website declines to say how long, but I hazard it is not less than ten years – in 22 litre oak casks which once held bourbon, and the resultant blended in 5000 litre oak vats dating back from the formation of the company, which suggests the vats may be quite a bit older than that. What comes out the other end as an aged premium rum put into a wax-sealed bottle stopped with a tight-fitting cork, and is well worth your consideration.

The striking thing about the Cavalier extra Old is its simplicity. It has a straightforward smooth nose of caramel, molasses and vanilla, with light floral hints. It has a medium brown colour and a kind of rich body in the glass. It’s the bite on the snoot that’s not there, or is so faint you barely notice it….just those rich waves of brown sugar and vanilla, and those very slight tannins that assert the prescence of some other flavour just outside your ability to nail down precisely. It’s just as velvety smooth in the mouth: like a caramel sweet, it stays and offers its taste to you and maybe the reason I didn’t expect that is because there was no reason for me to…I hadn’t, in point of fact, really expected much of anything, which may be reverse snobbery of the worst kind. Be that as it may, the taste stays in the mouth and the finish is long, smooth and sweet, like maybe one of the best kisses of your adolescence from the girl you loved to pieces and still remember fondly after all this time.

I have no idea how much it costs – John mentioned he had picked the bottle up at the VC Bird Airport in Antigua back in 2000 and barely tasted it since then (how do you even begin to talk to a man about such a wonderful undiscovered treasure when he treats the liquid gold with such insouciance, I ask myself helplessly, seething with envy). I only had the one taste and then a second one to confirm, and I have not seen the bottle here in Calgary, and so must rely on my tatty tasting notes that somehow survived the trip back here intact. Like that long ago girl, the taste of this rum now fades gradually from my mind while remaining in my memories and will be missed and even mourned a little for its unavailability.

All I can tell the reader of this review is that if you ever go to Antigua, then, aside from ensuring you buy the English Harbour 1981, pick up this Cavalier 1981 Vintage rum. I won’t say your tastes equate to mine or that you will have the same enjoyment I did…but I think you’ll agree that this rum is worth a little extra, and will retain an honoured spot on your shelf. The way, one day, it will hopefully have on mine.

(#044)(Unscored)

Angostura “1919″ 8 year old Rum – Review

 9 Responses »
Oct 272010
 

Photo (c) Whisky Antique

First posted 27 October, 2010 on Liquorature.

Excellent presentation; a rich, complex and smooth experience that reminds you why premium rums exist at all and makes for a good gift for aficionados

Somewhere in the midst of an alcoholic haze left by the last gathering of the Gentlemen of Liquorature, I had this vague memory of drinking quite a superlative little sipper. Pat had, of course, been quite miffed when I wrote the review of the Bacardi 8, since he had wanted to surprise me with something I hadn’t had before – but he got me on the rebound with this one. Fortunately, my tasting notes survive the bender, and once I sobered up and remembered my name, I dug them out for this review.

Angostura is that Trini distillery that now makes the excellent Zaya (Diageo, via its shareholding in Moet Hennessy, owns the Zaya brand, but do not own the distillery – CL Financial retains majority shareholdings there). They have been making blended rums since the early part of the 20th century (1947, according to them). At that time Bacardi owned some 45% of the stock, which it held until 1997 when CL Financial – the largest T&T conglomerate with fingers in dozens of pies – bought the shares (they ran into a major liquidity crisis in 2008 and in order to get a bailout, relinquished seats on the board to the Government1).

I don’t as a general rule make a comment on the bottle, but in this case I’m happy to make an exception: Angostura, home of the bitters and the Royal Oak, have poured the 1919 variation into a short, squat, square bottle with rounded shoulder and a massive, voluptuous cork. Its excellence is more in the simplicity than anything overt…I had the same feeling about the English Harbour 10 year old.

The 1919 is a blend of rums aged a minimum of 8 years – both bottle and the company website makes this claim – in charred oak barrels which were previously used to age bourbon whiskey. It’s a golden brown liquid, quite clear, somewhat reminiscent of the Havana Club Barrel Proof and has that same brilliant hue when the sunlight hits it.

On the nose, there is surprisingly little spirit burn. There’s a mellow billowing scent when the bottle is opened, in which the smooth odours of caramel, vanilla and flowers balance well and softly together. There is a richness to the nose that is quite unexpected, and it promises an excellent drink. Sipping it is a uniformly pleasant experience: I don’t usually expect too much from younger rums, though those greater than seven years are usually pretty decent mixers (the Flor de Cana 7 yr old is a perfect example): this one, it must be said, is an exception. As a ground level sipper, it’s bloody good, perhaps a slightly less sweet and less spiced-up version of the Captain Morgan Private Stock at about the same price, but equally smooth, equally tasty.

The feel in the mouth is warm and silky rather than harsh, and after letting it breath you get flavours of buttery caramel, vanilla and molasses, but not too much of any one: in fact, the 1919 is remarkably restrained and well balanced among these primaries. Coiling subtly around this backbone are some fruity and softer floral hints that I can’t quite identify but that enhance the central notes excellently. The texture is slightly viscous and smooth as all get-out. And the finish is long, warm and spicy, with the faintest hint of sharpness that seems to be there just to remind you this is not the best Angostura wants to give (that might be the 1824 rum).

All in all, for a rum that costs in the forty dollar range, I’m impressed. For all its relatively youth, it scores highly in all the right areas: presentation, nose, flavour profile, mouthfeel and finish. It is equally good as a mixer or as a sipper, again very much like the Captain Morgan Private Stock. And what it lacks in the complexity and sheer brilliance of the older premium rums (like the English Harbour 25, Appleton 30 or the El Dorado 25 and 21), it makes up for by being, quite simply, one of the best low cost rums out there, one which the average Tom, Dick or Harrilall can afford, and enjoy.

(#043)(Unscored)

Other Notes

  • In 2016 or shortly thereafter, the short, stubby and squared bottle (the “old” version, reviewed here in 2010) was replaced with a more standardized cylindrical barroom-style bottle; apparently the blend was tweaked as well, because a couple of commentators on Masters of Malt were scathing in their denunciations of the new taste.
  • Difford’s Guide and my own company biography of Fernandes Distillers both note that the “1919” name derived from a batch of rum recovered from a 1932 Government rum storage warehouse fire by Fernandes; some casks labelled 1919 survived and the rum inside was felt to be good enough to blend and bottle under that title. As a result it became a standard blend ever after, even transferring over to Angostura when they took over Fernandes in 1973. However, that blend did change over time – for instance there was supposedly some Caroni in the original makeup, but certainly no longer.

Banks DIH XM Extra Mature Demerara Rum – Review

 3 Responses »
Oct 262010
 

First posted 26th October, 2010 on Liquorature.

Something that puzzles, annoys and confuses me about Toronto is the paucity of rum selections in the LCBO. I thought this was just a Calgary thing, but it seems that there are more varieties of rums available in cowtown than in a metropolitan area that has several hundred thousand West Indians in the population. Can you blame me for the head scratching and being grateful for deregulation in Alberta?

