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Mount Gay Old Cask 1703 – Review

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Aug 282010
 

mount gay 1703

Stunning.  Strong marriage of well balanced flavours, terrific nose and a silky finish marred ever so slightly by a slight bitterness at the tail end. A damned worthy entry at the top-end, showing Mount Gay is still a force to be reckoned with in the premium lines.

First posted  28 August 2010 on Liquorature.

Mount Gay.  The premier house of rum on Barbados, the oldest rum distillery in the world, and this rum, their premium product, first seen in 2009.  I was not entirely enthused with the Extra Old, but here, they have created a small gem that takes the qualities I liked in the Extra Old, and made almost none of the mistakes; and while it may not entirely beat the snot out of the EH25 or the Appleton 30, it is on par with the El Dorado 21, tastes like the Clemente XO, and can quit the field of battle with honour in the company of these exceptional opponents

The top end of their production line was not a part of the Liquorature gathering of August 2010, but because I had just blown the ~$125 on it and wanted to try it in company, I brought it along anyway — it’s become in an occasional thing of mine to bring something high-end to the table when I want the others to sample, because I am fully aware that without that, they’ll never spend the cash on anything but whisky (I’m fighting a valiant rearguard action here, as you might notice).  As the sole ‘Caner here, I consider this my small contribution to their education in Matters of Rum.

All fun aside, let’s look at the 1703.  The bottle is simple, blocky and new age, harkening back to the old jugs of yore (and I adore simple elegance, so this gets mucho brownie points from me); the cork has a sumptuously tight feel to it and is metal tipped cork, tightly settled: it makes a plump, happy sound when popped.  The colour of the rum is a tawny dark gold, with reddish tints hinting of copper…perhaps a freshly minted new coin.  Like both the Doorly’s and XO, it possesses a medium body, lighter than other islands like Jamaica (or Guyana’s molasses beefcakes), but about on par with Martinique’s agricole offerings. It’s a blend of rums between 10 and 30 years old, both pot and column still as far as I know.

I don’t often spend more than fifteen minutes on a tasting before I make up my mind one way or the other: neither my experience nor my sophistication being wide enough to take this further.  However, when reviewing aged rums in particular, a more serious attitude really is needed (well, if you spent over a hundred bucks, doesn’t the object deserve more than just a cursory sip and disinterested demeanour?), and it’s always a good idea to let the opened spirit breathe in the glass.  The initial nose is of cinnamon, nutmeg and a soft whiff of bananas (the Mount Gay signature), but when it has sat in the glass for another few minutes, it opens up like my wife’s arms when I come back from a long trip abroad, and I get that warm comforting whiff of caramel, burnt sugar and toffee coiling around subtle fruits and spices.  And more than a hint of…well, leather.  Maybe that’s just me, though.

In the mouth the 1703 is quite dry and low-to-medium sweet, another thing it shares with both the Elements 8 and the Clemente XO, and for which I marked them down (and again I have to stress how personal a thing this business with the sweetness is for me). However, in fairness I have to mention how smooth the rum is, in spite of the aggressive oaken taste – the 1703 is a blend of rums aged between ten to thirty years in used bourbon barrels – and how subtler flavours slowly seep through the backbone of the tannins: vanilla, caramel, sugar, and baked apples. Yes, taking one’s time with this is almost a given: unlike a young lover who is all energy and power with no character, this one is all about mature and sober reflection of what it means to make love. The lack of sugar makes the overall taste much like a cognac (and the dryness reinforces this impression), and for that reason I myself won’t rank this high on my pantheon of truly great rums, but I fully acknowledge the depth of skill Master Blender Allen Smith utilized in marrying various rums aged ten to thirty years into this excellent synthesis.

The sting in the tail comes at the end. On the pleasantly long and reasonably smooth finish there is that faint hint of bitterness and spite which so marred my enjoyment of the XO – less than that offering, true, but I was watching and waiting for it, and yes, it’s there: unlike the Appleton 30 which expended much time in muting the oaken infusion, here this was not the case, or at least, less effort was made. When one thinks of the overall brilliant beginnings of the rum, it’s subtlety and complexity of married blends, this is – to say the least – problematic. I think, however, that brandy aficionados and whisky lovers will look at me askance and ask me what the hell my problem is, were I to bring it up, and guzzle the thing down with great enjoyment.

As a gift for someone special, as a sundowner in your new McMansion overlooking a lake somewhere, this rum will not disappoint, and overall, it’s an excellent choice for a sipper (no, I didn’t even think of bastardizing this with cola), in spite of its final bitchiness, which is a minor blip on an otherwise straight line, in my opinion (enough to make me mark it down, mind you). Mount Gay has been officially making rums since 1703, and lost a little ground in the premium market over the last decades, but it appears their long tradition of rums for the cognoscenti is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon.

(#097. 85/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

 

Smuggler’s Cove Dark Rum – Review

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Aug 182010
 

Publicity Photo (c) RockSpirits.ca

First posted 18 August 2010 on Liquorature.

Fresh from the intense concentration I brought to the Elements 8 Gold rum, I trotted out the flattie of Smuggler’s Cove Dark to chillax with.  I would have damaged the Young’s Old Sam, but it was almost done, so off I went to this one.  My more romantic side likes to think that the humourous and positive reviews of Newfie Screech and Lamb’s so impressed the family of one of my Maritime friends at the office, that when she went back to Nova Scotia for some R&R (rather more recreation than rest, I’d say), they chipped in to assist in the purchase of a flattie just for me, to drink, enjoy and review. “Drink, mon!” that gift joyously asks, and I am duly grateful and gave Tanya a big (but chaste) smooch to express my gratitude.

Smuggler’s Cove is blended from Jamaican rum stock by Glenora Distillery in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia which opened its doors in 1990: a good example of how low on the pecking order they consider their rum is the fact that they advertise themselves not as a rum distiller (which to me would make them a damned sight more famous and distinctive), but as the only single malt distillery in America (they make the Glen Breton Rare Canadian Single Malt whisky, and they have a legal battle with the Scotch Whisky Association as a consequence of using the name “Glen”). And yet, you really have to search and peruse and squint to find the shy – almost apologetic – remark somewhere in the fine print, that they make amber, white and dark rums as well.  Given that the Dark won a Gold Medal in the 2003 International Rum Festival, I find that a troubling and sad omission.  On the other hand, that just keeps the price down for me, so maybe it’s all good.

After the complex interactions of the Elements 8 which I likened to a young girl growing up but not out of her braces, and learning how to smooch properly (while not exactly succeeding), it is clear that Smuggler’s Cove Dark is her  45% ABV enhanced boyfriend who was out to teach me a goddamned lesson.  He’s the captain of the football team, doesn’t have a brain in his head, but sports a massive set of biceps and very stern case of hallitosis. The nose practically knocks you off your feet: molasses, sugar and spices, with armpits reeking of flowers. (maybe he’s got questions about his masculinity?).

Honesty compels me to admit that I took one sip of this neat, and, like the Coruba, shuddered and reached for the mixin’s. That powerful taste of caramel, vanilla and molasses is well nigh overwhelmed by Football Boy kicking me in the sack with his steel toed Spirit boots, and the burn ain’t pleasant either. There’s a whisper of real potential – nutmeg, fruit and spices whisper gently – under the strong rum reek, but it’ll never come out on its own.  A cola added 1:1 does, on the other hand, provide an intriguing counterpoint and I think it’s not too far from the Old Sam, though the balance of flavours isn’t quite as good as that particular low-end mixer. The finish on its own is brutally strong, like an uppercut you never saw that lays you out, and scratches the back of your throat as efficiently and sharply as might a hangnail on the finger of the doc giving you a prostrate exam.

I’m not suggesting that Smuggler’s Cove is one of the premier low-class hooches out there, like English Harbour 5 YO or Appleton V/X, or Old Sam’s…but I am saying that as a mixer, it’s quite good, with subtler hints a neat sip would not suggest it had.  I’d actually rate it ahead of the V/X. And, it has to be said that much like every Maritimer I ever met, once you get past the the craggy frontage, the dour kick to the tenders and the glorious lack of sophistication, once you accept it for what it is, you might just end up making a friend for life and a staple that stays — constantly replenished — in your rum cabinet forever.

(#033)(Unscored)

Other Notes

  • Jamaican distillery of origin unspecified; the still of make is also unspecified. According to the NLLC provincial website, it’s been made since 1992.  In 2021, when I was repairing the site and followed up, the rum was no longer listed on Glen Breton’s own website. A Canadian distributor, BID, in an undated article, noted it was a blend of rums aged a minimum of two years, and intimated it was pot still derived.

Elements 8 Gold Rum – Review

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Aug 182010
 

First posted 18 August 2010 on Liquorature. 

I’d seen this trapezoidal bottle once in a while on the occasional shelf in Calgary, but  I’d never been interested enough, or seen it in sufficient quantity – let alone heard anything about it – to decide whether it was worth a buy or not.  It was an interesting surprise when a very helpful gent from Co-op named Dan Ellis (may the ice in his glass never melt) sourced the thing out.  Now granted, I had been making sneery remarks at the paucity of his rum selection (as opposed to the Scottish drink) so the honour of his stores certainly came into play here.  But I’m happy he bothered.

Lightly-aged rums do not usually inspire me to treat  them with any great degree of reverence and a blend even less so, but in this case, the styling of the bottle and its comparative rarity (and, it must be stated, price – I’m as much of a snob as anyone at times, sorry), made me take more than usual care in checking it out. I was…intrigued.  And in retrospect, I’m glad I took the time.  The nose seemed fairly straightforward on the get go – a clear, intense light gold rum, very delicate (Oh God, was this another friggin’ Doorly’s? was the first thought through my mind), but with a slight hint of peaches and citrus, and definitely apple – it reminded me of my favourite (and very expensive) Riesling. My wife, who loved that New Age bottle to pieces, rudely snatched the glass from my hands and watching her little button nose try to extract scent from the glass that swallowed it whole was almost as entertaining as her attempts to translate her thinking into English.  We both tasted the oak, but she noted that there was a hint of dried forest leaves dampened by a summer rain too.  And after we stood it for a bit and it opened up, there was the molasses and burnt sugar revealing itself around the skirts of the first aromas like a shy girl hiding behind her mommy. A girl with some spirit because there’s no getting away from the slight medicinal tang to the nose which spoils what is otherwise a really good nose.

On the tongue and in the mouth, the Elements 8 Gold changed its character again: it grew up, took off its braces and flirted without shame, flicking up its skirt and laughing.  Not assured enough to be mature, still young enough to have some rawness to it, but no longer in its girlhood, it bucked in coltish adolescence across my taste buds, coating the palate with soft oiliness.  The thing is, there is no caramel or toffee taste in this thing at all – a first for me.  It’s not sweet and has a deep, rich burn going down, like a well aged cognac.  And the body is excellent, medium heavy, and maintaining that odd …cleanness which I really liked. But the finish is fast — our tomboy hasn’t learned to make a kiss last yet, so while she is fine as peaches and cream, she needs a little polish to make her into a world beater that men will stampede over each other to taste.

