Costa y Montserrat Ron Marina Blanco (Spain)(1960s)

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Oct 292023
 

Rumaniacs Review R-159 | #1036

Few references exist to track down this aged bottle with stained yellow label and a description remarkably thin even for the Days of Ago when nobody cared.  There is no distillery of make, no strength, no country of origin we can evaluate, nothing.  It is a white rum, has pictures of several medals on it (or maybe those are those coins, like pieces of eight?) and the implication of the words “The Spanish Town – Jamaica” is that it hails from there. One does not even get the strength, though my hydrometer tested it out at 37.8%, so either it is 40% standard and then dosed down, or it’s clean and maybe 37%-38%. 

As for the dating, the best source is a May 2019 auction listing on Whisky Auctioneer which suggests it’s from the 1960s, and which I have no grounds to seriously dispute – the label fonts and design and lack of provenance tend to support it, however thin that is. However, the auction site’s notation that it was produced in Spanish Town itself is not, I think, credible.

This leaves us with just the company, Costa Y Montserrat, SL from Barcelona in Spain. That most invaluable of resources, Pete’s Rum Labels, doesn’t provide any true data, but it does have another label, which suggests they were into the retailing of Jamaican-style rums which makes them an importer and blender, and the whole Spanish Town thing is just atmosphere and a cool label design but held no real truth (which is a shame, but okay…)

The company hails from the Catalan town of San Fructuosa de Bages (officially named Sant Fruitós de Bages), just to the north of Barcelona and the industrial estate of Manresa immediately to its west; wine has been made there for centuries. The Costa & Montserrat company refers to a famous Benedictine monastery of that name, built on a mountain nearby 1 However, that aside, what we have is the founding of the company in 1840, which made brandy in the early 20th century, and also fruit liqueurs in the late 1970s. I think it still exists, but under some other name I was unable to trace, and if it does, it’s not making rums any longer.

Colour – white

Strength – Tested at 37.8%

Nose – Astringent and sharp. It smells alcoholic (no pun intended), speaking more of raw ethanol than the easy lightness of a finely blended white cocktail rum. The puling strength is partly responsible for that of course.  Also some rubber, minerally notes, green peas from a can, watermelon and a touch of sugar water. 

Palate – Surprisingly there’s some brine here, again those canned peas (or, to be more precise, the water from that can), vague light sweet fruits such as papaya, watermelon and pears, but all very lacklustre, very much in the background.  It’s like a dumbed down, weakly flavoured, underproofed vodka.

Finish – Almost nonexistent, really. Light sugar water, no burn, no tickle, no real taste.

Thoughts – If the intention of the label is to point towards Jamaica, I assure you that sampling it dispels any romantic notions that somehow I had picked up an undreamed-of pot-still Rum from the Cocktail Age. No such luck.  It lacks strength, it lacks taste, it lacks any identifying characteristics of country or terroire, and is best seen as a pre-21st-century-Renaissance historical artefact that sheds light on rum’s development over the decades, rather than some kind of distant classic from a long vanished era. There’s a reason why it only fetched £31 on that auction. It’s a historian’s rum, not one for the bar crowd or connoisseurs of unappreciated rum, or even speculators.

(65/100) ⭐½

Key Rums of the World – Old Monk Vatted 7 YO Blended Rum (India)

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Oct 232023
 

 

Originally published as a standalone review in October 2023; revised and extended to Key Rums series in January 2024

Few rums from India make a splash in the western world, and that’s a peculiar thing since it’s entirely possible they were among the first people to actually make any kind of spirit from sugar cane (although it’s likely the crown goes to the Iranians whose “good wine of sugar” Marco Polo supposedly enjoyed on his travels) and for sure have some of the best selling rum brands on the planet. We may not hear of them very often but McDowell’s No. 1. Contessa, Old Port, Hercules, Two Indies and a few others, have a huge market footprint out east.

Historically, rum in India has always been a down-market tipple for the masses, largely because it lacked the snooty pretensions of whiskies (though they, for decades, laboured under similar perceptions until they changed their game), and was made in large quantities using relatively easily available molasses, panela or cane juice. On a larger scale, rum was popular when made by distilling companies because its method of production was essentially column still near-neutral alcohol plus additives for taste: cheap and easy to make at scale, priced to sell. This made rum do well at the rural level — where the majority of Indians still live — but cut no ice at all in the rest of the world.

Among the first to break this mould was the company of Mohan Meakin (previously Dyer Meakin), which was established in the mid-1800s. They made at least some kind of rum all along, but it was the 1950s that were key: in December 1954 they released the first Old Monk rum to the armed forces in its signature Old Parr-style bottle, aged around seven years. It shattered class barriers by being marketed not just the rank and file jawans but to the officer class, and gave rum as a whole a boost by making it more socially acceptable, even respectable, up the social scale.

From that humble beginning sprang a brand of uncommon durability and popularity. For the next fifty years, anchored by huge sales to the military and canny placement in five-star hotels, Old Monk rum was the most popular brand of rum in India, with increasing sales abroad. It became the spirit of choice among university students for decades, and as these educated young people fanned out and emigrated across the world they brought their nostalgic love for the rum with them, establishing the brand in new countries where the company set up distribution arrangements in many countries to satisfy this demand. For a while, so strong was cultural attachment to Old Monk that the global diaspora regularly requested relatives bring some with them when they came visiting, or brought it back themselves when they did. 

Yet even if its sales were gargantuan (for decades, it was one of the five top selling rums in the world), outside a few major regional, internal and historical markets, it was never a truly global widespread seller; one rarely if ever saw the squat and tubby bottles at international spirits or bar expos, and though I’ve passed the vatted 7YO several times on local shelves in several countries, I’ve never seen it at a single festival. And the general opinion of those modern reviewers who have tried it is somewhat dismissive: adjectives like “crude”, “oversweet”, “rough” and “spiced” are common in most write ups I’ve seen, and it’s often relegated it to mixer status, with grudging compliments occasionally thrown in. The Old Monk series of rums, then – and there are quite a few – attract a curious mix of indifference, scorn and loving nostalgia from rum drinkers, some of which is understandable, some less so.  

It continues to be made, however, and continues to sell and for all intents and purposes remains almost a cultural institution in India, so its importance to understanding rum around the world must be accepted. Unlike Appleton, say, it doesn’t look like they have continually tweaked the recipe, and the bottle we see nowadays is recognizable the same as the original. It remains a vatted 7 year old rum from molasses, or that nutrient rich variant called jaggery, which we’ve met before (opinions vary, and the company isn’t telling).I don’t know what the original strength was back when it was first introduced, but at least for the last decade and a half I’ve only seen it sold at 42.8%. Let’s take it as it is, then, and move on.

As a rum it presses all the right buttons.  You can smell molasses, sandalwood, some tar, and overripe bananas, plus some tannics. That’s the first pass.  After opening up it reaches further and hits the spice jar: ginger, vanilla, cardamom, cumin, I would say, and some sweet paprika, all of which is nice and heavy and almost perfumed, while never losing sight of the fact that it’s a rum.

On the tongue the taste is dark and medium heavy, with strong notes of salted – almost bitter –  caramel and unsweetened chocolate, coffee grounds, molasses and licorice. The strength is just about right for all this smorgasbord of subcontinental notes and doesn’t burn a whole lot going down, so sipping neat is an option.  It’s not that sweet and there’s that vague spice shelf drifting in from the nose even here. The finish is like that as well,  being mild, short, breathy, warm, and again, redolent of licorice, caramel and spices, plus what the Little Big Caner called a mix of pepsi and jerky (go figure).

If pressed for a comparison, I’d suggest that the Old Monk has a fair bit in common with the dusky heaviness of the Demeraras, or perhaps Goslings and other dark molasses-forward rums. You can sense the similarities with the Amrut’s Two Indies or the Old Port as well; except that it has its own vibe and that might be because it is either (wholly or partly) made from jaggery, or because it really does have something added to it. We don’t know. Old Monk has always been looked at slightly askance, because it’s hard to shake the feeling this is not what we’re used to, not a rum that’s made completely “clean” and something’s been sprinkled in. But honestly, it’s not too bad, though it sometimes feels a little unfinished. I like the offbeat and unusual in rum, and in the main the Old Monk is very much like Amrut’s whiskies are: definitely what they’re supposed to be — a rum in this case —  just with a slight kink and twist to mark them out as noticeably different. On its technical merits and how it noses and tastes I can’t say my score is wrong: but since this is a rum from outside our regular area, there are bound to be variations. 