Fortunately my old schoolfriend Pratima, who also hails from Guyana, had two rums in her cabinet gathering dust (and I mean that literally); I had been after these for a long time as they are tough to get in my area, and she very happily trotted them out for me to sample, probably so that she could giggle at how I swirled, sniffed and tasted. I laughed too, but drank ‘em anyway…it’s fun doing this in the company of an old friend.

D’Aguiar’s Extra Mature rum was in a plastic bottle with a tinfoil cap, which was surprising (and did less than enthuse me abut Banks’s product line here); it’s definitely a Demerara rum, although not made by DDL (and as of the 2010s can no longer call itself a Demerara rum, as DDL has dibs on that descriptor). It’s darker than the norm, but still lighter than DDL’s el Dorado offerings: a clear dark gold. In the glass it displays a good viscocity and thick sheen sliding slowly down the sides of the glass. On the nose it is pleasantly deep and rich, and redolent of molasses – much more so than the 10 year old which I’ll address in a separate review – but with a bit of spirit smackdown as well…not too much, though. The caramel, vanilla and toffee hints come through quite clearly; the rum overall is slightly dry, and just sweet enough…and coiling around the backend, you get a faint whiff of fruit – citrus, a little banana. The finish is not very smooth, and medium long on the first go – as you get used to it, it subsides somewhat and evens out.

The Xtra Mature is blended from Demerara rum supplied to Banks DIH by Demerara Distillers up at Diamond Estate (note – by 2017 this had ceased and Banks sources distillate from Trinidad and Barbados), and I gotta tell you, the more I find out about DDLs operations – the supplying of rums to other companies, their international scope, their excellent premium rums which they can almost be said to have pioneered – the more impressed I am. This XM product is a challenge to review because so little has been written about what constitutes it. That it is a rum, and a decent one, is without question: but how long the blends are aged and whether any post-finishing touches (again, like the 10 yr old) are added is not something I can ascertain from either Banks’s website or any other writers. My personal take is that this Xtra Mature is a step above the 5 yr old but not as good or complex as the 10 year.

I’d also have to say that it is not a sipper: it has just a bit too much bite in it for me. I don’t think Banks actually markets it as a sipping premium rum either, since that moniker appears to apply to the Royal Gold Extra Mature, the 10 yr old or the VXO 7 yr old. But both Pratima and I agreed (when she ceased her laughing) it was good, nay, excellent, as a mixer. Since I’ve never seen it for sale in Canada, and it lacks the international cachet of the El Dorados, I can’t speak to the public awareness, or the price: but whoever gets a Mudlander to bring this or the ten year up from the Old Country for them, is in for a treat without question.

(#042)(Unscored)

El Dorado 25 Year Old Rum (Millenium Edition) – Review

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Oct 262010
 

First posted Oct 26, 2010 on Liquorature.

Note: I have written a companion piece to this review for RumConnection here: it’s more tightly researched, a bit longer, and takes a more structured approach. But both this review and that one are of a piece, and I hope you enjoy them

Of all the rums reviewed here, I believe that the only reasonably complete “age set” of a single distillery’s products I’ve managed to buy is the el Dorado line. Somehow, Calgary seemed to have gotten most of the el Dorado aged rums over time, though some of the estate editions are missing – and I’ve snagged everything I ever saw up for sale…except for the ne plus ultra, their fabled 25.

Now the El Dorado 21 costs ~$100, the English Harbour 25 goes for $200, Mount Gay 1703 $110 and Clement XO $126 (with the Appleton 30 at a whopping $300+ in Calgary, and $550 in Toronto)…the El Dorado 25 supposedly retails for a cool $350, but only when you can find it, and that’s about as likely as finding seriousness in a Rajinikanth movie. So it’s a little like a Grail of sorts for me, and when an old friend in Toronto mentioned he had a bottle of the Millenium Edition (bottled for the year 2000), and was prepared to let me have a sip under carefully controlled circumstances (lock, key, watchful guards and closed circuit cameras not excluded), well, what can a man do but accede and hustle his behind over there.

The various reviews I’ve done of the El Dorado line give more than enough history of the producing company without me adding substantially to it, but in brief, more than any one company in the world, DDL ushered in the age of premium sipping rums way back in 1992 when the El Dorado aged vintages emerged, led by the flagship 15 year old Special Reserve (which my father told me quite frankly is his favourite of them all). To a great extent this was aided by the tremendous variety of original and modern distilling equipment DDL had (and has), including original wooden stills dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries; these permit a variety of dark matured rums that form the backbone of the range.

The ED-25 shares, with a few others, the humorous cachet of being old enough to have intimate relations with itself, and to call the bottle it comes in merely “a bottle” is to do it a disservice. Like the Angostura 1919 and the Appleton 30, it comes in a container best referred to as a decanter, or maybe a flagon (minus the handle). It may lack the zen-like Spartan simplicity of the EH10, but it’s arresting for all that and the glass-topped cork makes its own statement of quality (I particularly liked the voluptuous popping sound when eased out). You feel, when opening this baby, that you should be on a plantation house somewhere, watching the sun go down over emerald green cane fields moving and rustling in the trade winds.

Right away you are enveloped by warm breathy fumes of your favourite bedtime partner gently blowing brown sugar at you. The nose is not sharp enough to sting, but asserts its prescence in a sort of mild burn that is far from unpleasant and hints of caramel, brown sugar, faint orange peel, spices and perhaps (and I’m reaching here) cinnamon. Slow, fat legs swirl in your glass as it drains in an oily film down the sides. I had observed before that I loved the viscosity of the 21 year old…this one looks to do it one better.

And it does. “Oiliness” is a mark of how well the rum coats your tongue and allows the tastes to remain there. The ED25 is a step ahead of the 21 year old I so admired, perhaps a shade more viscous, a bit thicker in the mouth. It gives the liquid a richness and feel that I find amazing. It’s still a spirit of 40% ABV, but dense enough for you to almost feel you’re getting a liqueur. The taste that comes through is of smoke and oak, sweetness (a shade more than the 21) and caramel, molasses, nuts, fresh coconut shavings still damp from the blade, bananas, cherries and a slight hint of licorice; and the sense, never quite solidified, of wet warm ground softly steaming after a tropical drizzle. And there was that wine-like taste of cigarillos soaked in port which I used to love in my smoking days.

The dark brown rum is smoother than any rum has a right to be, and to taint it with any kind of mixer would be sacrilege. I had it neat and then with ice, but my take would be to just have it neat and sip it one small mouthful at a time. The finish is long and lasting, and like a playful tabby, it bats you with half-sheathed claws right at the end just to let you know you can’t take it for granted…what a wonderful rum this was, indeed.

I suggested in my review of another uber-rum (the Appleton 30) that I can titivate around with opinions on the low and midrange rums without losing any kind of credibility, but just because a man pays a lot for a bottle of the good stuff does not immediately guarantee a positive, let alone a sterling, review. That I paid not a red cent except fuel costs to get to John’s house does not invalidate this sentiment. Was it as good as I had been led to believe?