Elements 8 is a self-styled “premium” rum made in the St Lucia Distillery, but care has to be taken in distinguishing it from the actual products of that distillery (for example, the Admiral Rodney, or the Chairman’s Reserve brands) – the [e]8 organization works closely with the distillery while not either owning it or being owned by them.  The Elements 8 Rum Company is a UK enterprise run by two gentlemen, one of whom, like me, is a Caribbean infused German (don’t ask).  The founders of Elements 8 saw that rum, like whiskies, vodkas, gins and tequilas, could reach upscale quality and prices by dint of differentiation, innovative distillation and blending, product design, clever marketing and word of mouth.

Elements 8 is an instructive study in how to raise expectations with glowing advertising. Unlike the Kraken, which simply had fanboys going ape over it (unnecessarily so, in my opinion), this one had quality written all over its commercial messaging. Supposedly eight elements of production are married in a holistic manner to produce a rum modestly referred to as being of surpassing quality: environmental (St Lucia boasts a unique micro-climate which imparts its own character to the rum but then, so does every other island), cane from Guyana – I was told it was molasses not the actual sugar cane (one of the ads, which touted the cane  as being “hand selected” had me doubled over in laughter), water from protected rainforest habitats, three differeing yeasts, distillation, tropical ageing, blending and filtration, all in harmony. The rum is distilled in three different stills: a John Dore double retort copper pot still for the heavy, flavourful components, depth and finish; a Vendome Kentucky Bourbon copper pot still which gives the rather unique flavour profile; and a steel columnar still for the lighter components.  Since each still is charged with three different washes (from the three yeasts), we have nine blend components (actually, ten) which are blended and aged for a minimum of six years in oaken barrels that once held Buffalo Trace bourbon.  Not bad.

All right, so I tasted, I researched, I drank, then added an ice cube, and after it all, tried it as a mixer.  My conclusions?

Well, forget the mixing part. You get an interesting ginger taste with coke, but it isn’t really worth it: the [e]8 Gold is dense and viscous enough not to need the enhancement.  The nose, as I said is clean and complex, rewards time and care, and is very attractive except for that last bitchy smackdown of medicine (some care in the distillation or ageing, perhaps an additive or two might mitigate that).  The taste is something else again. I’m not sure rum lovers who like their caramel and sweetness will appreciate the slightly salty tang of a rum that is more like a cognac. If you can get past that, the smoothness of the finish and the overall richness of the blend make this quite a unique drink, one that, like Bundie or the Pyrat’s XO, can be identified blind with no doubts whatsoever.  Just not entirely a rum the way I expect one to be (this may be a limitation of mine, not the rum…get a bottle and make your own determination).

So it’s not quite my thing – maybe I’m not yuppie enough, or just like my sweet rum taste more than something made and designed for the bars of the upper class – but in way I feel a little sad, too.  The nose had real promise, really set you up for something special, and at the end I felt like the geek who got to kiss the head of the cheerleading squad, only to find she couldn’t kiss as well as my expectations had been led to believe she could. I’m left with all excitement and no true satisfaction.

I’m hoping that in the years to come, Elements 8 will find a way to marry the traditions of the older rum distillers with the new wave innovations of this century, to come up with something truly spectacular: the fact that they are attempting to produce a premium white rum speaks at a fair amount of determination to think out of the box.  I’ll  not hesitate to buy anything from their line I see going forward.

(#055)(Unscored)

Other Notes

  • Thanks go to one of the founders of [e]8, Andreas Redlefsen, who was kind enough to answer all my questions on his organization, its history, outlook and methods.
  • The rum is a spiced product, a fact unknown to me at the time when I tasted it.
  • My remarks about preferring sweeter rums are amusing when read in retrospect, given the development of my tastes over time.

Amrut Old Port Deluxe Rum – Review

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Jul 302010
 

(Publicity Photo)

First posted 30 July 2010 on Liquorature.

Pungent, full and pleasant to drink.  Amrut may be taking the whisky world by storm, but I think this may have been the real shot across the bows

Didn’t Clint and the Last Hippie just post good reviews of Amrut’s fusion whisky the other day?  In researching the second of three new rums for the July 2010 gathering, I discovered (much to my surprise), that the same company out of Bangalore India, makes this very capable young rum called Old Port (I can’t get any details on ageing, distillation methods or composition for this baby, alas). Now India having spoken English longer than America, being a British colony ever since Clive in 1757 (look up Plassey, ye historically challenged ones), I sort of expect the whisky production (and definitely gin), but this was the first rum from there I had ever managed to snag.  This is the dark side of having so little choice, here in Calgary: you grab anything new with a price tag and hope for the best, and in your hurry to elbow the other guy out of the way, you don’t read the label carefully enough. I should have picked up the reference.

The bottle is short and squat, and the dark brown liquid sloshes invitingly within.  The nose is candied caramel, and the molasses from which it is made comes through clearly.  It smells a bit like a spiced rum, to be honest, sweet and thick.  Neat, that caramel charges at you right out of the gate, and you also get hints of cinnamon, and a spicy undertone of some kind.  There’s something unidentifiable buried under there, that spicy note which harkens to muscatel grapes, bananas or perhaps prunes, and I can only attribute that to either the distillation method, the source cane (remember how the Bundie blew us all away because of its crazy taste utterly at odds with our conceptions of rum?  same thing here, but in a much much better way) or some subtle spice addition in the blend that gives Old Port Deluxe a distinctive taste and bite all its own.  Whatever it is, I liked it, and the the overall texture and taste in the mouth were pleasant and tasted of just enough sweet. The burn on the back of the throat was a sort of dark rich caramel, deep yet not sharp. It’s not entirely successful as a sipping rum – lack of care in making this a successful marriage of flavours and tastes mitigate against that – but as mixer, I thought it was excellent

Amrut distillery was founded in 1948 (that would be the year the British left), and since India is the second largest sugar cane producer in the world after Brazil, is it any surprise they have made some kind of spirit out of it? For the most part and for many years they served the local “country hooch”  market, but have in recent years branched out international… primarily in fine whiskies.  The rum component of their production – the part that isn’t for internal consumption – is still relatively unknown.  In part this is because of the craziness of the Indian liquor landscape: there are thirty-three states in India and each has its own liquor policy – Gandhi’s philosophy on prohibition make booze illegal in Gujerat, for example. The sugar lobby prevents local country spirits from being legalized;  import taxes on foreign liquor are stupendously high…and yet the horribly large shot serving preferred in places like the Punjab makes India one of the largest tippling nations in the world. The British influence makes whisky preferred to rum as a sign of the upper classes (poor rum – no respect on the shelves of Calgary, and now none in the tastes of India either…sigh)

From country hooch, local tipple, flavoured vodkas, gins, brandies and whiskies, all based on molasses, to premium whiskies like Fusion and its counterparts is quite a step.  But I have to tell you that the rum as a whole wasn’t bad at all, and I liked it a lot.  It didn’t really have much competition that evening – el Dorado Five and the disappointing Mount Gay Extra Old – so it turned out to be the sleeper of the evening, in my opinion.  With the gradually increasing prescence of this 60+ year old distillery on the world liquor stage, all I can say is I look forward to their premium offerings to come: Curt was impressed with their whiskies, but I gotta tell you, if this was an example of their rums, they are worth watching in the future for something really stellar.

(#032)(Unscored)

Other Notes

  • There is a peculiar absence of information about this rum in spite of its fame.  Nowhere is it noted what kind of still it came from, how long it was aged, what are the components of the blend, or whether it derived from molasses, cane juice or jaggery. That includes the reviewers (one dating back to 2009) as well as Amrut’s own site.

El Dorado Finest Demerara 5 Year Old Rum – Review

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Jul 302010
 

First posted 30 July 2010 on Liquorature.

We’ve tasted the El Dorado 21 year old (a superb example of the distiller’s art) and I have a 12 year old kicking around somewhere that I’m awaiting the return of the Bear to crack, but since the low end of the scale was available, it formed the third part of the three-rum selection for the July 2010 gathering.  I’d like to point out that what Demerara Distillers markets abroad as 5-year, is vastly different from what is foisted on the local market in Guyana, and that’s a shame, since it says that leavings are given to the locals, while high-revenue earners are shipped abroad.

DDL is headed by a marketing dynamo: Yesu Persaud, the Chairman of the company, saw the emergence of premium sipping rums coming and lay down stocks from the 1980s and even before that; so in 1992, when DDL issued the El Dorado 15 year old Special Reserve, it showed that rum, like whisky, could compete for the sipping market on level terms.  Too – and for this I have to give full credit and many attaboys – DDL has used the whisky principle of stating that when something is a 12 year old or 15 year old, then that is the component of the drink that is the youngest part of the blend.

As the picture shows, this is a brown-gold rum, not terribly heavy in density. Baby legs scamper in scrawny rills back down the glass in labba-time, and those nose is simple, without complexity – the usual caramel and burnt sugar offering, though somewhat lighter than usual, and with some cinnamon and perhaps coconut thrown in for good measure.  There’s that spirity sting on the schnozz to watch out for, of course.  About what one would expect from a five year old.  I’m beginning to come to the belated conclusion that the only real difference between a five and a fifty year old is the care taken to smoothen out and balance the various tastes and burns…younger babies are simply bastard offsprings of more noble sires and have not yet grown into their stature, so to speak.

Tastewise, I have the advantage – or suffer under the burden – of having tasted DDLs crap ware in the old country, so my expectations of their single digit rums are always low (I concede that the exported tipple is miles ahead of the local market hooch). But I must admit that the five caught me off guard: I had been expecting the slightly dark sweetness of DDLs older offerings, but got instead something drier, smokier and more distinctive.  The flavour of coconut, anise and caramel blends into something akin to a very strong, unsweetened tea carving its way down your throat, with a bite of heat rather than that of acid (I hope I’m making the distinction clear).  Sure there is burn at the back end, but less than I would have imagined – actually, the rum reminds me of a young cognac more than anything else.

Which is not to say I was entirely enamoured of DDL’s rum here. You know me and my love for sweets, so on that level, plus the rather low effort put into muting the burn, it’s sort of a “par for the course” kinda deal;  a very nice little mixer, however.  Cola fills out the sweetness and body the rum itself is missing. I’m prone to playing favourites, and I really like the 21 year old, so if I was in a good mood (which I was) I’d certainly give this one a pass on the strength of my appreciation for its sibs and its quality as a mixing base.  As a sipper, however, much as I’d like to state otherwise, I’d rather stay away from it.

Still, for a five year, that’s still polling ahead of the margin, I’d have to say.

(#031)(78/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Other Notes

  • I ran four five year old rums — including a later edition of this one — against each other in 2012, here, if you’re interested.