So with all that, does it deserve to be in the pantheon of those rums I deem “key” to understanding  the spirt? I argue that it is. Firstly it remains immensely popular and among more than just expatriate Indians, and needs to be seen for what it is. Secondly, it has a long history, both as a company and a brand, and shows something of how rum developed outside the more comfortingly familiar regions we extol in every other post on the subject. We need to understand and appreciate more than just rums from the Caribbean and Latin America, and have to learn about profiles that are at odds with our perceptions of how rum should be made, or should taste. No rum that has lasted this long without serious change and still sells this well, can be ignored just because it’s not in current fashion. It needs to be acknowledged as a rum from its region, for its people, maybe even of its time. Amrut conquered the whisky world by making whiskies to global standards.  Old Monk becomes a key rum by resolutely adhering to its own.

(#1035)(79/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Other Notes

  • I’m unsure how different the Old Monk Supreme XXX is from this one. Perhaps it’s just the bottle as both are supposedly 7 years old.
  • There’s a lot of backstory to the brand in the company profile, which I strongly recommend taking the time to read.

Highwood Distillers Aged White Caribbean Rum – Review

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Oct 062023
 

This is not the first review to be speaking to a rum made or released by the western Canadian outfit Highwood Distillers: I’ve looked at the forgettable Momento, the guilty pleasure of Potters Dark, and a completely indifferent contract throwaway called Merchant Shipping Co. white rum (made for Wine & Beyond, a large local spirits shop chain), which some readers might recall I disliked intensely when I tried it earlier this year. At that same session I sampled their own simply labelled 40% white, and was a little more impressed than with the others…but I’m afraid that’s nothing to make you rush to the nearest store to go buy some.

The rum is a product that channels something of no-great-shakes median-scoring Plantation Three Star — without the character. It’s made from near neutral alcohol from Guyana that’s imported at 95% and aged for a year in ex-bourbon casks before being filtered to white and taken down to 40% (it remains an outstanding query with them as to where the ageing takes place). These facts, then, position it squarely in the cheap mixers’ blends section of the market that has no aspirations to be seen as an artisanal classic, so tempering expectations commensurately is a must.

Back in 2009 when my fellow rum chum The Rum Howler first looked at this product, he commented that he was able to discern its Guyanese nature: I assure you that no such profile attends to the one I tried 14 year later. It is redolent of rubbing alcohol infused with coconut shavings, with some subtle threads of sugar water, overripe white fruit, crackers, salt biscuits …and the musty, dusty scent of abandoned houses. There’s no wooden still action, no dark fruits, or tannins or raisins or licorice or sawdust. It’s really quite easy to smell, smoothly light and inoffensive…and here that means it’s simply bland. 

On the palate it retains a neutral character: tangy, lightly sweet, alcoholic. It tastes, at best, of a few indistinguishable sodden watery fruit in a graceless salad sprinkled with some alcohol and icing sugar. One can sense some pears, swank, a fine line of brine and light citrus (this is being generous), perhaps a touch of melon and coconut shavings, all of which serves to make it better than alcoholic water, but not by a whole lot.  The finish is smooth, light and relatively clean, just ultimately without much of anything.

Which, as has been mentioned to me before, is probably the point: for something made to be a cocktail ingredient, I should not ask for more. Maybe so. Expectations were low going in and the rum met them swimmingly. It is still being made almost two decades after being introduced, so it has to have something to recommend it. The problem for me is, that “something” is only price for purpose. It’s relatively cheap, it gets people buzzed and its blandness make it well suited for cocktails where it’s the other ingredients that shine, not the base rum.

Yet I take umbrage at the casual throwaway nature of the white, because I feel that if we are ever to grow the rum category in western Canada, local distillers have to stop with this “it’s cheap” one-size-fits-all mentality that is solely meant as a vehicle to move cases. Surely it’s possible to do more than just make a forgettable, affordable rum? How about an unforgettable one?

And I say that because I’ve seen what small rum companies in other countries do with lesser facilities and just some gumption and the desire to try making something interesting, something better. They’re making Jamaican wannabes in the UK and Down Under, using wooden pot stills in Japan, dicking around with Swedish oak in Denmark, to name just a few wild and woolly ideas that make rum more interesting: those guys experiment, they go off the reservation, they do it all themselves, and they make rums that sing in cocktails and enthuse aficionados the world over, and yes, they sell too.

In contrast, what do we get here? A Caribbean rum of zero taste and originality that doesn’t even channel its point of origin or advertise its source. It smells anonymous. It does nothing. It tells you nothing. It could be anything, come from anywhere, and be for anyone. Tell me, in what universe does that count as a successful product?

(#1030)(72/100) ⭐⭐½

Company background

The company is a distillery founded in 1974, originally called ‘Sunnyvale’. In 1984, it was renamed Highwood Distillers after the river that flows through the town of High River in which the distillery is located (in Alberta, just south of Calgary). Until 1997, both the distillery and sales offices were located at the distillery but then the sales office moved to town (which is to say, Calgary), while the distillery continues where it started, and where it remains to this day. In 2005 they bought the BC-based Potter’s distillery, as well as the brands they owned which is why Potter’s Light and Dark rums are part of Highwood’s current portfolio. 

The acquisition of Potters and the expansion into general spirits – vodka, rum, whiskey, gin, liqueurs, flavoured spirits – marked the limit of how far Highwood seemed to want to go, and no further purchases, acquisitions or portfolio increases attended the company for the next decade and a half. Interestingly, in 2022 the Nova Scotia based whisky distiller Caldera Distilling, bought out Highwood in a push to expand into western Canada, thereby creating what is touted as the largest family owned distillery in Canada; however so far it does not seem as if much has changed and if the two company websites are anything to go by, with neither company referring to the other, then it suggests a rather hands-off and independent approach to production.

 

Don Q “Cristal” White Rum – Review

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Sep 222023
 

Don Q is the other big brand from Puerto Rico that many believe has bragging rights over the Big Bad Bat when it comes to quality, yet somehow does not inhabit as a deep a mindspace as Bacardi does. The brand is very well known in the US and Canada (though I don’t see it for sale out west very often) but I get the impression it’s somewhat less of a thing in Europe or Asia – probably because they have plenty of brands of their own and so don’t exist in the same spirituous desert.

Don Q is the flagship brand of the other huge distilling operation on the island of Puerto Rico, Destilería Serrallés: like Bacardi it was founded by a Catalan emigre in the 1860s, though they lacked the international ambitions of the larger company and have stayed within Puerto Rico the whole time. Destilería Serrallés produces three main tiers of this branded rum: the Traditional range of mixing agents (Cristal, Gold and 151); a series of flavoured rums, and the more upscale “Serrallés Collection”, which is where the aged, finished and stronger premiums live. Don Q as a brand is named after Don Quixote (one wonders where Sancho Panza is lurking), but the reason has little to do with the wannabe over-the-hill knight and more to do with the author and his masterwork (see below).

The Cristal is a white rum from the Traditional range: it is of course nothing like the robust white brawling full proof rums whose praises I have extolled in past lists of Great Whites, the ones that go out there sporting an attitude, showing off their glutes and spoiling for a fight. In point of fact it’s a light rum coming off multiple distillation runs on a five-column industrial still, aged in ex-bourbon barrels for between one and five years, filtered to colourlessness, blended, and then bottled at standard strength (40%). Therefore it adheres more to the ethos of relaxed and affordable backbar general mixers, a sort of workhorse of daiquiris and mojitos, hearkening back to the light rum period of the previous century, than something more primitive and elemental.

The tasting notes show why the above paragraph can be written. There’s vanilla, coconut shavings, some nail polish and brine.  Also, after some time, one can pick out citrus, light cream soda, cherries, some ripe juicy pears. It just kind of fades away at this point and there’s little more to be gained by hanging around

The palate shows off a similarly light and easy island charm: sweet, light, creamy, with some watermelon, papaya, cream soda, ginger, and again, the pears, maybe a couple of bananas.  A dusting of cinnamon can be discerned with care, and the finish is as expected – short, prickly, a touch of honey and coconut shavings set off by that slight twist of lemon. 

The Cristal, then, is a completely serviceable rum with just enough taste in there to lift it (slightly) above more anonymous fare that tries less, and I can see why some consider it a step above other whites, including Bacardi’s. There’s a bit of edge lurking behind the inoffensive first taste, a hint of undiscovered character. That said, the strength makes that difficult to come to grips with, and rums like this are never going to be my go-tos unless I just want to get econo-hammered. Overall they display too little of interest, being quite content to stay in the background, sink in the cocktail, and disappear. Thus, they play it safe and take no chances – the alcohol is delivered, the drink is ok, it goes down easy, no fuss, no bother, mission accomplished. 