In answering this question, I want to stay away from making any kind of unequivocal statement as “this is the best” or, “it’s the epitome of rum” or any such superlative, because at end, what you are getting here is an opinion. Mine, to be exact, and as readers of my writing will have discerned by now, I like smooth sippers of some sweetness, complex flavours and subtle underpinnings, with a good mouthfeel and long finishes. On that level, the El Dorado 25 is one of the best commercially available 40% rums ever made: in my opinion it’s a top five pick for sure (and note how carefully I phrased that). Where it fails slightly, is in the sweetness component. It’s just a bit too much, the burnt sugar and caramel flavours being a bit too aggressive: they just edge out the subtler tastes coiling beneath, and while the upside is that this smoothens things out a bit on the finish, masks the smoky oak tannins enough for it not to be a whisky (a problem I had with Appletons), it prevents that coming together of all elements — flavor profile, texture and finish — that would give it the premium many will feel a rum like this deserves, and justify the price tag.

That this is the top end of rums is not in question, and so, at the end, whether you buy it or not depends a lot on how you see rums yourself. Are you prepared to shell out over three hundred dollars for a world class sipper, or are you at that stage where you would prefer to go a rung lower and buy two or three also-premium, almost-as-good rums for that same price and triple your enjoyment? In my youth, I knew exactly where I stood on that sentiment; at my current age, with a little bit of cash socked away to indulge myself (and an understanding spouse who pretends not to notice), I’d have to concede that I’d walk – nay, run — to Willow Park to buy this, if they ever stocked it.

…but only once.

(#035)(Unscored)

Update February 2017 – I had the good fortune to re-taste this as part of the Rumaniacs lineup, and the intervening years made one hell of a difference: it was staggering how my own tastes had changed. Not only was 40% way too weak (the rum retails at 43% in Europe), but the sweet was now something that could only be described as an epic fail. I believe that for its time (~2005-2011) it was right and commanded the heights; few other makers could produce a 25 year old rum in any real quantity to compete with this. But as full proofs became the preferred strength, and lack of adulteration was the signature of top end rum; and as other, sometimes older rums came on the market, DDL never really changed with the times. To be sure there will always be those to whom this rum appeals. These days, I’m no longer one of them, until DDL dials down the sugar and issues the rum at a higher proof.

Clarke’s Court Pure White Rum – Review

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Oct 212010
 

First posted 21 October, 2010.

(#041)(Unscored)

A strong white overproof, of which not much can be said, since I had an adulterated version: but that “bush” is one of the most evocative, crazy experiences I’ve ever had, and if you brave the Spice Island to get some, more power to you.

***

I have never had a rum like this one, and I know that 99.99% of the people reading this (even if you’re from the Caribbean) haven’t either. No, really. When was the last time you a had a 138 proof rum with what looks suspiciously like a worm floating in it? I know for damn sure I’ve never even seen one like it (and maybe never will again).

Now let’s be clear about one thing. The real Clarke’s is a legitimate overproof white lightning made in Grenada by the Grenada Sugar Factory since 1937, and is apparently the most popular rum on the Spice Island, best had with some Angostura bitters (the 43% darker rums made here are supposedly for the ladies, who “prefer gentler rums”). Local wags claim it’ll add hair to your chest, strip the paint off anything, and can run your car if you don’t have any petrol. Older ladies use it as a rub. The commercial rums of this distillery have actually won several awards for excellence. However, what *I* had was – how do I put it – a refined variant of the standard recipe. In a word, I had the “bush” (and that’s why I’m also not scoring it). How it got into the kitchen of one of my oldest long-distance friends is a question best left unaddressed.

Bush of course has a long and honoured tradition in the West Indies. We called it “bashwar” in the jungle camps I used to work in, always had a 45-gallon drum fermenting somepace, and as I noted in the Newfoundland Screech review, backyard variations are a fixture in the remoter areas of The Rock. You take your life in our hands when you drink some of this stuff, I told John, as he poured me a generous shot of a clear purple-brown rum. He grinned and turned the bottle, which no longer had a white rum in it, but a coloured liquid in which floated additional ingredients: leaves, bark, twigs, berries, and, yes, that plump worm. I said a heartfelt prayer that the thing was dead, and knew right away that there was exactly zero point in attempting to review the rum the way I dealt with more commercial wares that actually pass a certification process of some kind.

The tasting of some new, as-yet-untasted rum of the cheaper type, no matter how it started life or ended up in my glass, is more an exercise in zen than anything else (hush, ye snickerers). It’s about feeling, about memory, about what it brings into your mind when you taste it (even if you immediately throw up afterwards). It’s about who you are and what brought you to this place.

By that criteria, Clarke’s delivered in spades. After waving away the spirit fumes which evidently wanted my wife to collect on the insurance, I got a powerful scent of chemicals, and was transported to my boyhood in a flash. It was the exact scent of the orange lye soap I grew up bathing with at a small stand pipe in the overgrown backyard of a small house we moved to in Georgetown’s Charles Street when I was nine. It was my aunt Sheila cutting up a tableful of fiery hot peppers at four in the morning to make into hot sauce. It was “It’s A Fact” at 645 in the morning on Radio Demerara, black pudd’n’ with plenty sour, a hot curry with roti, a cookup with nuff nuff chili ‘pon it.

And the taste, wow: sweet, brandy-like, fiery as all hell, and yet dusty too…old, aged, like a sleepy pre-Independence Georgetown dreaming in the sun under the Union Jack. It was the memory of the dingy beer gardens my brother and I haunted on Broad Street, with bob-pieces given to us by our uncle Ronald to play pool with. It was the smell of too many old pool tables with dead rails and old balls that barely bounced. It was the smell of rum and stale beer and cigarette smoke and guys with no clear occupation playing cards or dominos in these places at ten in the morning while Roger and I shot a rack. It was the deep smell of the old drugstore right down the street, now long gone, with chico sweets in rows of huge glass jars, plastic revolvers with rolls of caps from China, all mixed up with the odours of Limacol, drugs and prescriptions and memories of childhood when life looked sunny and summer holidays went on forever.

At 69%, you aren’t getting subtlety on the finish and I won’t pretend you will, or that Clarke’s bush variant even approximates that. But you know, all those herbs and crap in the bottle seem to have smoothened it out somewhat, taken the edge off, because the burn is deep and warm — and still with that elder dusty air wafting around in the back of your throat, like the times of our youth in a small town that you now no longer remember clearly, except in your dreams and fading memories.

I sort of likened the Bacardi 151 to a race car and wrote a good humoured review in that vein. Clarke Court’s Pure White Rum (the bush variation) is not like that at all. It’s strong and crazy and unique, and I didn’t think of speed or racing thunder at all when I tasted it — instead, the cars I got were the old taxis of Georgetown: Hillmans, Austins, and Morris Oxfords, with cracked vinyl upholstery and purring engines, and my brother and I jouncing around on a Saturday morning going with our mother to Bourda market to shop for fresh stuff. The rum may be raw, smelly, one-of-a-kind home-adapted hooch , and commercially unavailable in this iteration. But the memories it evokes in this long departed Mudlander are priceless.