 

Mount Gay XO (Extra Old) Rum – Review

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Jul 302010
 

First posted 30 July 2010 on Liquorature

You’re not looking at two images here by accident: both of these are Extra Old. The one on the right is the new design introduced perhaps a year or so ago, and what I bought was the one on the left. There’s some confusion in the literature as to what you’re getting: the one on the right is supposedly 15 year old blends, while the one on the left is stated on some websites to be 7, 8 and 10 years old blended together…what the hell? However, after having contacted Mount Gay’s customer service (in France, because Rémy Cointreau has owned the brand since 1989), I can now tell you that both blends are exactly the same – a combination of 8-15 year old rums – and the bottle on the right is merely a newer, more “premium” design, which is in line with my observation that rums are now moving upscale in both blending and design (see the Elements 8 review if you doubt me).

Mount Gay is the rum from Barbados that essentially – after tourism, I guess – makes the island’s name. Not everyone has heard of Doorly’s, or Mahiki’s or St. Nicholas Abbey, and though Cockspur is pretty familiar to any West Indian (it’s had sniggering rights for decades) it’s not so well known outside the Islands: but you’d be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t at least heard of Mount Gay. It is the Bacardi of Barbados, you could say.

Maltmonster made the remark the other day that he likes to do his tasting in vertical rankings, because you get a better idea how the rums (well, he said whiskies, but I chose to think he misspoke himself in an unfortunate faux pas which he now sincerely regrets and will one day beg my forgiveness for) improve or develop as one goes up the price chain. The problem with that admittedly laudable theory here in Cowtown, is that while well-suited for the elephantine selection of single malts one can find in even the meanest mon-and-pop establishment, it utterly fails for the anorexic pickings of the cane around here. One is therefore left with the dubious methodology of simply comparing rums on age and price and hoping you can draw some reasonable conclusions from that.

Anyway. The oldest continuously operating commercial distillery in the western hemisphere is not in Scotland, it’s not in the American continents – it is this one, and it has the papers to prove it: in fact, legend has it that Mount Gay was distilling rum since the mid 1600s, which would bring it in a shade behind Bushmills, in Ireland (so look it up). The signature of their lines is banana and almond, the way citrus is for Appleton, and the premium offering is the Mount Gay 1703 Old Cask: what we had for the July 2010 selection was a few rungs lower – the Extra Old, a mixture of rums eight to fifteen years old (a note here: the kind of the bottle I review is the picture on he left: this is gradually being replaced with the sleeker new design on the right).

On the nose it’s caramel candy, with that taste of banana. A bit strong, burning gently but not offensively. Swirling in the glass shows the thin legs of a model from Milan, but nothing special to my mind (I don’t attribute much to the legs unless they are really running off the reservation). On the palate, this supposedly premium sipping rum does not, unfortunately, impress: while it shows off a medium brown colour, tastes of the usual molasses and brown sugar, and hints of pecan, the blend is somehow not assertive, not intriguingly complex…it is, to but it bluntly, a tad bland. Behind, stiffening it up, is the aforementioned banana and a slight note of citrus that almost disappears in the mouth. The finish, I’m gonna have to tell you straight out, is short and bitchy and bitter, like a Reno divorce, and about as pleasant. I kind of just looked at the glass on my second go ’round with it. What just happened to this thing? Did they not try to tone down the woodiness imparted by the Jack Daniels barrels, in some misguided effort to give it street cred?

No matter what my personal feelings about the Bajans (and my disappointing experience with the Doorly’s XO should have been a shot across the bows), I had really gone in prepared to like this one. Hell, I forked over sixty-plus bucks for the bottle, can you blame me for expecting more? Extra Old rum of any kind has this cachet of age and care and love about it – online reviews are almost uniformly positive and fawn over the rum as if it could hold them till the Rapture – and while I had wanted to stroke Mount Gay like a favourite cat, you’d think my prior encounters with other pretentiously named XOs would have educated me out of this delusion: as it turned out, I had forgotten my lesson, and simply got scratched for my trouble.

So it fails as a sipper for sure, in my opinion. It’s okay – nay, excellent – as a mixer and a cocktail base, but then, if I wanted okay and a mere ingredient for fancy-named drinks, I could have gone with the Coruba, and not blown my budget for the week with this thing.

I think one day I’ll fork out three figures for the 1703 Cask edition from Mount Gay, if some kind purchasing agent for a liquor shop ever gets around to bringing it over to this city of malts: by that time, I’m just hoping that I’ll have put this rather disappointing experience behind me, so I don’t treat the premium offering of a four hundred year old distillery with the same sort of indifference that this slightly less exalted bottle treated me.

(#096) / Unscored

Update February 2018

  • For years I felt Bajan rums lacked something and mostly stayed away…not difficult given the hundreds and thousands of rums available for me to try.  But in a 2017 revisit, with more experience (and perhaps more understanding), I called the Mount Gay XO one of the Key Rums of the World
  • In 2017 Mount Gay released a cask strength expression of the XO, which I felt was quite good when I tried it in 2018
  • By the same year, most of the Bajan rum bragging rights had been transferred to Foursquare and its amazing run of the Exceptional Series, as well as its Velier Collaborations. It remains to be seen what response will be mounted by Mount Gay.

Flor de Caña Grand Reserve 7 yr old rum – Review

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Jul 212010
 

 

Solid, even excellent, full-bodied, full-tasting mixing rum (some with stronger constitutions than mine may disagree).  I’d take it neat only with some caution, and would simply not advise it this way, though you are welcome to try.

When you’re going on a deliberate bender, or attending a bash where you know the drinking will be copious, there’s about zero point to being pretentious  about it.  You dress like a peon, you bring some cheap stuff with you (or supply it), and you don’t waste a whole lot of time snooting, tooting, gargling, tasting and spitting. You’re there to have a good time, and having a professional demeanour regarding your booze is about as useful as taking Granny’s silverware to a backyard barbie.

This was the frame of mind in which I decided to take something simple to a gathering of the Old Farts last Saturday.  Normally referring to ourselves as the Great Scholarly Gathering (a hyperbole if there ever was one) we meet after work about once a quarter at the Unicorn Pub in downtown Calgary on a wing night, and quaff beer (rum in my case), discuss work and cast deleterious aspersions on the escutcheons of our former employers, long may their management bowels fester. The Bear, being a founding member of the esteemed society, decided to have it at his place last week, given that he had space and time; and never being one to pass up wings and ribs and booze, I enthusiastically accepted. And brought along this low end Flor, to see how it ranked up against their very excellent 18 year old.

Flor de Cana is a Nicaraguan rum (points to Doug McG for recommending its older sibling), produced by Compañia Licorera de Nicaragua, which was established in 1937 to produce and market the Flor.  In 1996 they did a complete factory upgrade which allowed them to attain the coveted ISO 9002 certifiction, and nowadays they use a 3 column still to produce both the Flor variations, and the bulk rum sold to bottlers and blenders in Europe. It’s of interest to note that while the political unrest of the ’80s and ’90s was going on, the conmpany maintained production, and hedged their bets by storing their rum production in oak casks (I assume in some safe location) – and now they have one of the best stores of aged rums anywhere, so look out for great rums to come in the years ahead.

Flor 7 is darkish gold brown with red tints, and medium bodied. It is not on par with the dark density of, say, the Kraken Black, or the almost oily opaque caramel of the El Dorado 21 year old, but it’s not light, and had anorexic legs that disappeared down the sides of the glass fast. Having had the 18 yr old, I expected something less sweet than the norm, perhaps some fruitiness to it.

The nose did not disappoint, once you got past the alcohol sting: slightly fruity, hints of caramel and toffee…yummy. The more you smell the thing in warm weather, the more you may find…I swear I smelled a bit of leather and oak in there (maybe that was the saddle some fool left draped over the Jack Daniels barrels this was matured in, back in the old pais).

Neat, the taste in the mouth is like a lesser version of the older rum: not quite as smooth or dense, and a bit rough, but not enough so to disappoint. The caramel, toffee and vanilla tastes are balanced by the lack of sweetness in a manner that is surprising, because normally I expect a bitchslap of bitterness when the sugar is toned down – but not here. No medicinal taste at all, just some sting and burn.  There’s a mild kind of spiciness, perhaps nutmeg or cinnamon (pepper?…naaah), that I liked. On ice this almost disappeared, but came back like the cavalry over a cola (in this case a pepsi might be better if you like your sweets up front). And the finish is crisp and sharp and sudden, with the burn there for sure, but in a way that reminds you this is a younger product of a more distinguished line and so is allowed a little more freedom to be untamed.

Now you must not get the impression that I took a delicate sniff, a prissy little taste, swirled and swallowed and then came up with all of this at once. Truth to tell, I finished half the bottle over the course of many hours (Keenan had retrogressed to Heineken, polishing off maybe fifteen or sixteen in the same timeframe). The thing is, the rum kind of opened up as the evening wore on, and I tasted more in it as I drank it more of it and didn’t eat anything except my wife’s ferocious hot wings (aptly named “Satan’s Crotch” to warn the unwary and tender-tummied).  And since I was neither completely drunk nor completely sober – I passed my time in a sort of pleasant haze in between either of these precipitous extremes – I was able to remember most of what I detected in order to write this review.

Mind, I’m sure you can understand why I waited a few days to write the thing.  Any fool can drink for eight hours, but it takes some skill to write something coherent when in that condition. I’m not entirely ecstatic with this single digit rum, but I will concede that it put me into my haze without bang or burn or serious after-effects, tasted pleasant and was a good drink.  So my take is that for a low end mixer, this one isn’t half bad at all, and if I didn’t have several thousand rums to look at in the course of my life, this one would probably take up residence on my “bender shelf” quite often.

(#030)(Unscored)

Doorly’s XO Barbados Rum – Review

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Jun 302010
 

 

Publicity Photo

This rum is simply too weak and underpowered. It is the Prince Myshkyn of rums.

Bajans like to say they did everything first, annoy and harass no end of Guyanese travelling through Grantley Adams, and are a suitably soft-spoken, deprecating folk to boot (“You may enter the war; Barbados is on your side,” went that famously modest telegram to King George in 1939).   However, research shows their claim to produce the first commercial rums in the western hemisphere is likely to be true. Mount Gay is of course the most famous and widely exported, but for some reason they missed the boat on the emergence of premium sipping rums in the last few years, and so very few top-tier liquors emerge from Little England at this time from that house (they didn’t lay in enough stocks twenty years ago, or something). Other rums made on the island are less well known, though I’m sure most know of Cockspur and Malibu (a liqueur) and St. Nicholas Abbey, and maybe Mahiki. I’m still waiting for a good top-end Mount Gay to pass through Calgary, mind you.