That will work fine for people who don’t care, and I don’t cast any aspersions on either buyer or seller in this matter – the purpose of the review, then, is less to pass judgement than to simply tell you what you’re getting when you fork over your two bits. As with Bacardi Superior, Lamb’s and other lightly aged, filtered white rums, the answer is, “not a whole lot”.  But then, that’s also why you don’t pay a whole lot – it’s quite cheap, and you’re not getting a dated, decades-old rum of complexity and age which is old enough to vote and will take your an hour to come to grips with…just a relatively neutral, inoffensive rum that serves its limited purpose, and delivers exactly what you pay for, plus a few cents extra.

(#1027)(76/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Other notes

  • The rum is cheap, yes: this also comes not only from economies of (large) scale, but from the impact of the cover-over tax rebate the company receives, which keep prices down.
  • This is not a much-reviewed rum; the Fat Rum Pirate rated it two stars in 2017 and he commented on its neutrality – he wasn’t impressed. Spirits Review gave it 7 olives out of 10 in an undated review probably coming from around 2010 (the design of the bottle is an earlier variant). Honestboozereviews, writing in 2018, figured it rated around 6.5 points and mentioned it mixed well, was easy to find, and cheap. Lastly, Dave Russell of the dormant site Rum Gallery scored it 8.5 points in 2012 and said that he asked Robero Serralles about the name Don Q, and was told it linked the brand — made by the descendants of Spanish Catalans — to Spain and its preeminent work of literature, and both were masterpieces.

ABC Gold Label Tropical Rum Superior (1970s/1980s)

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Aug 142023
 

Rumaniacs Review #R-156 | 1017

ABC Distillers is not a distillery of any kind, but a brand of rums still being made (with different labels), on behalf of the ABC Fine Wines and Spirits liquor chain in Florida, brought to life by Florida Distillers (no direct connection, just a commercial one), and in this case dating back to the seventies and eighties. 

ABC is a chain founded in Orlando just after Prohibition ended, in 1936 — originally it was a series of bar-and-lounge establishments named after its founder (Jack Holloway) but seeing the opportunities and lesser risks of the retail trade, switched over to liquor retail shops, and renamed itself ABC so it would always be first in the yellow pages. Nowadays ABC has over a hundred stores around Florida and has expanded into all sorts of other businesses. This particular rum we’re looking at today was made by Florida Distillers’ facility in Auburndale, but whether modern variations continue this association is unknown.

Florida Distillers – one of the largest distilleries in Florida you probably never heard of – are the makers of the Ron Carlos brand and Florida Old Reserve Rum, as well as manufacturing the Noxx and Dunn 2-4-5 rum we’ve touched on before, and clearly have fully embraced the “more is better” philosophy of rum making, since nothing they produce is particularly interesting…but they sure make a lot of it, and not just for themselves. They have several distilleries churning out both industrial and commercial alcohol products and act as blenders for smaller companies who want to make use of their output and expertise.

Colour – Pale yellow

Strength – 40% ABV

Nose – Gentle, mild and floral, slightly sweet and in no hurry to get anywhere or do anything. It’s quite delicate, with some light peaches and apricots, pears and a bright line of red grapefruit and vanilla running through everything

Palate – Here it goes to earn its sobriquet of “Extra Light and Dry”…or tries to, for it’s astringent and blade-sharp, but lacking any kind of real dryness, and tastes more like a boosted cheap zinfandel. Slight brininess, a fruit or two, and overall it’s nothing really special. It’s too light to make a real statement, even in a mix.

Finish – Surprisingly long and ultimately bland. One can taste some faint and vague florals and white fruit, and that’s it.

Thoughts – By modern standard it falls down flat, of course.  Even standard strength rums today have a profile that tries to be more than just a flavourless alcohol delivery system for a cocktail of some kind, as this one is.  It’s something of a shame so many US brands even back then did nothing but try to copy that light Bacardi style instead of forging new paths, but that’s Bacardi’s legacy for you.

(73/100)

English Harbour “Cœur de Savalle” 8YO High Proof Antigua Rum – Review

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Jul 312023
 

Antigua Distillers, the makers of the English Harbour brand of rums, has always held a soft spot in my heart, since it was their exceptional 1981 25 YO which kickstarted my desire to not just jot down tasting notes at the Liquorature rum club, but to actually go publish them (it’s review #R-0001).  Over the years that followed I tried as many of their offerings as could be reasonably acquired: their standard five year old and 10 year old rums, the port, madeira and sherry cask experimentals, and some of the High Congener series. Sometime around 2021 they whipped out this massive codpiece of a rum, strong enough to give Victorian ladies and their swains the vapours. It was issued at rompin’ stompin’ kick-ass-and-chew-bubble-gum strength of 73.6% ABV, like nothing else they had ever done before, and as soon as I heard about it, well, it excited my curiosity way beyond reasonable avarice.

The Cœur de Savalle came from the older 4-column savalle still they had installed in 1966 (later replaced – or at least eclipsed – by the John  Dore which went up in 1991); it’s kind of a limited edition but the exact outturn is unclear – what is obvious from even a brief tasting is that it’s one of the most uncompromising beefcake rums English Harbour has ever made. It had its genesis in the mad dreams of the previous master blender and cellar master of the company, who wanted to produce a special off the rails cask-strength rum that showcased the savalle still to the max (hence the title “Heart of the Savalle”). To do so they chucked a higher than usual proof new-make spirit (80%) into eight uncharred  and of course forgot all about it until the new cellar master/master blender found them almost a decade later. At that point the distillate was so good that it was promptly bottled as it was, before they even knew the strength (the labels were printed later).

Smelling it, you can see why they were so excited. Column still or not, the nose on the rum is immense: huge initial fruity vanilla notes meld with tawny salted caramel, chocolate oranges and even some light mint, all biffing your hooter without apology. There’s toffee, blackberries and occasional flashes of leather and coconut shavings, and compared to others of equal strength and greater age, perhaps not a whole lot – but what is there is at least emphatic and clear without any muddling or undue savagery, and remains quite aromatic.

Palate remains quite fierce and spicy on the initial sips; then it quietens down (either some time or some water will help here). Bitter chocolate and hot sweet black tea mix it up with toblerone, crushed almonds and walnuts, plus a tinge of red wine, some cinnamon. There’s also a hint of brine and a pleasant last taste of bananas and light cherries in syrup, which last is thankfully very much in the background and doesn’t ever become cloying.  The finish is long and tangy with both unripe and overripe fruits, some flowers and white chocolate, quite hot but by no means unbearable nor unpleasant.  

All in all, it’s a really good rum, and oddly, the strength is not an issue. Sure it’s spicy, but so are many other rums north of 60%. Here it’s all about the taste and those are vibrant, quivering and alive and give a good account of themselves.  Some smoothening out could have been accomplished with a bit more ageing, but for what it is – a rum in the middle aged sweet spot of taste and texture – there’s nothing at wrong with it, and much that is right.  It walks a fine line between a brawny cane cutter’s after-hours libation and a more elegant sipping experience in the planter’s house, without ever making a case for one over the other.  That’s quite a neat trick and it makes the rum one to savour and enjoy, no matter where you have it, or how. I quite liked it.

(#1014)(86/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Other notes

  • The Rumcast episode #83 took a deep dive into English Harbour’s history and various releases over time, including the backstory of this rum at around the 57 minute mark.
  • The naming of English Harbour was necessary because in the 1980s some enterprising American trademarked the name in the US, just as Antigua Distillers was seeking to export its increasingly popular (Cavalier) rums there. The new name came from the location of a famous annual regatta held on the island, but interestingly, Antiguans themselves initially disliked the title, preferring the old one – this led to Cavalier remaining the rum of choice on the island, while English Harbour is the brand name for the exports.
  • Eight barrels were filled so assuming an average outturn of 300 bottles per barrel after the eight years, I would hazard a guess that the final outturn was around 2400 bottles, give or take.

Brief company background

It’s been a while so a reminder of the salient details is useful for those not familiar with the company. English Harbour rums are made by Antigua Distillers: this company was founded in 1933 as a collective enterprise funded by several Portuguese rum shop owners (descendants of indentured servants from Madeira), who pooled their resources to put up a distillery whose output they then shared in proportion to their investment — each then produced a blended rum of their own from that allocation. Acquisition of nine sugar estates followed, rum production flourished in the post-war years, and inevitably Antigua Distillers came up with its own house brands, starting with the Caballero (or Cavalier) Muscovado rum. Over time it morphed and became known as Cavalier rums by the 1950s (as muscovado molasses became harder to come by) and this was itself subsumed into the English Harbour rebranding in 1993, and after which the first famed “1981” was released (the Cavalier brand has not yet been retired completely).