Gosling’s Black Seal Bermuda Rum – Review

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Oct 132010
 

First posted 13 October 2010 on Liquorature

My younger brother and I have always had an excellent relationship, and the other day when I was in Toronto (I drove there from Cowtown) we had a small session, even though we didn’t have anything special to sample – to my surprise, the LCBO prices were higher than those in Calgary and so I simply laughed at the $550 for the Appleton 30 yr old, or the $120 for the El Dorado 21 and bought the Gosling’s Black Seal.

Gosling’s hails from Bermuda: like Appleton’s, Mount Gay or el Dorado, it is closely identified with its island of origin and is, aside from tourism, a mainstay of Bermuda’s economy and probably its main export. The Gosling enterprise has been in business on Bermuda since 1806, when instead of landing in Virginia, the founder went ashore in St. George’s and set up shop. The Dark Seal is their flagship product and goes hand in glove with their trademarked (yes, they have the rights to the name) cocktail “The Dark ‘n’ Stormy.” Note that the rum was not named for the sea animal, but for the black sealing wax with which the first bottles were closed. For some reason, the company does not feel that you need to know how old it is, though their website entry does helpfully note that it is aged in charred American oak casks, and is a blend of pot and column still distillates.

The rum is dark with russet-red tints, and has a surprisingly medium body (I expected something heavier for a rum this dark). It is made from three distillates – I was unable to ascertain from where the raw stock is imported – aged three to six years in the standard once-used, charred oak barrels that once held bourbon. What results is a nose of some sharpness (reminds me a bit of Buckley’s, to be honest), but which holds in elements of brown sugar, vanilla, and later, fruit and citrus peel of some kind. I thought I tasted cinnamon behind all the burnt sugar, but won’t swear to it, and my bro’ didn’t sniff it either.

On the tongue, the sharpness and spirit burn mar what is otherwise a decent drink – perhaps I should not be expecting too much from a young rum like this one – but it does have a stronger fruity taste than I had suspected, and the overall flavour profile hints at complexities marrying cirtus, apple and vanilla, all in reasonably good balance. The finish, alas, is short and bitchy, and what spices Gosling has added impart a last bit of undeserved bitterness…and once again I am reminded that in youthful, mostly unaged rums – I do not consider anything under five years to be aged at all, but I’m snotty that way so you may disregard me – not much effort is made to make the finish worthy of note. Since such Single Digit Rums are often made only for cooking, mixing or as bases for something else, perhaps I should count myself as fortunate.

All the above aside, I wasn’t too displeased with what I found. It’s sweet enough, a bit young and brash, lacks experience and complexity, but has a good heart. After we had dinner, we poured ourselves our individual libations (me rum, him beer), relaxed, leaned back; and I thought to myself that there are worse things in life than sharing pleasant conversation of the sort only close siblings or best friends have, while sipping an unpretentious rum I didn’t have to worry about appreciating.

(#040)(Unscored)

Captain Morgan’s Original Spiced Rum – Review

 2 Responses »
Oct 132010
 

First posted 13 October, 2010 on Liquorature

The best selling and most commonly quoted spiced rum in the world. It’s the standard by which all other spiced rums are measured not because of its excellence, precisely, but because of its overall “okay-ness”. It’s okay everywhere while being truly outstanding at little. It’s sweetness and spice are part of the appeal.

The fact that this is a low end mixer should not dissuade you from giving it a shot (no pun intended) if you’re in the mood for a reasonably low-priced little something. It’s about on the same level as the cheaper Bacardis (Gold, and Black), but it is spiced and therefore somewhat sweeter than normal, and also not meant to be taken seriously as a sipper. Yet many aficionados with a less exclusive turn of taste are quite ardent supporters of The Captain’s spiced variant.

As I’ve noted in my review of Captain Morgan’s Private Stock, Seagram used to make the rum, but sold the rights to Diageo in the mid-eighties, and currently it is the world’s best selling spiced rum. The name is nothing more than a marketing ploy, since it enhances the connection to swashbuckling, seafaring pirate days of yore, but beyond that, there isn’t anything else (note that the TV advertising campaign I have seen in Calgary also plays on the whole bit about being like a pirate in breaking the rules and thinking outside the box to achieve success…an interesting bit of moral relativism given Morgan’s history and actions).

Captain Morgan is a tawny gold colour, and displays a medium light body in the glass. The nose is heavy with rum and vanilla, and a bit of caramel thrown in. I can’t say I detected anything beyond that, because the scent is so overwhelming. Yet the youth of the rum is evident in the sharpness at the back of the throat (it’s been matured for two years or less in charred white oak barrels), so there’s not much point in trying the rum to sip (unless you’re a slight nutcase like me and want to try it that way nevertheless). The finish is pretty good, though, a tad sharp, though not nearly as much as the nose suggested it would have. Last flavours of vanilla and nutmeg.

For my money, I suppose it’s okay. It’s a versatile ingredient in mixed drinks, but just too sweet to really appeal to me — and for all those who have read my reviews about liking sugar in my rums, this must sound strange, but there is something as too much and this is a case in point. Perhaps adding just a smidgen of coke to mitigate the burn is the way to approach it.

However, like Bacardi, the Captain is available just about everywhere, and as a result, if you drop thirty bucks on a bottle when getting something in a hurry, well, you’ll certainly get what you pay for plus maybe a bit extra. Your friends and guests sure as hell aren’t going to refuse it, and, if offered at a party, neither would I.

(#039)(Unscored)

Lemon Hart Demerara Rum (Standard Strength) – Review

 2 Responses »
Oct 012010
 

Picture (c) Pete’s Rum Pages

First posted 01 October 2010 on Liquorature.

Lemon Hart is an instructive case study in how one can chose a rum without knowing a damned thing about it. As I’ve noted on more than one occasion, if you go into a store without a blessed clue, you are down to three bases for your decision and only three: the price; the look; and knowledge you have when you enter the joint. Anything different is somebody else choosing for you.

So here, what did I have? Well, the price for a flattie, which was less than twenty bucks; the look, which was simple and unadorned and referred to Demerara – perusers of my writing will know I have a soft spot for the old sod; and my knowledge. Admittedly, I do have a bit of a larger base of knowledge than some, and so I had certain advantages there.

Knowing the history of the brand though, doesn’t mean anything. It’s how good the rum in this brand is, in this bottle, that counts. And I had never had any of Lemon Hart’s variations before, so I couldn’t tell whether any of its cousins were any good and extrapolate up or down, and therefore…well, in the end, I guessed. How disappointing is that?