Anyway, this XO is supposedly the best of the lot from this Barbados distiller R. L. Seale’s (of Foursquare Distillery) which blends and bottles it under the original marque of Martin Doorly, an old rum-making concern that was bought by Alleyne Arthur (yet another now-defunct merchant bottler from Barbados) in the 1970s and itself taken over by Foursquare in 1993. Doorly’s claim to fame was/is the double distilling and then ageing of the blend in used Spanish oloroso sherry casks, which impart a lighter, less dense and clearer aspect to this 40% rum (I’m not sure whether this is a practice has been discontinued).

I am in awe of people who can flex their probosces, sniff, gargle and spit, and come up with liquorice, aniseed, mint, grapes, treacle, walnut and raisins, plus ten other things including the breakfast cheese the blender had had on the morning of the bottling (plus, perhaps, the name of his favourite marmalade).  I am, alas, nowhere so practiced or adept. Once I broached the squat bottle – love that rare blue macaw on the label – a sniff and a swirl suggested a lighter than usual rum, of toffee-brown hue, and a nose hinting at toffee, fruit, caramel (very lightly so), and a dusting of nuts of some kind.  Sugar, and a sort of perfumed sweetness that goes well with the overall delicacy the rum seemed to embody.

Up front, I have to tell you – I wasn’t pleased. I didn’t pay an arm and a leg for the rum to be a delicate little wallflower, with lace curtains on chintzy wallpaper: I wanted the proverbial cutlass and yo-ho-hos, the dead man’s chest, a little pillage, rape and plunder, damn it.  Was this what almost four hundred years of distillation had taught them? To make rum for the wussies and tourists?

Sipping it neat, and then  on ice, confirmed some ideas, dispelled others: I tasted walnuts, cinnamon, sugar, and there were few hints of the usual burnt sugar which current tastings of other rums to this point had led me to expect. And yet there was that same delicacy again, that slight civilization of rum, which made itself evident in very light notes overall.  In other words, here was not a rum that took you by the johnson and gave a good hard tug: rather, it politely tapped you on the shoulder to get your attention.  Discreet, polite, effeminate. One could almost believe this was a stronger than usual but not-as-sweet port.  This lack of assertiveness carried over into the texture and feel on the tongue. Light, smooth, yes, but was this not defeating the purpose of a rum?

I must admit to being left a shade irritable, as if by a girl who smiled and promised and then bailed just as I was getting my hopes up: it was a rum, sure, but I’d never had one that held back so much, revealed itself so shyly. I was unused to the concentration I needed to bring to tease out the notes on Doorly’s, and even then, my overall lack of a decades-long well-trained snoot put me at a disadvantage.  I liked it – it was smooth on the palate and didn’t burn much on the moderately long finish, so on that level, not bad.  But this lightness and complexity doesn’t work for me – I’ve always preferred strong tastes that “tek front” and don’t dick around.

On the other hand, maybe the Bajans really did overwork Doorly’s, they really did make it for the wussies, my feelings weren’t lying and it really is nothing beyond the gentle delicacy of a tamed wild libation that should have more depth and character.  If that is the case – and I’ll go back to this one again to ensure I’m not marking it unfairly – then the rum remains a part of the starter line and should not be considered anything special.

(#029)(Unscored)

Rhum Clément X.O. Très Vieux- Review

 4 Responses »
Jun 302010
 
Photo copyright and cribbed from Rhum-Reiche.de

Photo copyright and cribbed from Rhum-Reich.de

First posted 30 June 2010 on Liquorature.

A superlative agricole with good body, marvellous complexity and a really strong, spicy fade; yet not as sweet as some rums drinkers might like.  As of this writing I’m not entirely won over by it (or agricoles as a whole), but concede the excellence of its make without hesitation.

Abandoned by all the ladies in my family for the afternoon, tasked with making sure my two boys didn’t get into a fight over the Wii, I whiled away the hours by taking an appreciative sniff, slurp and swallow of this expensive rhum agricole from Martinique. At ~$120 from Willow Park, I had to think a bit about it, but the truth was that the Barbancourt had piqued my curiosity about agricole rhums, which are made from cane juice rather than molasses, and seem to be a characteristic of French Caribbean islands. In competition for my dinero had been a rum from India, which I decided to decline, an English Harbour 10 yr old I really agonized over, and one from Barbados, the Doorly’s, which I bought, and which I’ll save for a bit.

This rum may actually be the very thing Keenan likes: cheap cardboard packaging and an intriguingly different bottle shape, a foil-lined cork, gold leaf lettering, and a light honey-bronze liquid swirling invitingly within: in other words, some style, but not so much as to suggests excessive add-on cost. It is the top of the line of the Clemente estate on Martinique, founded by Homere Clemente in 1887. It bears the appellation AOC – Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée – just as for fine wine, the AOC guarantees that rhum agricole will have all the characteristics associated with its particular terroir (area of make).

The original 1996 AOC stated that in order to use the designation rhum vieux, the liquor must spend a minimum of three years in oak casks and not much more than that.  However, by dint of common useage and various amendments, other age bands have become accepted:

  • Vieux – More than 36 months.
  • Très Vieux, Réserve Spéciale, Cuvée Spéciale, VSOP – More than four years.
  • Extra Vieux, XO or hors d’âge – More than six years.

Sometimes there’s also a vintage year. In this case, the blend is of three reputedly exceptional years’ production: 1952, 1970 and 1976. I may be getting better at this, or maybe I just had tasted enough rums by now to get a sense of what to look for. At 44% ABV, I certainly got that: a nose of some sharpness (the 47% spiced Kraken was the same), but care had been taken to tone down that spirity aroma for which I had so marked the Kraken down. Toffee.  A slight woodsy backdrop. Smokey, the slightest bit.  Honey, crackers, a soft peaches note. Some cane sap and vegetal backdrop. And oh, that burnt sugar taste that was so exactly like the aftersmell of burning canefields at harvest time in Guyana, that it was like I never left (canefields are usually burned before cutting: it removes the undergrowth, kills insects and concentrates the sucrose in the cane). The golden liquid has some density and oiliness — it clung top the sides of the glass like honey, only reluctantly sliding slowly back down on fat slow legs.

The taste enhances what the nose promised: a solid, complex feel on the tongue, but not syrupy sweet, a common characteristic of agricole rums. It’s like a good cognac, slightly dry, not marred by excessive sugar. It was a bit like a decent scotch (the Hippie will have to pronounce judgement here), and the flavours were pronounced and distinct:  tannins, smoke, light fruit surrounding a solid core of burnt sugar. A slight note of cinnamon. It’s warm on the palate as well, but the finish, if one can take it, is long and sensuous, and burns, but all the way down, leaving a taste of caramelized sugar lingering in the the throat.  There’s a clear kind of cleanliness to it, which perhaps won’t be for everyone.  For those who like their cheaper tipple to mix, I would not recommend this. Whisky drinkers should go ape for it.

Agricole – or agricultural (made from cane juice), to distinguish them from industrial (molasses-based) –  rums are made to exacting standards (they would not have the AOC rating otherwise), and here I’ll have to say that if the Barbancourt and this Clement are representative of the class, then, even with the quality I’ve described, I’m afraid thus far it’s not entirely my thing. The maturation in oak imparts some of that sharpness and tannins to the taste which I’ve never really gotten to enjoy with the passion others do. And that heat so reminiscent of whisky. But honesty forces me to concede the quality of other components of this rum: mouthfeel, nose, viscocity and density, and the complexity of the flavours just out of my capacity to separate, blending into a fascinating whole.

I don’t think the money was a waste, as nothing that adds to my knowledge and education can be: but I doubt I’ll buy another one of these premium agricole sippers, and after the taste and the thinking and the writing, what I’m really left with is the memories of being ten years old, and, fresh off the plane from Africa, watching the canefields burn, smoke rising from one horizon to the next, the dusk lit with the red glow of dying fires, and the smoke and sugar scent heavy and redolent on the tropical night air.

(#028)(Unscored)

Update – December 2014

Gimlet eyed readers will note that as the years progressed and my experience and palate grew, I did a one-eighty on agricoles, and these days I think they are a marvellous part of the greater rum world. I guess I had to grow up sooner or later. Based on a retaste in 2014, if I had to score it (at the time this review was written scoring wasn’t part of the review), I’d award 87 points easy, maybe even a shade more.

Sources:

 

Kraken Black Spiced Rum – Review

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Jun 272010
 

 

First posted 27 June 2010 on Liquorature.

(#027)(Unscored)

Overproofed, overpriced, overrated.

***

Kraken Black — the selection for the June 2010 Book Club session — is a victory of advertising over the reality of what it is, of style over substance for those who are ok with it, a low-to-middling value (~$28 Can) wrapped up in a presentation that would have you believe the price is an undiscovered steal.  A lot of people are going to drink this thing, wax loquacious at the spice, admire the darkness and say “wow!” I’m afraid, though, that’s just knee-jerk, because you take Kraken apart, and it just can’t live up to the hype.

Fair is fair: I liked the bottle, and the presentation was cool. I enjoyed seeing a rum with the stones to put a mythological creature that’s created to do a Godzilla on  ancient Greece right there front and center. The small handles I thought were affectations, but hearkened back to old seafaring days, so what the hell: points for that.  Points also for that inky black swirling rum which is by far the darkest I’ve ever seen, and therefore for sheer originality, this rum sitting on a shelf is sure to get your attention.

The rum sits in the glass and soaks up the light, letting just some dark brownish red glints through – decent middling legs, nothing special. It’s a blend, this one, a new addition to the market (Proximo Spirits from NY, which also markets Matusalem, distributes this), and bottled at 94 proof…47%  ABV. And it supposedly has something like eighteen different spices added to it.

The nose is problematic – caramel had to be added to get the colour this dark and that comes through, but so does, vanilla and toffee and chocolate…and a medicinal odour remniscent of cough medicine that is both jarring and unwelcome, and no, I do not attribute it to the 47%. Even a Glencairn glass the Hippie provided could not save the schnozz from being skewered by that hospital reek.

The taste is better. The caramel is not dominating, and lets other flavours like licorice, cinnamon and maybe nutmeg through, but for the most part all I got is a musky cloying taste of too much molasses left in (and that weird chocolate texture) that destroyed the fine balance a spiced rum needs. But I must make note of this: for a 47% rum, it’s damned smooth going down, and so I think a lot of people are going to love this rum in spite of the cough medicine taste that persists and just ruins the whole thing for me. The finish goes on for longer than expected (a definite plus) but what it does is permit the very things you don’t like to persist.

My suspicions are that with the recent resurgence of interest and popularity in quality rums, a lot of lesser wares are flooding the market in an effort to mine the vein. Nothing else explains why so many American and Canadian companies are buying all these Caribbean raw stocks and blending and distributing the results themselves (not always to the benefit of our palates, alas). When Bruichladdich, Cadenhead or A.D. Rattray put their resources and acknowledged street cred behind a rum, I’ll acknowledge the effort and result, but I can’t yet give the same cachet to the (supposedly Angostura-owned) Lawrenceburg distillery in Indiana, sorry.