DDL Diamond Reserve 151 Overproof White Rum – Review

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Jul 252023
 

Sometimes I get the uneasy impression that slowly the 151s are fading from common collective rumconsciousness. These long-lived, much-used and oft-feared high proof rums – bottled at what was for years almost the standard for really strong rums (75.5%) and outdone only by a few – were once the kings of the stronger drinks mixes (like the B-52 and the Zombie for example), and many cocktails called for them by number, not name or brand. Yet in my lifetime, we have seen more and more strong rums at high proof invading the market, and even some regular blends are inching closer to – if not past – 70% (and if you doubt this, feel free to consult the list of Strongest Rums in the World), so it’s no surprise that it’s been occasionally bruited about that 151s have lost some shine and may be on their way out. 

Yet the 151s cheerfully persist and continue to get made, and one of the reasons why is probably the amount of cocktails that call for them (as ingredients or floats), which traditionalists are loath to mess with. Many companies around the world continue to make them, and one of the brands that has stuck with it is Diamond Distillers out of Guyana — the source of many other brands’ stocks for their 151s — which has something of a love-hate relationship with the spirit: sometimes years it’s easy to find and sometimes you’ll search long and hard without success. Fortunately, it always comes back. 

The Diamond range of rums from DDL is their entry level blended rum collection: rubbing shoulders with the standard white, gold and dark are three additional variations at 75.5% – the puncheon, the dark overproof and the white overproof. The puncheon and the white seem to be the same product (French savalle still, 6 months’ ageing and filtration to white) and possibly named for differing markets; while the dark is somewhat more interesting, sporting 1-2 years’ age on a blend of Enmore, PM and French savalle distillate.

My own preference for the dark’s intriguing makeup aside, it was the white that I was handed, and that’s what we’re looking at.  And indeed, it’s not a bad rum, at first blush.  Nosing it reveals a profile nowhere near as “throwaway cheap” as many other brands are wont to make – it starts off with hot notes of alcohol, quickly burning off, leaving clean aromas of nuts, almonds, flowers and strawberries, with vanilla and coconut shavings, and a weird faint background of earth and wet leaves. Nothing too complex, but nothing to throw down the sink either. Like with the Sunset Very Strong, there’s more here than initially seems to be the case.

This is also evident when (very carefully) tasting it. It has a sharp yet very solid series of simple and quite powerful tastes: cherries, unripe mangoes, light flowers, icing sugar, vanilla and not a whole lot else.  Very strong on the attack, of course, but bearable, with a long and epic finish that unfortunately doesn’t present a whole lot but is content to just recap the preceding without adding any flourishes of its own. Like I said – nothing spectacular here, just solid workmanship.

Since there are several affordable rums we all have access to these days which are more emphatic, individualistic and close to this in strength (the Jamaicans come to mind, no surprise), the question arises whether a 151 with a profile so relatively straightforward serves any real purpose any longer, outside its core cocktail making base (and brainless college students who want to get loaded fast). They are not all that easy to make well at scale, lots of competition is out there, and getting them on board a flight (especially in the US) is a real pain. It’s no surprise they are not as common as they once were, and while they’re not impossible to find, it is becoming difficult to locate them on physical store shelves. Bacardi got out of the game in 2016 entirely (too many lawsuits), yet one can still find DDL, Lamb’s, Goslings, Don Q, Lemon Hart, Cruzan, Tilambic, Takamaka Bay and several others with a little searching (mostly from online shops), and even Habitation Velier paid tribute to the type by issuing one of its own. So not quite ready to be counted out just yet.

Where does this one land, then?

All in all, it’s very much like a full proof entry level rum with some rough edges and too little ageing, which I say from the perspective of one who tastes many cask strength rums on a regular basis and therefore has no particular issue nowadays with the proof point when trying it neat. There are more tastes than one initially expects, which is welcome, and if it is too simple and uncomplicated for serious appreciation, well, at least it leaves its heart out there on the table and doesn’t hold anything back. What you are getting is a very young, uncomplicated, filtered, high proof white rum which can’t class with an equivalent agricole (for how could it?) but which nevertheless gives a good account of itself and seeks only to do what it was made for: to spruce up some dynamite cocktails and to give you a seriously good drunk, seriously fast, and maybe both at the same time. Fine by me.

(#1012)(76/100)

Other notes

  • For those with a historical bent, there’s a small history of the 151s available to provide more backstory and detail than this review would allow for.
  • This rum intrigued me enough that I’m scouting out the Dark Overproof now.
  • My sincere appreciation to Indy Anand of Skylark and Ben Booth of Tamosi, in whose pleasant, ribald and laughter-filled company I sampled this one (it came from Indy’s stocks, which meant it was fair game for all of us).
  • It’s interesting how things change: back in 2010 when I wrote the humorous Bacardi 151 review, 75.5% was a breathtaking and titanic proof point, and a rum issued like that was regarded with near awe, sipped with trembling care. Nowadays a rum sporting such an ABV is regarded with caution, yes, but it would not be considered strange, or even particularly unusual.

HSE ‘La Belle Heure Titouan Lamazou’ 2021 Rhum Agricole Blanc – Review

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Jul 192023
 

HSE – or Habitation Saint Etienne – is a small distillery on Martinique whose products I dally with on and off like a lovelorn swain who can’t make up his mind. They have all the usual products attendant upon Martinique’s distilling scene: unaged blancs, aged agricoles of various years with a finish or special barrrel ageing thrown in here or there, the occasional millesime, indie bottlers’ outputs and even a parcellaire or two for those who like to take apart miniscule deviations in a single distillery’s profile. All of the rhums from the distillery which I’ve tried have been very good, at any age and any strength, so it’s a wonder we don’t seek them out more assiduously.

They are the real deal, and produce a full suite of AOC rhums, yet I sometimes get the impression that they lag somewhat in people’s awareness or estimation behind other French island outfits such as, oh, J.M., Saint James, Damoiseau, Labatt or Clement (disregard this comment if you are already and always have been an HSE fan). Not that this matters much because like with any quality product, those who know, know.  And clearly they know why.

The stats, then: the rhum is blend of unaged whites made on Martinique from cane juice on a column still, distinguished by being reduced after distillation down to 50° over a period of (get this!) six months. It is named after Titouan Lamazou, a French navigator, sailor, artist and writer who was famous for his sailing exploits (he won the arduous round the world Vendée Globe race in 1990 and gained the title of world racing champion in 1991). Also an accomplished artist, in 2015 he staged an exhibition of his portraits of women created over a number of years for his “Women of the World” project in collaboration with Habitation Saint Etienne, and since the first references to the rhum come right around this time, it’s reasonable to suppose the first edition came out in that year, or in 2016. It continues to be made as a limited release, which makes it a millesime rhum (this one is from 2021), and the label design is supposedly his own.

All that is fine, yet we’ve been burned by sweet smiles and pretty dresses before: sometimes the adornment is the best thing about it. I come before you to say, fear not, for this rhum is great. When nosing it at the Berlin Rumfests’s pre-festival group tasting (I had sneaked in and was invited to hang out with the cool kids) it started with an elegance I was not expecting, with a sweetly rounded aroma combining perfumed flowers and salt with lovely deep notes of sugar cane syrup. Keeping it on the go for an hour, it developed more muscular smells of dark red olives, hot olive oil just at the smoke point, sugar water, cucumbers, sprite and watermelons, all overlain by that light and almost delicate floral, even herbal aroma that made me think of sun-dappled flower-strewn clearings in green forests, steaming after a warm rain.

The depth and intensity of the palate was really quite superlative as well, and demonstrated no fall off from the way it smelled. It presented with a smooth texture, tasting of solvent, bubble gum and and melded the crisp tart sweetness of unsweetened yoghurt with lemon meringue pie, green grapes and apples. There is a clean snap of citrus and coffee grounds, a touch of sweet soya and a nice sort of understated sourness to it all, leading to a long and languorous finish redolent of lemon peel, pastries, laban and a very sweet and mild balsamic vinegar.

All this from a white unaged rum. It’s really quite amazing and a standout at every level, even while you’d strain to find a single point of excellence about it. It raises the bar all at once so the singularity I search for is tough to describe, except to say – it’s really good and can function well as a sipper, while not losing its ability to turbocharge a mix in fine style.