Lemon Hart owes its making to the Navy Rums of yore. I’ve covered this in more depth in my review on the Pusser’s, but to recap, the British Royal Navy, as far back as 1655 until they abolished the practice in 1970, regularly issued a tot of rum to all hands in order to ward off scurvy (they added lime juice to the mix which is why I mentioned before that rum has been mixed since the beginning of its existence, and why Jack Tars are called limeys even today). Navy rum by tradition is not heavily sugared or added to, which is also part of its distinctive cachet: Lemon Hart, Pusser’s and Lamb’s all pretend to this inheritance (for my money, the Pusser’s makes the strongest case, but that’s just me). Lemon Hart was one of the original suppliers of rum to the Navy, beginning in 1804; Alfred Lamb came a few decades later with his London Dock rum. Both used raw rum stock that came from the Caribbean, mostly the dark, full bodied rums of Guyana. Indeed, Lemon Hart states this quite specifically on the bottle I have: Demerara rum product of Guyana. But it is bottled in either Ontario or England.

Lemon Hart is a dark rum, 40% ABV, brown with reddish tints, and has the characteristic thickness and full body of Demerara rums. When you swirl the liquid in the glass, it has slow fat legs sliding languorously back in. The nose, what there is of it, hints at straightforward rum without embellishment. You can tell it’s young from the harsh burning and medicinal reek, but this is swiftly gone, to be replaced with a powerful molasses overlay. Behind that is a slightly salty tang, just a hint of bitterness as if from some sort of citrus rind. On the tongue it demonstrates its youth with the rawness of the taste. Yes it’s a bit oily and coats the mouth very nicely, but behind the molasses taste (which is quite overwhelming) and brown sugar, caramel and some fruit, there’s not much here: on the other hand, if simplicity is your thing, LH will definitely shine for you. The finish is medium long and not very smooth, but since I wasn’t expecting much, it wasn’t too disappointed.

In summary then: a mixer’s rum for sure. Lemon Hart is dense and viscous enough to need only a reasonable addition of cola or ale or Christmas drinks or whatever else your poison is, but it does need it. Once that is done, you have a decent drink you can enjoy at length without worrying too much about the overall price tag. And if you have guests, you may even get some brownie points for taking the time to hunt out what appears, in other parts of the world, to be a drink somewhat harder to obtain there than it is here.

(#038)(Unscored)

Note: There is also a Lemon Hart Jamaican rum bottled at 73% which I found many years later. It was quite good, but no longer made. Lemon Hart is most known for its overproof, 151s and Navy Rums. I’ve found a few over the years following this review.

Bacardi 151 Overproof Rum – Review

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Oct 012010
 

First published 01 October 2010 on Liquorature.

This deep-throated bellowing maniac of a rum does almost nothing well – but one thing so grandly it borders on Van Gogh-level insanity: it hits you in the face. A lot. Welcome to the lost week of your life.

Even in the world of lesser rums, there is such a thing as subtlety…a whiff of class, or style, be it ever so humble. Bacardi, with this 151 proof beefcake, sneered long and loudly and stated flat out that they wanted no truck with that kind of pansy nonsense. They stayed as far away from the notion of class as they could, and made a popskull that reminds you of nothing so much as the liquid equivalent of a Tarantino movie, or a permanently pissed off ex-spouse packing an Uzi in either hand. The rum acts like Bacardi decided to build some kind of high test which jet engines can run on and set altitude records. It’s as if they let some mad scientist out of their chemistry lab and he went ape while unsupervised.

Bacardi 151 is absolutely not a for the weak. If you’re merely average, then make your will, alert your relatives that the possible cost of long term health care will be theirs, and ensure the insurance is paid up. Kiss your significant other tenderly one last time. If you’re still single, well, you may be in luck, ‘cause after a shot or ten of this massive ethanol delivery system, you will think just about any girl and maybe even the neighbor’s dog is fair game. And I have to state up front: with a rum this powerful, clear health advisories are in order. Do not drink while smoking, or when camping out and stoking the fire. The 151 is as flammable as hell: giving vent to a loud fart or indulging your propensity to bloviate may leave you as a rapidly decomposing burnt amoebic mess on the floor.

Because Bacardi 151 is quite simply, nuts. It blows out your sniffing nose at 500 hp and 8000 rpm, and when you’ve recovered breath, rediscovered your voice and stopped crying like a little girl, it thunders down your throat with a tonsil-ripping 600 ft-lbs of torque. Zero to drunk arrives in 2.5 shots – yeah, go ahead, try it – and that figure is only marginally exaggerated. Generations of insects will expire on your exhale, and professional flamethrowers will avoid you like the plague. Other drunks at the bar will only vaguely remember seeing a flash of alcohol fumes as your sobriety disappears over the horizon in a cloud of vaporized rum.

In between the waves of spirit and ethanol burns waft tantalizing hints of something warm and caramel like. Hey, if you don’t mind some suffering and try a second sniff or a real taste, you can probably pick out the molasses and the burnt sugar, plus – and I’m reaching here – vanilla (I was comforting my throat with EH25 and weeping into my wife’s shoulder a the time so my memories are a little hazy). But these are like bunny rabbits in a cane field of jaguars and have about as much chance: the 151 swiftly, efficiently and mercilessly hunts them down, eviscerates them with sharp ethanol claws and has them for lunch. You only think you noticed such warm and comforting scents and tastes before reality invades your fantasy and you are ravaged yet again.

Bacardi’s makers took a rum aged a minimum of one year, snickered into their mustaches, and distilled it to a whopping 75.5%. At that strength, it’s kind of irrelevant what kind of barrels they age it in…they could age it in my son’s potty with a diaper floating in it, and the next morning both diaper and potty would be gone. That also makes it one of a select few overproofs in the world today: their own 151 Dark, or the Stroh 80, Sunset Very Strong, the SMWS Longpond 9 year old 81.3% or poorer bastard cousins like the Wray & Nephew White Overproof (a mild 63%) or the Stroh 54 (at which you can just see Bacardi laughing hysterically whenever they name it). The company can, of course, indulge itself in such cheerfully infantile pursuits – selling more rum than just about every nation on the planet allows it to pretty much create anything they feel like.

Making this one, they may not have attempted to create a superrum. But for my money, they sure as hell gave birth to a rum like few others. Which probably means that, as with other overporoofs like the Stroh 80, you’re more likely to run out of bar patrons than a bottle of this stuff – or cojones, or whatever other words the Puerto Ricans use for “courageously stupid.” It’s not quite my thing and I’m not masochistic enough to try 151 on a consistent basis, however grudging an affection I may have for it: but that this rum exists at all is reason enough to admire it.

(#037. Unscored)

Other Notes

  • The Bacardi 151 rum was discontinued in 2016 because health and safety issues (stupid people using it for stupid reasons) — this kept Bacardi in near constant litigation and finally they just got fed up and pulled the plug, though of course it remains available to be found on auctions and secondary markets to this day. Buzzfeed carried a humorous retrospective.
  • This rum started a train of thought that culminated in a deep dive into the History of the 151 rums that was posted in 2020 (I had a more detailed section on Bacardi than this review allows), and a place of sorts in the list of Strongest Rums in the World, as part of the 151s entry.