So I’ve said it fails for me, but fails as what? As a sipper or a mixer? As a sipper, yes but not by as much as you’d think: it’s smooth enough and intriguing enough – cough syrup crap taste aside — for me to not to mark it below the Young’s Old Sam, or Bundie or the Coruba: though none of these has pretensions to grandeur the way the Kraken does, and if you doubt me, just compare the websites and the forum chatter among all these.  As a mixer I have to be more careful – remember, the purpose of the mix is to either fill the weaknesses of the rum, enhance the diluter, or create a synthesis of rum and additive(s) which is greater (and weaker) than the sum of its parts. Put like that, this rum shows its dichotomy and in trying to be both cocktail and sipper, pleases neither. It’s too spiced, too medicinal – too cloying –  to work well as a mixer, for coke, ginger ale or others.

And so my recommendation would simply echo old Zeus, call in Harryhausen, and issue the command to (what else?)  — release the Kraken.

Lamb’s Navy Rum – Review

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Jun 222010
 

First posted 22 June 2010 on Liquorature.

“The spice must flow,” said the Padishah Emperor in Dune. I agree, because I do love my cheap-ass spiced rums. My sweet tooth and plebian background make having a rum with no stratospheric price or ostentatious pedigree such a pleasant experience, truly.  And I could tell, that day when I trotted out the Renegade 1991 for my Newfie squaddie (who snatched it happily out of my hand with a speed his corpulent frame does not begin to hint at), that even if I was a snob with pretensions to the peasantry, he had more grandiose notions of what kind of rum he liked to drink (or deserved to be poured).

Which is not to say Lamb’s is a bad rum, or even particularly limited in quality. Alfred Lamb, who started making this dark rum from West Indian raw stock in 1849 in London — his factory was bombed out during the London Blitz and subsequently rebuilt — simply added spices, aged it in cellars below the Thames (hence the original title of London Dock Rum) and made pretensions to the Royal Navy cachet by stating his product was made with that recipe.  Pusser’s did the same, as readers of that review may recall. In the years since, Lamb’s has become more of a tipple than a refined drink, and not – to my knowledge anyway – any kind of top tier rum; though I know a few who swear by its 151 proof offering. One can find it pretty much anywhere in Calgary for under thirty bucks.

When I’m drinking with a good friend, I like a good grog, but the point is not the drink but the conversation that the drink enables.  Of course, if the conversation is about the drink, that’s another matter (for example, the higher priced stuff which I like company to taste with) – but for the most part, when I talk I just like a good little mixer on hand, and this is why SDRs (single digit rums) are always good…one never worries about how much money is being pissed away, only what a good time you’re having with it.

The rum is dark reddish in colour and has a very decent, almost heavy body. Lamb’s is a blend of rums from all over the Caribbean (up to 18, or so my research suggests), and has a virulent nose that I should warn you against taking a deep sniff of, if you don’t want to go crying to your mommy about how the bad rum bottle biffed you on the hooter.  The spirit burn on the nose fades fast and leaves the brave and persevering soul with an overwhelming sniff of caramel, with vanilla and cherry undertones.  The spices are harder to pick out – nutmeg and licorice come through at the tail end.  The taste is strong with the spice, and the spirit burn from those nose hasn’t gone anywhere, just grabs you by the throat and holds on – yet it can be tolerated and even adjusted to (as I did), at which point it transmutes into a sweet and caramelized almost-sipper that I quite enjoyed. The finish is hard to gauge because you’re being assaulted by the admittedly harsh spirit burn, which lasts long after the taste has vanished.  Lamb’s is about as subtle as a charging brontosaurus, really.

I’ll concede that the rum is better as a mixer, but I would caution against coke or (god forbid) pepsi.  Some kind of cola with a little less sugar would probably enhance it better, otherwise you get a syrupy mess that you either like or toss away.  For the record, I had only coke on hand so that was what I used, but as I got drunker that evening in Keenan’s house, I found that it got progressively better over ice.  Maybe that was my throat being sanded away, or something.

In summary, I liked its simplicity and taste, even as I acknowledge how devoid it is of real complexity – a connoisseur would probably never buy one of these except as a reference point. If I were to wax metaphorical, I’d say Lamb’s is the country sweetheart with a heart of gold, the one who can rope a steer or take apart a John Deere tractor, who’s on the square-dance floor at Ranchman’s giving you the eye, who you really can’t go wrong with if you don’t expect too much, treat her right and don’t tread on her toes.  Perhaps give her a kiss when the night is over.

That may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it sure as hell is mine.

(#026)(Unscored)

Rhum Barbancourt Reserve Speciale 8 Year Old Rum – Review

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Jun 192010
 

 

Photo (c) Whisky Antique

First posted 19 June 2010 on Liquorature.

Barbancourt.  Just roll that on your tongue and you can almost hear the whisper of words both foreign and exotic – Barbarossa the Ottoman privateer; the Barbary Coast; Hispaniola; bucaneer…the name reeks deliciously of of piracy.  And aside from peg legs, parrots, cutlasses, the Spanish Main and caravels of looted or buried treasure, is there any product more identified with the term than that of their most famous drink?

I have to admit that it was the romance of the name and origin – and some honest curiosity –  that made me pick this one.  Haitian rums are not made from molasses but rather directly from cane juice, and the sojourns of the Club have not made it to this island nation yet; nor have I seen that many examples of the brand here in Calgary. Like other French islands (Martinique for one), what we have here is a rhum agricole, and I was fascinated as to the difference in the end product. There are more expensive examples from Barbancourt out there (the 15-year estate offering for a start), but this seemed like a reasonable compromise.

Agricole rhums are lighter-coloured than the average, as a result of being made from cane juice as I noted above, and tend towards dark yellow. This Special Reserve originated from a double pot-still distillation, and was then aged for eight years in Limousin white-oak barrels imported from France (they once held cognac, I believe). Press releases and distributor’s notes suggest Barbancourt is among the most widely distributed and available rums from the Caribbean, but I chose to dispute that: the Law of Mediocrity (which is not what you think it means) suggests that if, in  the first store you enter in some average spot on the globe, they stock this stuff, then you’re likely to find it anywhere.  Since I’ve spotted this rum once in many years (last week)…well, you get the point. I’ll grant you however, that it’s probably one of the better known Haitian exports.

I liked the light colour (hidden from casual view by a darkened bottle of no distinguishing presentation) and a swirl in the glass revealed shy legs that took their own time draining back into the glass.  The nose surprised me because the spirit surged to the fore immediately: it was, quite honestly, a bit overwhelming, even medicinal.  But as that faded, I managed to pick out notes of butterscotch, toffee, brown sugar and…honey. Nice.

The taste was tricky because the more powerful components took charge so quickly.  You have no problems picking up vanilla, the toffee, caramel and burnt sugar, but subtler flavours hide behind the skirts of the more aggressive ones – a bit of nuttiness flirted around with a faint citrus I could not identify (I always have a problem figuring out whether it’s lime, lemon, orange, tangerine or some other Vitamin C bearer I’m tasting). The burn on the backstretch is not strong, but definitely present, a phenomenon I attribute to the prescence of oak in the maturation process. I wish there had been less spirit sting, to be honest, because it marred what to me had been a spiffing job up to that stage.  But really, it’s a minor point, because overall, I thought it was a decent sipper: not top of the line, but a very pleasant sundowner.

The body of the rhum is not as rich as I might like, and in taste it hints at the heritage of Dupre Barbancourt who hailed from the cognac producing region of France and formed the company in 1862.  So it’s perhaps a bit schizophrenic in that it’s a medium- to light-bodied paler rum, slightly dry, and not as sweet as might be expected – hardly the profile of a rum as I’ve been used to defining the term: more like a cognac, really. And here, my plebian instincts overwhelm my own snootiness, because with that kind of flavour and texture, the spaces of the drink are very nicely filled by a coke, and in doing that, a masterful little mixed drink is created which I have no hesitation whatsoever in recommending to any who ask.

(#025)(Unscored)

Other Notes

  • As a point of interest: Haiti is unique as a nation because it is where the only successful slave revolt in the West Indies took place, under Toussaint L’Ouverture, at the turn of the 18th century. Sadly, it is now the poorest nation in the western hemisphere: two centuries of western ostracism and successive dictatorships have left the place in shambles. High marks go to the businesses that manage to produce this excellent product…one can only speculate under what conditions they do so, or with what methods.
  • In January 2019 I revisited the Barbancourt 8 after having tried quite a few more from the company, and named it a Key Rum of the World.
  • Between 2010 and this update in 2021, the label design has changed once or twice, but so far as I am aware the blend has remained close to the same.

Havana Club 7 Year Old Cuban Rum – Review

 5 Responses »
Jun 192010
 

Havana 7

First posted 19 June 2010 on Liquorature.

So much of how I remember a drink and rate it, comes from the circumstances in which I sampled it. The woman I was with in that special restaurant when I feigned sophisticated insouciance over an unpronounceable rum.  The Irish pub in Berlin where my brother and I got a little sloshed on some cheap crap tipple at a Rugby World Cup match we watched years ago, the name of which I can never remember, but which tasted so great that I go all soft with the memory long after the laughter has gone. The colour of the sunset on a tropical night in Palm Court with the best friend of my younger years indelibly linked with XM Five year old rum. The way my Newfie squaddie’s kids played with me and discussed gory horror movies as I traded shots with their father and laughed in his kitchen while my son baited his cat. The discovery of the EH5 with the Book Club. And the mild nights on the Okanagen shore where I first tasted this young rum in the company of friends.

That’s how I often remember drinks.  Sure the taste and rating and all the technical details come in for discussion (it would hardly be a review without those things), but I like to take a more holistic approach to the essay, and this is why I spend as much time documenting my thinking as I do my actual tasting notes.

As I note on the Barrel Proof variant, Havana Club 7 is a true product of Cuba (made by Pernod-Ricard who own the marque), not the Bacardi family product out of Puerto Rico which is legal to have in the US.  The bottle  is smoky brown with a (to me) boring label, and a cheap metal screw cap (I hate cheap crap, honestly – surely a more secure plastic cap or even a cork could be added without too much additional expense?). The rum itself is lighter than the darker ones I had recently (this is an observation, not a criticism), and has an intriguing density to the liquid which causes it to adhere to the sides of my glass* and trail slowly down.

This being a seven year old rum, I have the effrontery to expect certain basic qualities from it: a medium body, mild oiliness, harsh bite and a medium quick finish (like a kiss from a girl who doesn’t mind snogging you, but doesn’t particularly like you that much either, one might say). Perhaps some casually tossed-in flavours that shyly edge around the bully of the playground, the caramel-toffee taste.  What I got was a pleasant surprise: the feel on the mouth had a mild spirit burn, not a punch in the face or scratch on my neck, but which to some extent underlined the medium body. The first taste is one of light caramel, and a surprisingly mellow sweetness, less than I anticipated: and this must be deliberate because after a few seconds a marvelous fruity flavour developed out of and around that sugar, which I really liked. I think I detected some citrus and raisins (perhaps currants), but they were assertive enough to not be elbowed out of the way by either the light smoke and tannins of the oak ageing, or by the subdued sweetness and caramel – in other words, three distinct flavour profiles come through here, each in excellent balance.