That a rhum with such a top notch profile doesn’t ring more bells or launch small cults, that it sells at an insanely low price of around or less than €40 is, on the face of it, incredibly fortunate for us rum proles, because for once we can actually get us a good one and not sell a kidney to do so. Sure it’s a branded product commemorating a sports figure, sure it’s a blend whose stats seem to make it just another blanc, and sure it’s unaged and taken at agricole’s standard strength – nothing besides the beautiful label design really marks it out. But I maintain that through some subtle alchemy known only to the makers, HSE created a quietly, sweetly, unprepossessing little masterpiece that lit up my eyes and brought a grin to my face from the moment I nosed it. It was the first really top rum I sampled at the beginning of my 2023 rum festival experience – and was still one of the best at the end. 

(#1011)(91/100) ⭐⭐⭐⭐½

Other Notes

  • The bottle notes it is a limited edition without elaboration, so for now I can’t tell you how many bottles are out there. Apparently there’s a 40% version out there as well.
  • Brief distillery background: Habitation Saint-Étienne is located almost dead centre in the middle of Martinique.  Although in existence since the early 1800s, its modern history properly began when it was purchased in 1882 by Amédée Aubéry, who combined the sugar factory with a small distillery, and set up a rail line to transport cane more efficiently (even though oxen and people that pulled the railcars, not locomotives). In 1909, the property came into the possession of the Simonnet family who kept it until its decline at the end of the 1980s. The estate was then taken over in 1994 by Yves and José Hayot — owners, it will be recalled, of the Simon distillery, as well as Clement —  who relaunched the Saint-Étienne brand using the original stills from HSE but relocating them to Simon (ageing remained at the Habitation), adding snazzy marketing and expanding markets.
  • Of course I’m not the first to mention the rhum. My good friend Laurent Cuvier (he of the now-retired poussette) mentioned it enthusiastically way back in 2019 on a distillery visit when he got a try way before it was released, and again in his 2023 Paris Rhumfest roundup. Serge, ever ahead of the curve, tried an earlier edition back in 2016 – it may even have been the first – and liked it to the tune of 86 points which for him, back then, was well nigh unheard of.

Original Hana Bay Premium White Rum (1980s)

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Jul 032023
 

Rumaniacs Review R-155 | 1010

By now we’ve looked at Hana Bay and its other incarnations like Whaler’s and Spirit of Hawaii from Hawaiian Distillers a few times (here, here, here, and here) and there’s nothing new to say abut it. It is no longer being made and the company bio is brief.

Hawaiian Distillers made Hana Bay rum from around the 1980s forwards and in 2002 it switched to being made in Kentucky by the brand owners at the time, Heaven Hill, who had acquired the brand from the Levecke Corporation in that year…though they may have just tossed it on the scrap heap, since I can’t find much that says it was made into the new century by them. 

However, Hana and Whaler’s returned to Hawaii…Maui specifically, where Hali’imaile was founded in 2010 by a branch of the Levecke family and has its premises…I’ve heard they began making rum again in around 2014. Although the sugar industry, family connections and tropical climate would suggest it, rum is not actually their focus there – whisky, vodka and gin are, which is probably why their distillery makes rums of zero distinction. Hali’imaile’s claim to fame is to have worked to develop Sammy Hager’s Beach Bar rum, but that’s hardly an endorsement of the other rums they make and it’s been suggested that the Hana Bay wasn’t even made on Maui anymore. They don’t bother saying much about any rum on their website which may be an implicit statement about it, or simple embarrassment.

This rum is different from the Original Hana Premium (R-144) in that it is a white, with all that meant before (slight ageing then ruthlessly filtered to colourless blandness). So it lacks that pale hay colour of the Original, and the label is also not gold-edged but-silver edged, a sort of subliminal messaging as to what it is, if one is colour blind or too drunk to pay attention.

Strength – 40%

Colour – White

Label Notes – Silver edging (not gold), different medals from “Premium Rum”

Nose – Weak, wispy and thin. Acetones, pears, sugar water, yet mostly the sense one gets is of bitterly astringent alcohol.  Some nail polish and the smell of  plastic film stretched over new furniture.

Palate – It’s a rum with some bite. White fruits, sugar water, vanilla, coconut shavings.  There’s an odd touch of brine here and there, but mostly one strains to find much beyond alcohol

Finish – Neutral spirit burn.  One could as easily be tasting vodka with some added elements that remain difficult to identify

Thoughts – You can probably get more out of the nose and the taste if you have it first thing in the morning (as I did, to taste it for this review without anything getting in the way). That said, who would want to? There’s too little even with that, to make a sip worthwhile.  Best to dunk it into a personal (or indifferent) cocktail experiment where you don’t want to waste a good (or even a real) rum.

(70/100)⭐⭐

 

Ron Bacardi “Select” Rum (Puerto Rico)(1990s)

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Jun 162023
 

Rumaniacs Review #154 | 1006

In this series of Rumaniacs reviews (R-149 to R-154) we’ve been looking at a set of Bacardi rums from the 1970s to the 1990s that were all part of a small collection I picked up, spanning three decades and made in Mexico and Puerto Rico – they display something of what rums from that bygone era was like, and in this final review I’ll sum up what few observations that can be made.

Preamble – The Select is a successor to the venerable “Black” or “Black Label” or “Premium Black.” Some of these labels were retired in the 1990s, although it would appear that some continued to be made concurrently for a while, and labelled as such in separate markets (a new version of the Black was reintroduced in 2014 in the UK, for example, similar to the one I reviewed back in 2010). The Select was aged for around four years and also made in charred barrels like the Dark editions then were, and the Cuatro is now; and while a search around the online shops shows it remains sporadically available (Rum Ratings has recent commentaries on it), it has definitely been discontinued and folded into the Carta Negra rebrand. The exact date is a little tricky – the last reviews and commentary online about it seem to all date from purchases made pre-2010, and if neither the Rum Howler or I have it in our early reviews then it’s a fair bet that by the turn of the first decade, the Select was dead and gone.

Strength – 40%

Colour – Dark Gold

Label Notes – Produced by Bacardi Corp. San Juan, Puerto Rico

Nose – Honey, caramel, coffee, chocolate, toffee, nuts, a reasonable helping of dried fruits.  Raisins, prunes, dates. Licorice and some woodsy notes, quite nice. Could hold its own in today’s world and one can see the iterations of the Black come together into something slightly newer, and incrementally better.

Palate – Also quite good compared to others. Coats the mouth nicely with brine, caramel, coffee, mocha, nougat and some almonds. Bitter chocolate, smoke, leather and honey. One thing I liked about it was that vague sense of the plastic and leather and vinyl of a cheap mid range new car owned by Leisure Suit Larry. It’s not entirely successful but does add a little character, which too many Bacardis don’t have at all.

Finish – Short, warm and breathy. Mostly brown sugar and caramel with the slightest nudge of lemon zest.

Thoughts – One wonders if giving it a score of 80 (which it deserves) is damning it with faint praise. but after so many of these Bacardis I really gotta ask, is too much to hope for something more? The rum is well done and it’s the best of the lot, but really, I was left wanting a larger helping of the potential this suggested it had, but never delivered.  

For that, I think I have to go either further back, or into the modern era.

(80/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Opinion – Summing Up Six Bacardis

Bacardi has always hewed to the middle of the low end road and focused on their core competency of making their various blends, until recently when they started putting out rums with real age statements; the Ocho and Diez are quite capable near-sipping rum experiences, for example. Even the 16YO is beginning to expand the range of the Bat’s capabilities into the high end, though few reviewers have anything good to say about the brand as a whole, or much to say about the company’s rums at all (which I think is a mistake).

These six early rums (and some others I’ve looked at over the years) make it clear why Bacardi has the reputation it does — or lacks one.  Unlike most major companies, whose rums from forty or fifty years ago were distinct, unique and often fascinating essays in the craft, and which gradually moved towards a more approachable middle, with Bacardi the opposite seems to be the case. Their earlier rums from the 1970s to early 2000s were mostly uninspiring, flat, mild, not-that-tasty mixing agents which barely moved the needle in a cocktail’s taste (often they were adjuncts to the fruit and mixes) and certainly never induced as much as a quiver in people’s minds as sipping rums. They were made that way and they stayed that way

And that was the (mildly) aged rums – the white rums were worse. Compared to today’s robust and muscular white unaged Blutos from anywhere on the planet, Bacardi’s whites, never mind their title of “Superior” were and are picking up footprints, and considered mostly filtered anonymous crap, closer to vodkas then real rums. Few have anything good to say about them, and almost no writer I know of has ever bothered to run them through the wringer.

The characteristics these six rums demonstrate, then, are not new phenomena but have been so for a long time.  “You got to go back a lot further than the 1970s to find a decent Bacardi, “ remarked Richard Seale when he read one of these mini retrospectives.  I have taken his implied advice and started sourcing the oldest Bacardis I can find from pre-1970s era sales, so one day – hopefully not too far from now – I can provide another retrospective of six more from even further back, to either prove or disprove the assertion.