Opinion

[August 2021] Aside from being one of the strongest rums I had ever tried, and written about, the review here was and remains important (or at least, it marks a milestone of sorts) for one other reason: it was written almost entirely with a sense of humour lacking in the 36 reviews that preceded it. Those had the occasional funny sentence or witty phrase as part of the review, but in the main, they were pretty standard and sober little essays. Here, for the first time, I just let myself go from start to finish, and laughed my way through the whole thing, enjoying the writing process thoroughly. It was worth it for that alone, I think.

But the reactions of readers over the years has been uniformly positive, and demonstrated that one need not be a dry, serious, punctilious, pedantic writer all the time. One can simply enjoy the writing, the expression and the laughs (and isn’t that what rum is all about too?). And what that did was allow me, thereafter, the freedom to explore other modes of expression in writing reviews, whether serious, or lighthearted, using a first person narrative, a conversational tone, or even adding a biblical flavour. I may be in the minority on this one, but I think it made the overall body of work a lot richer and more enjoyable for average readers.

 

English Harbour 10 Year Old Rum – Review

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Sep 252010
 

Solid all round rum, probably better than most ten year olds around.

First posted 25 September 2010 on Liquorature.

I’ve been a little reticent about trying English Harbour Reserve ten year old, and have put it off for over a month now. Its younger sibling the Five is such a good mixer and all round rum (it’s been a favourite of the club for some time), and its older brother the 25 is such a powerhouse in its own right, that it seemed almost like trying to make a good aged rum go up against…well, practically a pair of low and high end juggernaughts. And then, there was always the thing that I absolutely hate trying a new rum alone..it’s so much more fun when I can bounce my ideas off someone like the Bear as we get continually more sloshed together. Our spouses have a hard time containing their laughter as we come up with ever more flowery adjectives to describe out latest object of taste

Be that as it may, I bought this $100 (Can) rum at the local emporium of Willow Park, largely because the bottle I knew existed in Co-Op had disappeared by the time I got around to snagging it, and so, fearing a rum drought of the good stuff (and the jeers of the Maltmonster as he tauntingly raised his current single malt to toast me), I bought the only one they had. The fact that WP subsequently posted a few more bottles on the shelf suggests my fears were unfounded, but it’s better to be safe with stuff like this. The bottle sat in my pantry for a full four weeks before I finally lost patience with both my own pansiness and my non-materializing guests, and finally cracked it.

I’m a fan of minimalism – the whole Japanese concept of beauty in simplicity appeals to me: the EH10 follows this theme, coming in the same bottle as the EH25, but with a simpler cork stopper, and a lovely, bare-bones label that says what it is without embellishment or hoo-rahs. In that sense it beats the pants off any other label I’ve ever seen. And the container itself is a solid, non-nonsense straight-lined bottle that harks back to simpler time. Can’t help but admire that.

The rum is a deep brown-red-gold, like a transplanted flame-haired lassie from Cork. The legs sliding down the glass when it is straightened are slow and fat and oily, and I have to say I was quite taken with the rum already. The nose was very impressive. As I expected, it was less harsh than the EH5 and less refined than the EH25, but in this lay its strength, too. Remember, the Ten is a blend of rums aged ten to twenty-five years that have been aged in the usual used oak barrels that once held bourbon, and it takes something from those blends, and adds to that the oaken tannins from the barrels. Not quite as much care has been taken to mute the wood (the 1981 25 yr old is extraordinary for the balance it achieves with the same elements), but what the 10 has done is create a powerfully complex nose, one where its comparative youth grants it more character than otherwise might have been the case. Consider: on the first intake, you get soft brown sugar, toffee and caramel hints. Let it breathe a minute then try again. This time you get a faint citrus, vanilla, some oak or other sweet wood, and now the burnt sugar starts coming at your in soft billowy waves. On a third try, you get those deep notes of molasses and see how all these components come together. I called my wife and asked her to double check. She added some fruit to what I had discerned, confirmed most of what had detected, and then went to get the 25 for a quick comparison…and here comes the interesting thing: the 25 is softer, smoother, more refined and interesting – bit it also had a delicate floral hint which the 10 lacked (and more complexity to boot). Wow. I couldn’t believe it: while not as good as the 25, the ten year old was giving the El Dorado 15 a run for its money.

Tasting it was another interesting experience. The English Harbour Reserve is soft and smoky on the palate, but it’s not oak I was tasting…something else, some freshly mown green grass or sugar cane leaves, or new sawn lumber of some aromatic kind. The cinnamon hint and spices come straight out, I get notes of mocha and light coffee and perhaps fruit of some kind; and the overall feel is rich, viscous and smooth. There is just enough sugar to go with the molasses taste to make the experience a voluptuous one, and lose those cognac-like notes that (to me) so diminishes older, more expensive rums (after all, if I wanted a cognac…).

The finish is just a bit too bitchy, a tad too scratchy, to be appropriately classified as fully smooth – it claws rather snidely on the way down (with one claw, not five, so it’s not as bad as this sentence suggests) – but don’t get me wrong: it’s medium long, and the rum takes obvious glee in leaving you with a reminder it was there. Overall, I think this rum is top class for its age: perhaps it’s a tad expensive for that age, though I’m sure there will be no shortage of opinions on that score as time goes on. I think I can live with that, however.

The ten year old is a replacement for what once used to be the English Harbour Extra Old, which is now discontinued. The stocks for that rum – the 1981 vintage now exclusively used for the 25 – were being rapidly depleted by the under-priced extra old’s popularity. The spine of the EH10 is in fact the 25, yes…just less of it, and it’s bolstered by the various other rums, the youngest of which is the ten.

Many things go into my opinion of a rum – smoothness, sweetness, driness (or not), blend proficiency, complexity and intermarriage of subtle (or striking) flavours, and how well it goes with itself, with ice, or as a mixer. It should be observed that I get no end of a hard time from the Maltsters in my circle, whose snobby zealotry about how no single malt worthy of its name is ever contaminated by ice or anything icky like a mix is legendary. To some extent they have a point – the mark of a good whisky is how well it stands by itself, and – mistakenly or not – they apply the same standards to rums. But this is to misunderstand rums, I think, because ever since they were first made, they have been mixed in some fashion, and this is as much a part of their heritage and character as the peat used to enhance malted barley…so to me, there is no derision in noting a rum is an excellent mixer. Which this is, price notwithstanding.

Overall, then, how did I like it? Oh, quite a bit, and not just because of its well-known, much admired siblings. Taking all the above remarks into account, I’d say that on ice or in a mixed drink, the English Harbour Reserve Ten Year old is one well-made, almost brilliant drink. It’s really good neat, but I don’t think everyone will like it that way (many will, I hasten to point out). It seems a bit ungrateful to say it doesn’t do well in this way, when it succeeds and is top class on so many other levels (taste, richness, body) but the finish is a bit sharp, and I do believe that if you’re willing to mix the thing, you won’t be disappointed, and will have one of the more expensive cocktails you’ve ever tasted.