The finish falls somewhat short of the flavour and mouthfeel, which is unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected (even my SDR favourite the EH5 has this problem, so I can’t whinge too loudly) – but it’s not overly harsh and biting either. It’s a good rum, and an excellent mixer – if you can take the burn, then I’d suggest not mixing it at all, but that is just me. A diet or zero coke would probably enhance the body without adding to the sweetness appreciably and that may allow it to go down better, but I was drinking fast that evening, and didn’t bother. I had it mostly with ice.

So what did I think overall? Well, it has a distinctive flavour, and I like an SDR I can take neat (even if I chose later not to do so). The trifecta of light oak, medium sweet and bold fruitiness coming together really well is a good reason to try it out. But one of the reasons I’ll regard this rum with true affection is because in a beautiful house close to the beach on Lake Okanagen last week, lounging in an easy chair on the porch, with the breeze cool but the air still warm and the sky deepening orange, I recall thinking that there are worse things in life than relaxing with one’s wife and good friends, having a casual meandering conversation of no importance, and having a glass of this rum on hand to drink.

(#024)(Unscored)

Other Notes

  • I must make confession here: I’ve given The Last Hippie no end of a hard time about that tasting glass he scandalously pilfered from his daughter’s Barbie collection, but the house I was staying in had one as well…and so I used it, and was amazed at the difference it made to assessing the nose and body. I guess I’ll have to go see Toys R Us and see if they have a matching Ken glass. Score one for the Hippie 🙂
  • Update 2020: This elongated bottle was phased out in the 2010s and is now a stubbier version.  The exact year of the changeover is unknown
  • Abbreviations: “EH5” for English Harbour 5 YO and “SDR” stands for a “Single Digit Rum”, one aged less than 10 years.

Havana Club Cuban Barrel Proof Rum – Review

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Jun 092010
 

First posted 9th June 2010 on Liquorature.

Let’s be clear from the outset, that this is a true Cuban rum, not a product of the Bacardi line which produces a rum under the same name and which it is being litigated against.  The marque was first created in 1878 by Jose Arechabala in Santa Cruz del Norte, Cuba.  Some might argue that Fidel had no business nationalizing the company after he took over the country in 1959, but the current crop of rums, produced in a 50:50 partnership with Pernod-Ricard since 1994 suggests that quality has not suffered in the interim (although I so find it amusing to see bourgeois capitalism raising its head in the workers paradise). Unfortunately, the embargo by the US against Cuba has limited the rums’ importation into the States…but we, as Canadians, suffer no such problems or shortages.

As I taste rums from more and more countries – thus far I’ve sampled from the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Australia, Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados, Canada, Scotland, Venezuela, St. Croix, Antigua, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico and Anguilla – certain characteristics seem to be national in character: Antiguans make a lighter, smoother, sweeter rum, the Jamaicans favour some citrus and funkiness, the Venezuelans a drier, medium variety, and of course Guyanese make their famed Demerara rums with deep rich bodies.  So I was intrigued what I would find from the Cuban stocks…this was my first sample of one, and in a midlevel price range (~$45 Canadian).

The first thing that struck me was the colour.  One of the reasons I picked this picture to use on the post was because it almost perfectly shows  the gold-bronze colour of the rum when sunlight hits it.  Maybe that has something to do with how it’s made: distilled in used whiskey and bourbon barrels of white oak from the usual molasses, then blended together and aged some more in special casks (whatever that might mean) – this process is not the same as the solera method, since the blend is simply put into a second set of barrels in order to get an additional flavour profile.  The box notes this as the “double barrel” method of maturation.

The nose is more complex than I expected.  Hints of the usual suspects abound, but are well balanced with a certain fruitiness and woodsy flavour I could not precisely pinpoint.  On the tongue I really liked it – I made sniffy noises at the Kraken the other day, for which I’m sure The Last Hippie has not forgiven me, but it had that same smooth oily texture that makes it slide down the throat as smooth as a tomcat pissing on a sheet of velvet (well: that’s me being metaphorical, but you get the drift). Vanilla, cinnamon, toffee, caramel, brown Demerara sugar….I keep seeing cane fields on fire at harvest season when I taste this, so strongly does it evoke memories of my boyhood. And the woodsy taste I noted before fades gently into the background, lending an overall piquancy to the taste. Just sweet enough without being overwhelming – reminds me of those cigarillos I used to smoke, which were flavoured with port wine for additional taste; the rum was something like that.

In summary, I’d suggest this is a solid top-tier mid-price rum, perhaps even a bit better. It has real complexity and flavour, is sweet enough for me without annoying the peat-heads and can be had neat or over ice, as well as in a cocktail – a coke solidifies the flavour and texture on the palate markedly, and I highly recommend it this way. I’d say that it’s on a level with the Cruzan Single Barrel rum or above, which was a very good piece of work, and so I’ll simply close by noting that for my weekend libations on the deck in the summer, I would never say no to this excellent product of Cuba.

Viva la revolucion!

(#023)(Unscored)

Other Notes

  • This “Barrel Proof” rum was replaced around 2012 by the new “Seleccion de Maestros”, but it’s the same thing by another name.
  • The age has never been disclosed, nor the components of the blend. Ageing was done in white oak barrels and a finish in some other casks that were also never mentioned.

Newfoundland Screech Rum – Review

 1 Response »
May 312010
 

 

Picture courtesy of Chip Dykstra, TheRumHowlerBlog

First posted 31 May 2010 on Liquorature.

All humour and snide Newfie jokes aside, Screech is a thoroughly rock solid rum: not brilliant at any one thing, it is simply good at everything without shining anywhere.  Odd, but if you’re after something that just goes ahead and does what it does, here’s the one for you.

One has to smile when seeing a name as evocative as Screech. It has all these connotations of pain about it, mixed up with the Newfie seafaring heritage and their backwoods image so beloved of Canadian humourists: and so one’s imagination goes riot as the tipple of Newfoundland comes on the table for a taste.  Will it be a mess of agony as it sears one’s defenseless throat?  Will it be redolent of paint thinner, drano and various vile poisons meant to lure the unwary to their doom? One of those harsh hooches originally made on small wooden pot stills by somebody’s Uncle Seamus and not to be sampled by the unwise?

Screech has been so panned over the years, so made into an object of humour, that it’s quality (or lack thereof) have been made the butt of jokes, as opposed to being evaluated on its own merits.  Being a peasant myself and having grown up on low class paint remover and equally vile smokes made from kongapump leaves (don’t ask…but just whisper it to any Guyanese and he will nod wisely), I happily suffer from none of these hangups, and am perfectly prepared to sample this Single Digit Rum as one more interesting drink on my liquid road to nirvana. And I’d be lying if I wasn’t at least a little intrigued by something with so memorable a title.

Originally, Newfoundland hooch was not called that, or anything at all…it was just 18th and 19th century backwoods booze gleaned from the sticky leavings from the insides of molasses or rum barrels that had come through Newfie harbours from the West Indian trade.  It was melted out of the barrels with boiling water and then distilled in homemade stills to produce a hellishly strong rotgut akin the Brazilian alcool, or South African Cape Smoke, and as likely to make you go blind as anything else.  I worked in Labrador a few years ago, and the stories I heard suggested one can still buy its modern (and equally vile) descendants under the table in a few more rural areas.

The story goes that some poor sap from south of 49 took a hefty shot of the stuff while stationed on The Rock during the forties, and, seeing a Newfie toss it back (as any real man should), followed suit: apparently his howl of pain and misery (accompanied by a most interesting purplish colour change to the face) echoed for miles, brought his detachment in on the run, and they demanded to know what the hell that ungodly screech had been.  The Newfie (I like to think he bears a suspicious resemblance to the Bear) raised an eyebrow, blinked mild eyes, and said “The screech? That be the rum, boyo.”

Anyway, the stuff I was tasting is a more refined variant, based on blending of real rum stock imported to Newfoundland from Jamaica.  It’s a two year old distillate of molasses that gets aged in used whiskey or bourbon barrels, isn’t spiced or dandified like a tart’s handkerchief, and doesn’t pretend to be anything but what it is: a young rum, happy to be brazen, rough and a bit uncouth, showing off its spankin’ new sailor’s wellies.

Okay, so enough anecdotal nonsense.  Is it any good?

I thought it was. Oh, it kicks like a St. John’s fishwife on a bad hair day, no doubt; it’s not subtle, but bold and assertive and sports a hefty pair of biceps, together with a deep spirit-y nose redolent of molasses and caramel and not much else. It might make the eyes of the unwary water, the way any young brew does (the Coruba is another good example of a rum that does this). It has medium legs and a darkish copper-red, medium-dark colour and body…and it is just on the right side of enough sweet for me: not as spicy or caramelized as the Captain Morgan Private Stock, and not as whiskey-like as the Renegades. Quite a decent flavour profile, with some hints of fruit I couldn’t quite pick out…and maple, I think. A short and searing finish alleviated by…what else?  Another shot.

It’s at this point I should make remarks on what I smell and taste and what have you, but that’s just a waste of time with something so elemental. And being that way, I won’t make any more comments about nose and palate and finish (all are a bit raw, though by no means as harsh as some others I’ve tried) since my experience suggests the terms are overused in a product that is made to be drunk by people with no time to waste on frippery. My more dramatic side suggests that the dour nature of The Rock carried over into the character of its rum, and I liked that just fine.  I took it neat but preferred it with ice, and with cola it goes down very nicely indeed.

In summary then.  Screech is a decent mixer and can be had with colas or other mixin’s with nae problems (make a Scrape for yersel’ if ye want).  But the truth is that only wussies mix it up: real Newfies (or their wannabes) put hair on their chests and weight between their legs by drinking it the way it was meant to be had, which is to say, neat.

And if you be screamin’ yer lungs out after imbibin’, well, me son, it just be the Screech.

(Oh, and forget the cod: that be for tourists only.)

(#022)(Unscored)

 

Captain Morgan Private Stock – Review

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May 252010
 

First posted May 25th, 2010 on Liquorature.

Surprisingly mellow sipper from a purveyor not noted for such drinks; not overly complex, but warm, buxom, heavy and with a rich nose and body. This is the Mother Hubbard of rums, to keep in the cupboard.

Right from the get go I must mention that I’ve given Captain Morgan a wide berth thus far, simply because it always had a reputation as a low- to mid-level mixer.  The fact that it was a spiced rum – whether or not it says it is – also added somewhat to its plebian cachet.  Not that I have a real issue with that, but there’s so much other good stuff out there that I don’t need to go to Puerto Rico for my rums. Without trying to be insulting, the fact is that Puerto Rico, which enjoys a favourable import tax regime with the US, makes the Budweiser and Coors of rums, with all the negative connotations this implies.  In making common hooch to appeal to the widest possible audience and lowest common denominator (the US consumer), some of the quality is lost in the quest for sales.