But that’s going into the past. As I noted above, as the years moved on — and as the retrospectives’ incrementally improving scores suggested — the mainstream Bacardi rums actually started getting better. The Select was quite nice, I thought, and today’s Carta Negra, aged editions, and even the Facundo and Single Cane series, show a company that is slowly, incrementally, even reluctantly, branching out into profiles that are more interesting, and into areas others have colonised but which perhaps may now profitably be copied. We may be living through an era which future writers will see as the renaissance of the house’s reputation for real quality, not because they’re the only ones making any (as they were back in the day), but because they really have improved…however marginally.

Supplementary Reading

I consulted some books regarding Bacardi’s background to prepare for this addendum, as well as search for bottling and labelling history (mostly without success).  There’s no shortage of the history, but not a whole lot about labelling or branding – and company websites are almost universally silent about this kind of thing. Matt Pietrek’s recently published book Modern Caribbean Rum — which will surely go down as one of the most useful and indispensable rum reference works of our time — helped a little, and I enjoyed the historical works of Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba (Tom Gjelten) and The Rise of Bacardi: From Cuban Rum to a Global Empire (Jorge Del Rosal)…that said, not much on the evolution of their blends and brands and labels.

Dr. Sneermouth’s dismissal aside, Google image searches did help, as did that great Czech site Peter’s Rum labels. Older reviewers from Ago, whose names and sites few now recall, also fleshed out some plot points of the short series: The Pirate King wrote an undated but surely pre-2008 review of the Select; and so did El Machete, in 2007, when he penned a very unfavourable opinion on it. The Fat Rum Pirate wrote a small piece on the Bacardi Black in 2014, as did I back in 2010. It’s from reading and dating such reviews that some information can be gleaned, but even here, there are limits…which of course is why the Rumaniacs exists to begin with.

 

Bacardi Superior “Premium Black” (Puerto Rico)(1970s/1980s)

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Jun 142023
 

Rumaniacs Review #153 | 1005

In this series of Rumaniacs reviews (R-149 to R-154) we’re looking at a set of Bacardis from the 1970s to the 1990s that were all part of a small collection I picked up, spanning three decades and made in Mexico and Puerto Rico – they display something of what rums from that bygone era was like, and the final review will have a  series of notes summing up what few conclusions we may be able to draw.

Although some online references to the rum suggest a 1990s dating, the “Premium Black” is older, introduced much earlier: it was already a fixture by the mid 1980s. The diagonal red label design was discontinued in 1980, but let’s be conservative and give it something of a window around that date.

The Black — or more precisely, the ‘dark rum’ style it represented — seems to have gone through a number of changes over the years as its makers appeared not to know what to do with it (except maybe find a dark rum mixer for people to play with): it was variously called Ron Superior Premium Black, simply “Black”, Carta Negra, Superior Dark, issued at anywhere between 37% to 40%, and in all cases the dark colour was advertised as being imparted by heavily charred barrels, and, more recently, by caramel colouring.

Nowhere is the age mentioned, which seems to be a thing with Bacardi until a few years ago – perhaps because they blended like crazy, NAS was fine and they never felt it to be necessary until they twigged onto to the potential value of a real age statement when the 8 YO became a big seller. In the absence of anything better I’ll suggest that it’s a youngish blend of rums under five years old, but more than that I wouldn’t venture.

Strength – 40%

Colour – Dark Gold

Label Notes – Produced by Bacardi Corp. San Juan, Puerto Rico

Nose – Very nice.  Say what you will about The Bat (and a lot has been), their low end rums are consistently of better than average quality for their (heavily and illegally subsidised) prices. The nose is quite good, here: Danish cookies, caramel, toffee, honey, all the hits, plus vanilla and coconut shavings. Citrus, coffee, well polished leather…nice, if not new.

Palate – Sweet, smooth and war. Again, little that we have not already tried.  Caramel, toffee, salt butter, vanilla ice cream, a squirt of lemon juice. Traces of flowers and honey trail behind all this. 

Finish – Short, warm, aromatic. Pipe tobacco, florals, toffee and vanilla

Thoughts – Overall it’s nice and better than the four we’ve reviewed thus far.  So what?  It’s being damned with faint praise, is all. After it edges towards a more intriguing profile and the tantalising sense of something new, it retreats: one is therefore left with a sense of frustrated disappointment, at a rum which had potential and then returned to the safety of what was known.  Too bad.

(78/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Ron Bacardi Añejo (Mexico)(1970s)

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Jun 122023
 

Rumaniacs Review #152 | 1004

In this series of Rumaniacs reviews (R-149 to R-154) we’re looking at a set of Bacardis from the 1970s to the 1990s that were all part of a small collection I picked up, spanning three decades and made in Mexico and Puerto Rico – they display something of what rums from that bygone era was like, and the final review will have a  series of notes summing up what few conclusions we may be able to draw.

The antecedents of the Bacardi Añejo — a word simply meaning “aged” in Spanish — are the same as the Carta Blanca we looked at in R-150.  Made in the Mexican facility at Tultitlan, it likely predated the 1980s by which time all units of measure went fully metric for sale in the US market. However, the ubiquity and long history of production of any aged rums from the company (I looked at a 6 YO 1980s Anejo from Puerto Rico some years ago, for example) make that dating tricky at best. It is likely no longer in production, mind you: the Añejo moniker was applied to the four year old Cuatro in 2020, the strength was beefed up a mite, and you can’t find the old Añejo listed on Bacardi’s website – that said, the volumes of this rum that were on the market were so great it’s not unlikely one can still find them to this day, from any era.

As with most Bacardi entry level rons – which this undoubtedly was – it’s column still, molasses based and lightly aged.  Back in 2019 when Wes reviewed one of these – also at 38% but noted as being “original formula” which mine conspicuously lacks – he remarked that his bottle surely predated a 2015 label switch based on what else he could see lon the shelves, and it was possibly around 3 years old, which I think is about right.

Strength – 38%

Colour – Gold

Label Notes – Tultitlan Edo. de Mexico. 38° G.L.

Nose – There’s a bit more going on here than the lower strength would suggest, a sort of low grade pungency quite unexpected for a 38% rum.  Perhaps that’s because it’s actually 40% according to my hydrometer.  Some light salted caramel, fruit, florals, raisins, vanilla, and some wet coconut shavings.  Also black tea, salted butter and a touch oif citrus. Nothing really special here: the aroma simply suggest a well assembled product.

Palate – A rather restrained, yet still reasonably pungent mix of linseed oil on wood, furniture polish, well-oiled leather, caramel, honey and citrus. If you pressed me I’d suggest some black pepper and ginger notes, but they’re so faint it may just be reaching.

Finish – Short, peppery, caramel and unsweetened mauby, some honey and vanilla.

Thoughts – Compared to the rather poor showing of the three we’ve already seen dating back from around the same time period, this is a bit better. Still a mixer and still not a fancy upscale product, but I started warming up to Bacardi again after trying this and seeing they were not all milquetoast and moonbeams masquerading as something more muscular.

(78/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Bacardi Gold Reserve (Puerto Rico)(1970s/1980s)

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Jun 092023
 

Rumaniacs Review #151 | 1003

This series of Rumaniacs reviews (R-149 to R-154) is a set of Bacardis from the 1970s to the 1990s that were all part of a small collection I picked up, spanning three decades and made in Mexico and Puerto Rico – they display something of what rums from that bygone era was like, and the final review will have a  series of notes summing up what few conclusions we may be able to draw.

Bacardi’s Gold rum (in all its iterations) is one of the oldest continuously made rums in existence, dating back to the 1890s or before – in fact it may have been one of the original rums made by Facundo Bacadi in the 1860s. By 1892 it was so well regarded that Spain’s King Alfonse XIII allowed the use of the royal coat of arms by Bacardi as a tribute to it — and it’s adorned Bacardi labels ever since, even if the name of the rum has seen some evolution.

The age is indeterminate – I’ll suggest 1-2 years, which is consistent with today’s Golds. A mixing agent, not anything even remotely premium. It’s meant for cocktails and is a column still blend.

A coarse dating of production starts at 1959-2000 based on the logo design; the use of both metric and imperial units narrows this down to the late 1970s or early 1980s (the USA made metric mandatory for spirits labels in the mid 1970s, and there was an extended period when both units were used).  An Anejo version of the Reserve was released in 1981, which of course means this one existed already by that time.

Strength – 40%

Colour – Gold

Label Notes – Puerto Rican Rum

Nose – Honey, caramel, toffee, light citrus, the vaguest sense of saline. All the usual suspects are in the lineup, feeling washed up and past their prime. Light and easy, the rum actually smells weaker than its advertised strength: thin, watery and alcoholic.