Is that worth shelling out a hundred bucks for? Tough call. The stellar El Dorado 21 year old is slightly less than that, as is its fifteen year old. The dry, cognac-like Clement XO is in the same price range, and the Cruzan Single Barrel and Zaya 12 are both cheaper. All are good. So on that basis, I’d have a tough time telling you to run out there and get this one if money is your sole concern. But my belief is that if you’re looking to buy something in this price range, you either know your rums or you don’t, and if you’ve come this far, drunk this much, had your share of popskull and low end hooch, you wouldn’t be going wrong if you forked out the green to buy this ten year old dark-gold gem.

(#093. 84.5/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Other Notes

In June 2018 I revisited the 10 YO and inducted it into the Key Rums of the World series.

Bacardi 8 Year Old Rum – Review

 6 Responses »
Sep 172010
 

 

Picture (c) RumCorner.dk

First posted 17 September 2010 on Liquorature

A tentative foray, a single spy, sent into the camp of the premium rums, perhaps to scout out the territory for further invasions to come (we can hope). Capture one and be surprised by its low price and overall quality. If Bacardi can make this one, I don’t know why they don’t come charging into the high-end market in force.

***

Maybe it’s just me, but I sometimes find stronger notes and more positive tastes at the middle and lower end of the price and snoot scale; more premium rated rums can get their cachet from age statements, distillery snobbery and the supposed excellence and uniqueness of their maturation process…but don’t consistently please (or awe) the drinker any more than a regular rum could (sometimes even less). A lesson that does not seem to have been lost on the subject of this review: the 8 year old Bacardi.

Observe this brand. It’s the best selling rum in the world. It smartly moved its operations to Puerto Rico and then to Mexico in the pre-WW2 years to take advantage of favourable tariff regimes with the US, and created a marketing campaign which made it the pre-eminent tropical drink of its time. A series of extremely capable family members (some of them in-laws) kept the voting shares and quality control up to scratch into the modern era. And yet, it is considered fashionable today to bash the brand for its commonality and staid middle-of-the-roadishness.

Part of that is its utility. The damned thing can be used for anything. You can cook with it, drink it, mix it, use it as a base, an ingredient or a mixer. It has no real character except its lack of one. It’s bland. It’s like the a ’40s jeep or ’50s Land Rover or ’70s Toyota. It’s the faceless English banker, the anonymous Japanese salaryman of rums. It is, succinctly put, often seen as boring. But my lord, does it ever sell. The gold, the black, the white…they can be found everywhere

The 8-year old is something else again. Bacardi blends for the most part, but they’ve taken the time to put together this tawny golden blend of rums aged eight to sixteen years old and aged in used white oak barrels that once held sherry. This might account for a softer and more candied nose than one might expect from what could be seen as just another young rum. It’s a tad sharp, yet not so medicinal as others I’ve had. I’ve always meant to try it for that alone.

Tasting is a surprising delight: the slight sting to the nose disappears entirely, and a body of some substance makes sipping this without ice a definite must-try. It’s not as sweet as other rums, and the arrival on the throat is more like a dry, rich brandy, or the Bruichladdich Renegade rums. It’s got a solid flavour profile, with traces of vanilla, nutmeg and light fruity undertones, perhaps peaches. More to the point, it has real body, not some kind of anorexic thinness reminiscent of its cheaper cousins further down the scale. And the finish is excellent, with a slow deep burn, not a sting: this rum is more like a decent whisky, I judge, with just enough sugar in it to keep me liking it. A lot. I’d sip it straight with no problems, on ice without doubt, and as a mixer in any situation.

Bacardi 8 does not try for superiority (although the packaging is quite decent for its price and age…I particularly liked the cork stopper). It really is a good mid ranger, and in its own way, defines what a good rum could be if it doesn’t hanker after any kind of pretentiousness. A superstar it’ll never be: as an all rounder, it may be one of those undiscovered steals that those who patronize the low-end rums feel is a find all their own, and they’d be right to think so. You wouldn’t be wasting your thirty-plus bucks if you dropped them on this quietly impressive product.

(#0053)(Unscored)

Other Notes

El Dorado 15 Year Old Rum – Review

 1 Response »
Sep 102010
 

First posted 10 September 2010 on Liquorature #036

The 15 year old is a different animal from it’s older and younger sublings, and resides on the top of the sippers lists of many a rum aficionado.

The 15 year old is the bridge. It is the last bottle in DDL’s premium line that will not set you back three figures, and still has the cheery character of a younger rum, the cheeky palate that dances and laughs across your tongue and then happily bitch slaps you for your trouble with all the insouciance of the first girl who ever refused you a dance. In it you see the developing hints of the mastery first seen in the 12 year old that culminates the 21 year old.

I was all set to do a vertical tasting of all the El Dorados: the 5 yr, single barrel, 12, 15 and 21 year old, but truth was, the day I had set aside for this I was just to damned tired, and having had the 21 year old not too long before, I contented myself with sipping the 12 year old to refresh my memory, and then cracked the 15 year old I had managed to snag the week before; and that, by the way, was a stroke of luck, because it was the last bottle Willow Park had on the shelf – they may have had more, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

Demerara Distillers Limited is one of the largest and quite possibly the most professionally run international enterprise headquartered in Guyana. It’s main competitor in the liquor trade, Banks DIH, is a blender of the XM rum line, and producer of other spirits, beers and soft drinks (and of the marvellously named bottled water “Tropical Mist”), but for my money, when it comes to premium hooch, it’s DDL, and that enterprise stands alone.

The El Dorado series is DDL’s premium export line (as opposed to the decidedly mediocre local crap, the King of Diamonds or Russian Bear which people my age cut their teeth on, which even locals avoid(ed) if they can get the XM-5), and readers of my reviews, knowing my preferences, should not be surprised at how much affection I hold for El Dorados. Part of that comes from the complexity of the blend, coming as it does from fifteen to twenty five year old rums originating in the Enmore and Diamond Coffey stills, the Port Mourant double wooden pot still, and the Versailles single wooden pot still, all blended and aged in old bourbon oak casks. The quality shows.

The fifteen is a rich, dark blend characteristic of Guyanese rums, almost opaque (though not as dark as the inkiness of the Kraken, or, for that matter, its older sibling the 21 year old); it’s redolent of molasses and dark brown Demerara sugar in a freshly opened packet. There’s a sort of charcoal note wrapped around the nose somewhere, something smoky, and not at all unpleasant. Toffee and fruit jam. Like the 21 year, but not quite as much, the medium heavy dark body slowly slides back down the sides of the glass in lazy, fat legs of a Bourda market fishwife.

On the tongue, the rum is a sort of intense marriage of deep flavours. Dark chocolate (unsweetened, dried fruit, licorice, a flirt of anise start you off. You can taste the oak imparted by the barrels the components of the blend were aged in, but amazingly, they never overtake the whole blend. Note also that DDL, almost alone among premium rum makers, follows the whisky rule of stating the age of the rum as the age of the youngest part of the blend. You can separate out well balanced hints of caramel, molasses, burnt sugar, wound around with the faintest hint of cinnamon and vanilla, and the barest trace of orange peel. There is just enough sweet for me to appreciate depth and body, and just little enough to pronounce its age. In fairness, it’s a phenomenally well-balanced drink over all – it can go well neat, on ice or even as a mixer (I do not recommend it as a cocktail, mind you, since it requires no adornment or enhancing).

