Bacardi 151 Overproof Rum – Review

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Oct 012010
 

First published 01 October 2010 on Liquorature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(#037. Unscored)

Other Notes

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

Opinion

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

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

 

Bacardi 8 Year Old Rum – Review

 6 Responses »
Sep 172010
 

 

Picture (c) RumCorner.dk

First posted 17 September 2010 on Liquorature

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

(#0053)(Unscored)

Other Notes

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.
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