Palate – Dry, warm, slightly spicy, lacks the courage to bite you. Most of what little was in the nose repeats here in a more watery form.  Honey, nougat, toffee, vanilla, coconut shavings.  Some leather and smoke, maybe, it’s gone too fast to tell.

Finish – Here now, gone a second later.  Dry, a bit woody, hardly any taste at all.

Thoughts – This rum is about as expected. Light, sweetish Caribbean Spanish-style rum of little distinction, and could be the entry level low-aged candidate starter kit from just about anywhere in latin or South America (except maybe Brazil, Guyana or Suriname). Sorry, but it’s quite anonymous and forgettable – even today’s edition has somewhat more character. Nothing to report here, then. 

(72/100)

Bacardi Legendario “Carta Blanca” White Rum (Mexico)(1970s)

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Jun 072023
 

Rumaniacs Review #150 | 1002

This series of Rumaniacs reviews (R-149 to R-154) we’ll be looking at over the next week or so, is a set of Bacardis from the 1970s to the 1990s that were all part of a small collection I picked up, spanning three decades and made in Mexico and Puerto Rico – they display something of what rums from that bygone era was like, and the final review will have a  series of notes summing up what few conclusions we may be able to draw.

Dating this one was interesting. The Legendario Carta Blanca brand (sometimes just called Carta Blanca) has been made since at least the 1920s, and it takes a detailed look at the label, place of make and the changes in the bat logo to establish a rough estimate of when it was made.  Here we know that the bottom line has to be 1961 since that was when the Tultitlan factory in Mexico was completed and in 2006 the name Carta Blanca was globally discontinued. Too, the bat logo on this bottle was changed in 2002, so…

One collector suggested it was perhaps made in the 1990s but I tracked down a label precisely  matching this one that seemed, with the notes I have from the seller, to place it more conclusively from the 1970s, and so unless someone has better information, I’ll leave it there (note that the labels changed almost not at all during those decades).  

The Legendario Carta Blanca is a blend of light and  heavy bodied rums, aged between one and two years then charcoal filtered to remove the colour – it is therefore a direct descendant of the original rum Bacardi made in the 19th century, which established the brand.  Nowadays, it’s been rebranded, and is called the Superior.

Strength – 40%

Colour – White

Label Notes – “Carta Blanca”, “Tultitlan Edo. De Mexico”

Nose – Almost nothing here, less than the 1970s Superior we looked at before (R-149), and that one, while decent, was no standout. Starts off with some brine and olives, to the point where we feel some mescal has sneaked its way in here (very much like the Limitada Oaxaca, just weaker). Noy sweet at all – oily, slightly meaty, opens up into some nice cherries and flowers. 

Palate – By the time we get to taste, the brine is starting to disappear and the rum transforms into something sweeter, lighter with a bit of light fruits (pears, red cashews), sugar water and very light melons and citrus, though you have to strain to get that much/

Finish – A little sharp, briny, the slightest bite of some woodiness, coconuts shavings.

Thoughts – This one might benefit from some time and patience, because it develops better once left to open for a while. That said, nailing it down is not easy because it’s faint enough that the flavours kind of run together into a miscellaneous mishmash.  Disappointing.

(73/100)

Other Notes

  • The city of Tultitlan’s name shows it’s a very old part of Mexico (the name is Toltec). It is now a northern suburb of Mexico City and was built by a famous firm of architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Felix Candela between 1958 and 1961 (van der Rohe designed the corporate Office Building, and Felix Candela designed bottling plant and distillery cellars). The fact that it was constructed so long ago suggests that the family was already expanding (and hedging its bets) way before they were exiled from Cuba after the Revolution.

Bacardi Superior “Silver Label” White Rum (Puerto Rico)(Early 1970s)

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Jun 052023
 

Rumaniacs Review #149 | 1001

This series of Rumaniacs reviews (R-149 to R-154) we’ll be looking at over the next week or two, is a set of Bacardis from the 1970s to the 1990s that were all part of a small collection I picked up, spanning three decades, and made in Mexico and Puerto Rico – they display something of what rums from that bygone era was like, and the final review will have a series of notes summing up what few conclusions we may be able to draw.

This Bacardi Superior noted as being “Silver Label” is the doddering uncle of the set. The label refers to an 80 proof 1/10 pint white rum, which suggests the pre-1980 dating after which ABV and a metric system common (in the USA) – the rum of that title continued to be made until the 1980s after which it just became Ron Bacardi Superior. Puerto Rico is where the facilities of the company are headquartered, of course, so there’s little to be gathered here. It’s entirely possible that it goes back even to the 1960s – something about the label just suggests that dating and I’ve seen a similar one from 1963 – but for now let’s stick with a more conservative estimate.

It’s not a stretch to infer some fairly basic facts about the Silver Label Superior: it’s probably (but very likely) lightly aged, say a year or two; column still; and filtered.  Beyond that we’re guessing. Still, even from those minimal data points, a pretty decent rum was constructed so let’s go and find out what it samples like.

Strength – 40%

Colour – White

Label Notes – “Silver Label”, Made in Puerto Rico

Nose – Weak and thin, mostly just alcohol fumes, sweet light and reeking faintly of bananas, Some slight saltiness, acetones, bitter black tea and a few ripe cherries. There’s a clean sort of lightness to it, like laundry powder.

Palate – Interesting: briny and with olives right at the start; also some very delicate and yet distinct aromas of flowers.  Some fanta, 7-up and tart yoghurt, the vague sourness of gooseberries and unripe soursop, papaya and green mangoes.

Finish – Again, interesting, i that it lasts a fair bit. Nothing new really – some light fruits, pears and watermelons, a dusting of acetones and brine. Overall, it’s thin gruel and slim pickings.

Thoughts – Although most of these early Bacardi’s (especially the blancas) don’t usually do much for me, I have to admit being surprised with the overall worth of this older one. There are some characterful notes which if left untamed could be unpleasant: here the easy sweetness carries it past any serious problems and it comes out as quite a decent rum in its own right.  Original and groundbreaking it’s not, and certainly not a standout – but it is nice.

(76/100)

The Last Drop Distillers 1976 Very Old Jamaican Rum – Review

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Jun 022023
 

As the seasons turn and the years pass, the rumiverse edges closer and closer to the hallowed Everest of aged rums, that crowning achievement of geriatric eld grasped and never relinquished (so far) by G&M’s 58 year old rum from 1941. Alas, rums from so far back in time are now a disappearing dream, vanished into blends, collector’s vaults or the gullets of earlier connoisseurs who knew not what they had. There are few, if any, multi-decade old rums from the 1960s or 1950s to be found – these days, it’s the 1970s that is the decade we’re left with, and everything from that era of funk and disco, hot pants, big hair, bell bottoms and the fading of flower power, is a “mere” forty something years old…assuming it’s ever bottled.

One of these is this rum, a big, bold, rare, practically unknown brown bomber from Jamaica that was laid down the year my family left Africa and arrived in Guyana – 1976. It coyly ignores its own provenance and simply says “Jamaica”, but man, that age is serious, the strength is near biblical, and a sniff of the cork is worth more than my mortgage, so it’s probably best I put a review out there for all those who may one day wonder whether it’s worth forking over that kind of gold for an unproven rum of such mystery. The short answer to that question is “yes” – but only if (a) you are in funds and (b) you really have the interest. Without both these conditions, well, fuggeddabouddit.

So who on earth produced this thing? Where was it hiding all this time?   Which distillery made it? What does the tech sheet look like? And – perhaps more importantly – should we even bother? Questions such as these were going through my mind the entire time I was admiring, photographing, reading about and tasting it.

The restraint with which the rum opened is remarkable.  It’s 68.5% ABV and aged almost beyond reason, and you’d expect both the power and the lumber to be overwhelming: yet it presents no bite, no scratch, no vicious wood claws, no harridan-like screaming – just a serene, enormously solid flow of firm olfactory notes.  Rubber, acetones and honey start the parade, attended by salt caramel and the slightly acrid tang of a warmed-up indoor swimming pool in winter.  Aromas of wafers, warm and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, coffee grounds, and a seemingly never ending parade of all the dark fruit you could name (and a few you can’t) – prunes, dried apricots, plums, sapodilla, kiwi fruit, blackberries and more. And even then it’s not done – one senses the cloying musk of dead bees, melting wax and dusty rooms in old houses, marshmallows and even moist aromatic tobacco.  How so much scent was stuffed in here surpasses my understanding but it’s clear that this is one of the most complex and amazing rums I’ve ever tried.