The finish is an excellent deep burn, not really painful per se, more like a heated liquid – tea! – slowly carving its way down, and it’s excellently long. Yes it does have a bit of sting to it (like the playful smack I mentioned above), but it’s not malicious in a way I often have complained about in the Appletons or the French agricoles…more like a friendly backslap to say “Later dude,” from a friend who doesn’t know his strength.

I don’t give numerical ratings as a general rule, because I want my explanation to speak for my experience, and maybe that’s a mistake, seeing how much stock readers seem to place in The Last Hippie’s Whisky ratings and the numbers he assigns to nose, palate, finish and intangibles. But in the case of this strikingly original fifteen year old, I think I might make this concession: while sticking to my guns regarding a numerical score, I will be honest to admit that on a five star scale, El Dorado 15 year old easily demonstrates that it warrants no less than four, and if it wasn’t for its even more stellar older brother, I’d give it a 4.5 star rating right away.

El Dorado 15 is on par with the Zaya 12 year, and handily eclipses the Captain Morgan Private Stock, and gives the Bruichladdich Renegade line and the upper level Flor de Cañas a run for their money at a lesser price. I actually think it’s better than most of these. If you’re looking for an intro to the world of good sippers, or a gift of liquor that is at the top of the midrange, look no further. You’ve found it.

(#0036)(Unscored)

Update December 2016

After years of selling this top class 15 year old rum, El Dorado has come in for serious opprobium in the rum community for not disclosing the addition of sugar across the line (30-38 g/L for the 15 year old depending on who’s doing the measuring, and when). I still like the rum a lot, and don’t always have a problem with additions, but I’m a bear on disclosure, and really annoyed by the fact that it was never acknowledged by DDL, to this day.

Update December 2017

After re-tasting this rum and taking account of its enduring popularity and overall worth (in spite of the dosing issues noted), I have named it one of the Key Rums of the World

Stroh 54 Austrian Overproof Rum – Review

 4 Responses »
Aug 302010
 

First posted 30th August 2010 on Liquorature.

When I was discoursing about rums with a Calgary Co-op liquor sales manager (in my normal sneering way, and for the usual reason), I asked about this odd little label from Austria, because, with my penetrating insight and encyclopedic knowledge, I was aware that Austria didn’t have any sugar cane fields — Andrea from the cashier’s till was called over, and noted flatly (in that no-nonsense way that people use to inform you they know the Truth even if you’re too ignorant to), that she’d had them all, tried the lot, was Austrian into the bargain on her mother’s side, and Stroh was quite simply the best spiced rum in the world, bar none (except perhaps another Stroh). Abashed into silence and trembling meekness at this powerful and unambiguous endorsement and the fierce look of “Agree with me if you want to live,” I tried to recover my backbone from the yellow paint in which it was soaking, and bought the bottle.

This illustrates the sad state to which us rum lovers have been forced into, in this whisky loving city: we’re so desperate to try something new, that we are pitifully grateful for any new rum that passes through the local shops. Not the low or mid range from an established maker, but something genuinely new. I ruefully concede that Stroh’s meets every criteria except one: I’m not entirely convinced it actually is a rum. Oh, it says it is, and it has the suitable origin in sugar cane by-products, whatever those might be (originally it was made from a diluted ethanol base), but note I don’t say sugar cane juice, or molasses. The problem was that when Sebastian Stroh started making this little concoction in Klagenfurt in the early 1830s, Austria was not participating in the scramble for Africa (or anywhere else), and thus lacked tropical colonies from where they could get the raw materials. So he added his own spices and flavour and additives in order to make an ersatz molasses taste, and created a domestic rum which eventually became something of a national tipple. Can’t fault the Europeans for trying to make a good likker, I suppose: I just wish they wouldn’t pretend this was the real McCoy.

Stroh’s is made in several varieties: the 80% variation (who the hell would drink this firewater, honestly?), 60%, 40%…I had bought what I thought was the tamer 54% version which apparently is the most popular (I expect outraged posts stating that this is the wimpy stuff and how real men drink the 80%), and was the only bottle for sale anyway. At half a litre for $35, that’s a mid-ranger, and in spite of my doubt regarding overproofs (what’s the point, beyond cooking, creating cocktails, making college freshmen drunk faster or simply causing pain?), it did, as new rums usually do, intrigue me. Curiosity, I fear, will be the end of me one of these days, no matter how careful I am.

Good thing I was cautious. Scarfing Keenan’s excellent brunch the next day, I cracked the bottle and I swear the alcohol wanted to strangle me right on the spot. I’ve had some unique and aggressive rums in my day (Bundie and Pyrat’s to start), but this took distinctiveness to a whole new level. The smell on this thing was like – and I swear this is true – plasticine. I thought for a moment I had entered a time warp and was back in primary school dicking around with play-do. The assault on my nose was so swift and savage that I shuddered, avoided Keenan’s smirking eyes, and poured a shot at arm’s length over ice: The Hippie complains that ice closes up a drink when one should leave it open, but the poor man is a fan of civilized whisky for retired country gents and has never been boinked over the head and had his nose speared by this raging Austrian drink. You could make out some cinnamon notes and a hint of ginger when your schnozz was reluctantly returned to you, but the truth was that I thought this a vile, underspiced and overstrength drink that should under no circumstances be had “just so.” Forget the ice. Forget nosing, smelling, checking for legs or anything fancy. Drown this one in cola, in sprite, in juice or anything else, and quickly. But I must make this observation: in a cola (a lot of cola), Stroh’s tastes like a damned ginger ale. Plasticine flavoured ginger ale that gives you a buzz. Weirdest thing. Not entirely a loss, therefore.

Of course, it was only later, doing my research and putting my notes together, that I read it was supposed to be used as a cooking ingredient for cakes and rumballs, as a cocktail base and a mixer with other things to produce smoother drinks of some power (like the B52). It’s not a drink to be had neat (sure…now they tell me). Well, maybe. Rums do have this thing about being equal part sippers and equal part mixers, and their plebian origins make it difficult to distinguish which is which, sometimes. I’ll be the first to concede that as an overproof rum, Stroh – any one of the overproof offerings – is not for the meek and mild or those who haven’t seen “300” at least five times. Stroh’s is a hairy friggin’ barbarian of a drink, a dirty, nasty, screaming crazy, wielding a murderous nose-axe meant to do you serious harm and destroy your sight. It’s one of the most distinctive liquors I’ve ever had, and while I may not like it much, I ruefully laugh as I recall my encounter with it, will give it due respect and a wide berth from here on in. Austrians, other Europeans and Andrea are welcome to have it and enjoy it (although, what the hell, I still have to finish my bottle so Ill probably go back to be bashed around a bit one of these days when I’m in a masochistic mood), and if I have one in my house one day, I’ll serve it to him (along with the Coruba).

But I gotta tell you: I don’t care what they call it, or what its antecedents are – a rum, this one really is not.

(#034)(Unscored)

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