The Captain Morgan brand actually originated in Jamaica, where Seagrams bought the Long Pond distillery in the 1944. Tax incentives favouring Puerto Rico caused them to transfer manufacturing to a factory outside San Juan (close to where the Bacardi family was setting up a factory at the same time); in 2001 they sold the rights and brand to Diageo, a British concern which by 2010 was the largest spirits company in the world.  Diageo noted that they will transfer the production facilities from Puerto Rico to St Croix in 2011 or thereabouts.

Having bored you to tears with all of this tedious history and trivia, the question remains, is it any good?

Going in, I wasn’t sure: my experience with Puerto Rico was previously with Bacardi – the bestselling rum in the world and the choice of expatriates in far flung and remote corners of the world such as where I used to be – and Bacardi is a well-meaning, reasonably tasty but generally boring mixer — I tarred Captain Morgan with the same broad brush. Surprisingly enough, however, it really is quite a decent rum.  In fact, it’s a really nice sipper for the newbie who wants to get away from mixers without losing the body and taste. But I should add this was largely because of the inclusions and additions (primarily sugar and vanillas), not because of brilliant ageing and blending skills.

The nose is candied and overwhelms right out of the gate with vanilla and caramel. The dark undertones of molasses are clearly in evidence. The dark body has some strong legs, yet they don’t kick you in face with harsh spirit notes either.  This is why as an intro to a sipper, Captain Morgan is a pretty good way to start. The sweetness usually imparted by coke or other mixers that cut the spirit burn is essentially taken over by the spices added to the rum itself. And clearly effort has been taken to mute and smoothen out the palate.  The downside of this is that beyond the candy of these spices, it takes a real expert to taste anything else: try as I might, I could not discern more than butterscotch, vanilla and caramel and some very faint traces of what may have been orange.

The finish is also surprisingly smooth and even, and lasts quite a bit.  This may be attributable to the spices, but even so, for a three-year-old rum, I’m quite impressed. It ranks right up there, though its lack of complexity and deeper rum notes render it unsuitable for more discerning (and choosier) palates.

Speaking for myself, I’d buy this again, sure.  It may not be top tier (I paid just under $30 for it), but I have a sweet tooth and enjoy a decently crafted rum that is at home either by itself or in company with a cola. As a man who has spent triple digits searching for the best of the best (and been disappointed more than once with expensive losers that fail on the finish), I cannot fault the Captain Morgan for not aspiring to great pretentiousness.

So, unlike a Coruba, which I’d feed to favoured enemies in quantity, this one I’d gladly share on a warm sunset or cold winter night with my friends – for a low end rum, from me, that’s high praise indeed.

(#021)(Unscored)

Other Notes

  • In the mid-2010s the bottle label was changed to replace the Captain Morgan portrait  (head only) with the full picture of “The Captain” standing with one leg resting a barrel.  Bottle shape and contents remain the same, though.
  • 2021 Update: The rum has now been reclassified (by me) as a spiced rum due to the overwhelming vanilla profile…and the fact that it’s now acknowledged as being added-to. It’s therefore unsurprising that I don’t much care for it these days.

El Dorado Single Barrel ICBU Demerara Rum – Review

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May 242010
 

 

First posted 24 May 2010 on Liquorature.

I always admire some level of originality, whether it is in food, drink, a book, movies or simply the way something looks. In an era of mass production and conformity, too much of what we buy or see is an exact copy of the same thing we bought or saw somewhere else. On that basis, I was quite happy to see Demerara Distillers’ square, tall bottle of the El Dorado Single Barrel ICBU when it was presented at the April 2010 session of the club, and since it was not only a rum,  but from Guyana, I knew I was in for something interesting.  Maybe the review would not be positive, but at least I would not have been bored during the sampling.

The El Dorado rum is made with the French Savalle Heritage Still from Plantation Uitvlugt (hence the ICBU marque), where a sugar factory has been functioning since 1753. It appears to be a blend as opposed to something specific and aged on its own, which is why once again there is no official age on the bottle – regular readers of my rum commentary will know this to be a personal bugbear of mine, though admittedly DDL is better than most in identifying senior blends with the age of the youngest component. Still, as it is somewhat lighter than the Special Reserve 15 year old – this may come from the fact that it does originate from a single barrel –  I venture a guess that the main component of the blend is a ten or twelve year old (see other notes below this review). It is a curious matter that the DDL site makes no mention of this rum at all, at this time (2010).

The rum is a deep bronze redolent of burnt Demerara sugar, with nice legs hinting at a full, dark body. A certain woodiness attends the nose along with the faint toffee and sugar…it’s like a faint smell of new rain on sun-warmed wood chips, and nicely enhanced by the attendant caramel. In a way it reminded me of the aftersmell of burning cane fields at harvest time on the East Bank of the Demerara, where I once lived.

Neat it was a pleasant sipper; to my mind the smoothness of the taste was defeated by the somewhat harsher tannins and woodsy tastes the nose had hinted at. In recent years, the only DDL offering I have had was the stellar 21 year old (also reviewed on this site), and there the sharp tang of wood (I’m not yet so refined as to tell you what kind) was quite muted and blended well into the overall flavour profile.  Here, less effort had been put in and the taste was therefore more pronounced.  Not really in a bad way, but it did put off the sweetness of the rum quite a bit, and made it somewhat drier. Nutmeg and cinnamon came through clearly on the palate, along with coconut and vanilla, all somewhat overwhelmed by the pungency of the wood bite.  I liked it better on ice, all things considered, and yes, as a mixer it’s excellent.  The finish is long, and the burn lingers and that is not necessarily pleasant for all: it was not for me.

I hesitate to pronounce any kind of definitive judgement on this rum. As a reviewer who looks for certain things to describe, I must concede its taste and body. It’s intriguing, flavourful and while not as unique as the Bundy, quite forceful in its own way: and as I said at the beginning of this rum review, I am always appreciative of efforts at originality – it hints at a blender who is willing to go outside the box. As a man who has friends over, it would not be the first thing I trot out for my guests, however, since it goes a bit over the trench and off the plantation, so to speak.  Oh, it’s a rum all right, and quite a good one: just a shade different…enough so that most people might take a glass or two out of curiosity, but then shrug and move on to more convivial and comfortingly familiar fare.

(#020)(Unscored)

Other Notes

  • The rum is a blend of French Savalle still barrels aged between 12-13 years, according to a clarification on El Dorado’s FB page.  Cark Kanto, who worked with DDL as a Production Manager, told me that it was a blend of rums around 13-16 years old.
  • The rum was released in 2007 to commemorate the cricket World Cup, some matches of which were held in Guyana – the shape of the bottle to resemble a cricket bat is therefore not an accident.
  • In tandem with this Uitvlugt ICBU, two other rums from the wooden heritage stills were released: a Port Mourant PM, and an Enmore EHP.  I wrote about the trio together in a single post in 2015.

Appleton Estate 30 Year Old Rum – Review

 2 Responses »
May 172010
 

Publicity Photo (c) Appleton Estate

First posted May 17, 2010 on Liquorature.

A smooth, complex, warm, rich and all-round-awesome creation which fails ever so slightly on the back stretch because of excessive oakiness, just enough to defer sainthood for Joy Spence.  Should be drunk in miniscule sips, with hat off, and head bowed reverentially down.

I’ve remarked before that there are only three ways of deciding whether to buy a rum you know nothing about and which you cannot taste to test in the shop: one, by price; two by information filtering through from others (i.e., word of mouth or one’s own research) and three, by age. One might also and reasonably concern oneself with the way it looks – both bottle and liquid – or whether the rum is old enough to have sex with itself or not, but since so many are blends, it’s not always easy to tell (and Rums have this irritating tendency not to be bound by whiskey’s strictures of stating the age of any blend as the youngest part of the blend).

Based on these admittedly half-assed standards, the best rum in the world right now might actually be the 40% English Harbour 1981, because it comes in a sturdy red-maroon cardboard box, the bottle cork is a real one, not the pissy little plastic nonsense, and is sealed with old-fashioned red sealing wax (gotta love those touches, man); and it has received rave reviews from all over, as well as having a dark look and strong legs of a rum that really means business.  My imaginary friend Keenan has more than once observed (rather sourly) that he absolutely hates being dinged an extra ten bucks or more for a decidedly mediocre offering, simply because ten cents’ worth of extra whistles and bells was put on the bottle in an effort to “tart ‘er up”, as he so colourfully puts it.

So what can I say in a rum review of (hats off, and bow heads respectfully here) the Appleton Estate 30 year old?  This is a rum which is arguably at the peak of the distillers art in Jamaica. It is the most expensive rum I have ever seen. It has a bottle shape different from all the other Appleton offerings, up to and including the decent 21-year old which – horrors! – still comes in the cheapskate cylindrical tin, still has that fat-ass bottle shape of the entry level V/X and still retains the ridiculous cheap metal cap (what are these people thinking?). Now the 30-year-old has a fat cork shaped like a grizzly’s d**k. The rum is burnished copper and within the bottle dance hams two dance-hall girls past their prime would weep with envy over.  And yet, as if they heard Keenan’s grumbles, the makers put this pristine lass in the same piece-of-crap tin cylinder that embraces bottles a quarter of the price.  I don’t know who does the marketing for these boys, truly.

If you see one of these, or hear of one for sale, then your whole drinking life to this moment comes into perfect perspective.  To buy or not to buy, that is the question. In my youth, I would have said screw it and walked away, reasoning that my hard earned dollars were better off – and would go further, afford more enjoyment – in purchasing the equivalent fifteen bottles or so if SDR tipple.  But in my dyspeptic old age, quality is so rarely seen that it almost seems a crime to let something at the top of the heap – pricewise and appearance-wise – get away just because one was being a cheapo.  This line of reasoning is a little flawed, I’ll grant you, but it got me past last Friday with no problems.

Only 1,440 bottles of the ultra-exclusive 30 year old 90-proof rum were produced from six casks. Of those, 744 went to the USA and 30 to New Zealand in 2009 (the year of issue), and the rest got scattered around the world. The resident rum guy at Willow Park, a gent by the name of Michael, noted that they had six in the cellar, and I saw another four at Co-op the other day, I read a post on the Ministry of Rum that 156 went to Ontario in May 2010… all of which makes one wonder where the other 500 in the world are being held. I shut my eyes tight, forked over my credit card, and one of the pricier rums ever seen by me to this point became mine.

The individual marques that make up the 30-year-old originate from small-batch copper pots and columnar stills, and were all aged a minimum of eight years, blended, and then aged for a further twenty-two years in oak barrels from Tennessee which once held Jack Daniels.  After that length of time, the great fear of the drinker and the great challenge of the blender, is how to make the resultant not become so infused with the oak that you end up with something that is no longer a rum (but not quite a whiskey).

The Bear being unavailable (or my imagination not bringing him to life, depending on whether or not you believe the man exists), and I being unable to contain my desire to crack the bottle, I hustled over to the Last Hippie’s place, knowing he was out drowning his sorrows in cheap Scotch on his backyard deck in his daughter’s pilfered Barbie cup. Just as Dumbledore had to give blood to pass into Voldemort’s hiding place, I had to endure a dram of excellent whiskey which I had no appreciation for (sorry Curt, couldn’t resist).  Then we reverently opened the 30-year-old, swirled, took a deep sniff and a sip so dainty the Queen of England would have been proud.

Wow.

The rum had real body. The colour was a burnished copper-bronze, and it had the fat, slow legs of an over-the-hill stripper. The nose was an exhilerating and subtly complex combination of orange peel (the Appleton signature), caramel, maple sugar (yes, maple), vanilla and baked pears.  On the palate the smoothness of this baby was unbelievable.  I was waiting with trepidation for the oak peg-leg to the face and a deep burn on the way down, but somehow Appleton have managed to take 30 years’ maturation in oak and de-fang the taste many might expect, to create a smooth, mellow sipper which is redolent of vanilla, caramel, burnt sugar and spices, but which lacks the sweetness some might want in their rums.  Like Renegade’s offerings, there’s no getting around an oaken component some mislike for being too in-your-face (I said it was muted, not absent) but the smoothness of the overall blend made it a phenomenal drink.  The finish is excellent, lingering in the throat, not overpowering you, just staying there and gradually dissipating with the hints of molasses and spices remaining, and a suggestion of tannins and oaken flavours that many may find excessive.  But really, a masterful piece of work. For the record, I believe Curt thought so too –  though rum isn’t really his thing, he’s generous enough to lend grudging appreciation to his friend’s madnesses when they deserve it (even if the reverse is not true).

With a rum costing this much (it is $500+ in Ontario, last time I checked), one has, after the fact, to be a little dispassionate – even cold – about one’s review. One cannot simply let one’s expenditure dictate a positive opinion.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to: that it was a rum on par with the other elephant in the room is not under dispute.  The questions is, would one buy it again – or recommend it to someone else who had the money but wasn’t sure. For example, with the $200 EH25, I would unhesitatingly say yes (and have). Was the smoothness, the subtlety of the taste, the exclusiveness of the issue, worth it? After all, if the EH25 was like having a slow love-in with your mistress, then the Appleton 30 should have been like a surprising mad romp in the sheets with a wife you’re crazy in love with.  Was it?

The bottom line is both yes and no, and one of the reasons this review is so long is because in my own meandering way, I want to be honest about my feelings regarding it. It is a lovely rum. A lovely sipper.  It’ll come out to be sampled rarely.  It is one of the smoothest rums I’ve ever had, and one of the most complex.  But in a way I can’t quite put my finger on, it falls short of true greatness.  This could be because of the crap packaging; and the slight lack of sweetness, that final nip of bitterness, which, as I have said before, is what I want in a rum, and why I don’t care for whiskey.  It has a lovely hue and colour and legs, and the body is excellent.  But perhaps in ageing it that long too much oak ended up in the taste, subtle as it was, and too much effort placed into muting that, not entirely to the advantage of the finished product. (“Too smooth!” thundered Keenan, and quickly poured himself another shot to make sure he was right). Having said all of the above, let me say that I unhesitatingly and unreservedly recommend it above any of the other Appleton offerings, and I am really in awe of what Appleton have done, as I was with the English Harbour.

I just think for that price point, it should have bowled the EH-25 for duck, and instead, got nailed for two byes. I’m paying for a limited edition, not for the ultimate quality of the rum. The Jamaicans came in with a powerhouse cricket team and the Antiguans pipped the innings.

For a rum this exclusive, this hyped and this expensive, I cannot help but call that a defeat.

(#019)(88.5/100) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Other notes

Santa Teresa Antiguo de Solera 1796 – Review

 6 Responses »
May 102010
 

 

First posted 10th May 2010 on Liquorature.

I remember being somewhat unenthused with this rum from Venezuela when Scott trotted it out last year.  Venezuelan rums seem to be a bit drier, with less body and not quite as sweet as those made in the Caribbean proper (I note that several online reviews have precisely the opposite opinion), and to my mind, that makes them best for mixers, not sippers.  Still, I had never made good notes on this baby since I tried it for the first time, so, when both Keenan and Scott coincidentally came up with the same bottle two weeks in a row, I had the opportunity to dip my schnozz and see if my deteriorating memories of the first sip were on target.

Some history first: the Santa Teresa distillery is located in Venezuela (north part of South America for the geographically challenged) about an hour east of the capital, Caracas, on land given by the King of Spain to a favoured count in – you guessed it – 1796. Political vagaries being the way they are in South American banana republics, the estate ended up in the hands of a Gustavo Vollmer Rivas, who began making rum from sugar produced on nearby estates – owned by other Vollmerses –  in the late 1800s.  The Santa Teresa 1796 was produced in 1996 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the estate land grant, and, like the Ron Matusalem reviewed elsewhere on this site, is produced by the solera method.

In the solera process, a succession of barrels is filled with rum over a series of equal aging intervals (usually a year). One container is filled for each interval. At the end of the interval after the last container is filled, the oldest container in the solera is tapped for part of its content (say, half), which is bottled. Then that container is refilled from the next oldest container, and that one in succession from the second-oldest, down to the youngest container, which is refilled with new product. This procedure is repeated at the end of each aging interval. The transferred product mixes with the older product in the next barrel.

No container is ever drained, so some of the earlier product always remains in each container. This remnant diminishes to a tiny level, but there can be significant traces of product much older than the average, depending on the transfer fraction. In theory traces of the very first product placed in the solera may be present even after 50 or 100 cycles. In the Santa Teresa, there are four levels of ageing. And the final solera is topped up with “Madre” spirit, which is a young blend deriving from both columnar and pot stills.  Seems a bit complicated to me, but sherry makers have been doing it for centuries in Spain, so why not for rum? The downside is, of course, that there’s no way of saying how old it is since it is such a blend of older and younger rums (Appleton does this as well with some of their stock, and I can’t say I was impressed with their offering).

The resultant is a dark brown, medium-bodied honey-gold rum with a backbone of an older, dry blend.  It’s difficult to describe the exact feeling I had when I tasted it, but it’s like a very pure, medium strong unsweetened hot tea carving its way down your throat. Assertive, yet not unpleasant. And not very sweet, as I’ve said – it’s almost like a good sherry.  The nose is lovely: honey, vanilla, some faint hints of fruit (banana and cherries?), caramel and toffee. The taste and texture on the palate is not as smooth as I would like, and the finish is medium long, redolent of light oak and caramel. A pleasant nose, a good sip, a nice finish, a decent taste. A solid rum, medium tier.

I didn’t care for it neat, but on ice it’s a very competent sipper – without going so far as to make me really want to go nuts over it. In other words, not an English Harbour by any stretch of the imagination.  I would use it as a mixer without hesitation, but I’m not sure if that isn’t just a bit of sacrilege there: after all, the whole point of making something this special is to savour the richness, isn’t it? I guess it flew over my head.

It may be too early to say, but thus far, based on this and the Ron Matusalem, I have to say I’m less than impressed with the solera method of blending. I’m perfectly willing to accept that there must be superior examples of the solera blender’s art out there, and will search the remaining 1450+ varieties of rum until I find one, but I fear that either such and example will be found after I curl up my toes, or be out of the range of my rather slender purse.

(#018)(Unscored)

Update

Cruzan Single Barrel Dark Rum – Review

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Apr 132010
 

 

Publicity Photo (c) Cruzan

First posted 13 April 2010 on Liquorature.

Completely solid rum, that succeeds on many levels.  Strong taste, well defined flavour profile, just enough sweet and a lovely dark body that doesn’t quit. Wow. A worthy addition to the shelf, to be doled out to real friends. 

Against the constant whine I make about rums not stating their proper age on the bottle (like some sly strumpet misrepresenting her quality), I have to concede that having a friend to not only help drink it but who’ll trot out his own cherished stocks to stretch out the binge is some small way a decent compensation.

The not-so-mythical Bear, who very thoughtfully helped me change my winter tyres, suggested one or two vintages from his pantry (a Santa Teresa 1796 for one), but I had bought this intriguing new as-yet-unsampled dark rum hailing from St Croix for ~$35 from the much lauded Western Cellars store in Midnapore (I was disappointed yet again with the paucity of the rums which contrasted badly against the groaning and crowded shelves filled with expensive twelve year old or greater scotches), and since this is a tad more expensive than the normal hooch that goes for $25, I thought it was time to try it.

Keenan’s hurt look of reproach (he has spaniel eyes that really work well for this), that I could find the contents of his private cellar somehow less than adequate, mellowed quite markedly as soon as he saw the bottle. For all his talk about not wanting his bottlers to waste time dandifying their wares and thereby jacking up the price for nothing but cosmetic upgrades unrelated to true quality, Keenan is a bit of a sucker for a real cork. St Croix had a suitably exotic ring to it.  And the little label at the top, where real ink noted this was bottle X from barrel Y, impressed us both even as we snorted our skepticism.

Still, Cruzan’s single barrel rum is not bad at all, for a rum that is blended from a series of 5 year to 12 year old rums. It has a pungently sweet nose that states its origin in molasses quite clearly.  The original rums that create the blend are aged in white oak whiskey and bourbon barrels, but the resultant is then itself aged in yet another charred barrel for a further period about a year, and I’ll tell you, that thing creates a deep amber colour and a striking nose that a single ageing would not produce.  You can taste hints of  caramel, vanilla, butterscotch, dark fruit and faint nuttiness, and the finish, while not quite as smooth as I would like, is not unpleasant at all, and lasts for a good bit.  It’s reminiscent of a good cognac. It’s dry and clean and the burn is quite mellow, really.  And I have to say it: it pleased my sweet tooth, and the body is decent, so while I might not drink it neat, over ice it’s perfectly drinkable, and with a coke I’d say it’s just veddy veddy good.

Honesty compels me to admit that I had to do a second taste at home, after departing Keenan’s porch somewhat worse for wear.  Sampling the Santa Teresa (it’s quite good, but I have to write the review) and then the re-tasting the Appleton Master Blender’s Legacy (which is about as poor on the finish line as I recall), then following that up with 3/4 of the bottle of this exemplary Cruzan had me seeing three Keenans as I departed.  My mother raising me as she did, I said goodbye three times, and assured each one of the three that when it comes to a good mixing rum, or just a damned decent drink for a reasonable price, this Cruzan is definitely a good buy.

Hopefully the Bear was in better shape than I and can remember what a good drink it was:  I guess I’ll see the next time I raid his stocks or he comes over to pilfer mine.

(#016)(Unscored)

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