Last Drop Distillers is not, as some alert whisky anoraks will inevitably rush to inform me, actually a distillery, but an exclusive, high-end premium indie bottler. They occasionally – or at their whim – release very rare and very pricey ultra-aged limited edition bottlings on to the connoisseur’s market, and perhaps one of the reasons most of us have rarely if ever heard of them is because we penurious coin-counting rum-hoarding peons are too busy working for The Man to swim around the upscale markets in which Last Drop cruises. They issued mostly whisky, with an occasional liqueur, port, cognac or rum (this one) to round things out, almost all decades old, dating back to the eighties, seventies, sixties, fifties…even the 1920s. 

The small company was founded in 2008 and brought together Tom Jago and James Espey, two whisky industry veterans who might at first blush seem to be a little long in the tooth to be setting up new commercial ventures at a time most of us are marking out plots and making wills and feverishly downing our valued stashes before we lose the ability to spell “rum” correctly and start drooling instead of drinking.  Yet they did, even though Mr Espery (a veteran of International Distillers & Vintners (IDV), United Distillers & Vintners (UDV) and Chivas (where he was chairman) had just retired at 65 and Mr Jago (who had had a hand in the development of both Bailey’s Irish Cream and what would become Johnny Walker Blue Label) was a sprightly 82. They conjured up this little company where they determined they would source what – by their own lights – would be the rarest and best spirits available.  

Riding the increasing bow wave of premiumisation that was just starting to take off, Espey did the marketing himself: no wholesaler was really interested in such small volumes as they were producing, but in the first ten years TLD sold just about all 7,000 bottles of the 11 one­-off releases of Scotch whisky made to that point. This finally attracted some attention and in 2016 Sazerac, the American spirits conglomerate which owns Buffalo Trace, bought them for an undisclosed sum in a wave of acquisitions around that time, probably to be a part of its luxury division. A condition of the deal was for the existing release philosophy and management structure to be retained, and both Mr. Jago and Mr. Espey stayed on; the former’s daughter Rebecca Jago, joined the company in 2010 and the latter’s, Beanie Espey, in 2014 ,and when in 2018 Mr. Jago — he was the president at that time — passed away, the ladies  were on the expanded board and kept up the same careful pace of exclusive and expensive bottlings.

As of 2023, after fifteen years of operation, there have been a mere 31 releases, making the SMWS rum selections (70+ in about the same timeframe) seem positively profligate.  None costs under four figures and since you’re most likely already googling this rum, and because the purse-hunting, gimlet-eyed Mrs Caner also reads these reviews, you’ll forgive me for not mentioning it here.

The taste, in a word: stunning. It presented less as a pure Jamaican rum than a blend of Jamaica and Demerara, and showcases the best of both.  There were layers of flavour here,, starting with rubber, nail polish, brine, licorice, honey, vanilla, sweet creamed wafers and the aforementioned chocolate, coffee grounds and salted caramel.  In between the spaces coiled the fruits as before – prunes, apricots, overripe oranges and pineapples – and underneath that, one could sense cereals and toast and molasses, even a tang of marmite.  And the spices, those were there, light as a dusting of icing sugar on a tart: nutmeg, cinnamon, cumin, cloves.

All of the minor elements on display were chock full of memorable and strange and subtle (and sometimes near-unidentifiable) tasting notes, each of which populated the edges of our awareness for only fleeting moments before another wafted in and around and took its place. They were not the core flavours, the primary notes — those were obvious —  but existed to enhance, to supply background, atmosphere, like all those strange characters who move half-unseen and almost unnoticed in the dim corners of Dickens’s or Dostoyevsky’s novels. 

And the finish well, what can I say? If this was a movie it would be a four-hour-long extravaganza with a cast of thousands, a bunch of secondary also-rans, two overtures plus an intermission. In short – epic.  No other word does it justice, and while admittedly there was little that was introduced at this point that wasn’t already noted above, the amalgam of a basket of ripe and overripe fruit, spices, cereal, coffee, tobacco and leather was a fitting conclusion to a great tasting experience. There are always risks, in a rum this old and from Jamaica, of over-oaking and bitterness and too much reliance on one or other ester-laden note that then ruins the party for everything else and throws the chakras out of whack – not here; in fact, the balance is superb: it is, quite simply, one of the best rums I’ve ever had.

And the questions remain. Which distillery?  Everything I’ve researched says it’s a Clarendon, yet for those who are expecting some hogo-laden congener-squirting Jamaican funk bomb from Ago would be disappointed; there are no screaming, rutting esters in play here.  Nor, for that matter, does the rum present as a pot still product, and the accompanying red booklet provides remarkably little background here: in fact, it tells us only that it’s from the south of Jamaica.  However, Richard Seale, who helped me flesh out the background (see my notes below), in urging caution about expecting a New Jamaican taste profile, also mentioned it was likely from a long scrapped columnar still that once existed at Clarendon but which was later replaced by more modern pot and other columnar stills.

But of course, at this kind of remove, we want the info for our own historical knowledge, and while interesting, it’s ultimately almost unprovable.  What’s important is that in knowing it, we see that the TLD 1976 lacks the fierce pungency of Hampden or Worthy Park (which in any case were not operational or laying down aged stock at that time), does not have the elemental brutality of Long Pond (I’m thinking TECA here), and is a ways better than the more elegant middle of the road approach of even Appleton’s older offerings (though the 50 YO comes really close). 

It is admittedly somewhat mental to buy the TLD, even with that age and strength and that historical legacy – it’s akin to the Black Tot Last Consignment, and for the same reason. But let’s face it, we don’t really need to. The good stuff is all around us, and there’s oodles of excellent tipple available to our relentlessly questioning snoots and jaded palates, and for less, much less. To some extent what this rum really does is to demonstrate exactly how tasty and affordable so many rums to which we have access already are — modern drinkers are fortunate in the extreme to have such a wide choice available to them.

Yet even with all that choice it has to be said – if only by me – that the Jamaica 1976 is on its own terms, superlative.  It’s complex to a fault, tasty beyond hope, balanced beyond dreams, a quietly amazing dram, destined to become a unicorn in its own right, like one of the old Demeraras Velier nervously slipped into the marketplace so many years ago. Somehow – don’t ask me how – I scored a single one of the 183-bottle outturn, perhaps the only one allocated to Canada, which had been sitting in Edmonton for two years gathering dust, ignored and passed over.  Did I regret it? A little. Did I save it? Not a chance. This one is all about cracking, savouring…and then sharing. 

(#1000)(93/100)

Other notes

  • The presentation of the bottle is first rate.  Red leather box, embossed logo, extra cork, a book of small details about the company and the rum – and two bottles, one small 50ml mini to play with and the full sized bottle.
  • My sincere thanks to Richard Seale, who took time out on two separate occasions to answer some questions and provide context and background.  He is on the tasting panel for the Last Drops Distillers and apparently enjoys the experience enormously.
  • My appreciation also to Matt Pietrek who helped me check on some historical details.
  • There is no information as to where the barrel was sourced. URM in Liverpool, maybe, but I somehow think this is one of those rum barrels some whisky outfit had squirrelled away someplace. Just a hunch.
  • Are there any other rums like this, from so far back, still ageing in any bottler’s portfolio? Unlikely, unless some of the old Scottish whisky houses are holding on to old barrels in dark cellars, unseen and maybe even forgotten by mere mortals. Richard suggested that there won’t be, either. There was a three year minimum age rule in play for whiskies since around 1916 that was also adopted by rum makers, so the incentive was to either release relatively young aged rums or send bulk abroad; and only after that rule was relaxed in 1973 or so, was there a gradually emerging market for single barrels. This, he theorises, is one of the main reasons why there are almost no bottled single barrel uber-aged rums in existence pre-dating the 1970s, and even the oddballs of the Cadenhead 1965 Guyanese rum, or the 1941 Long Pond, may just be the rare exceptions that prove the rule.

El Destilado Wild Fermented Oaxaca Unaged White Rum – Review

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May 222023
 

Few even within the rum world and almost nobody outside it, will remember the small UK indie bottler El Destilado about which I and a couple of others wrote in our reviews of the fascinating, off-the-reservation Aguardiente de Panela, a rum from a tiny back-country distillery in Mexico. The three British guys who run El Destilado are unabashed agave lovers and dabble with rums only as a kind of sideshow; yet so enormous was the impact that that single limited edition artisanal rum made, that not only did I immediately try to buy all available rums which the little indie had released, but added the word panela to my vocabulary, started researching artisanal Mexican spirits like aguardientes and charandas, and marvelled yet again at the sheer diversity of sugar cane spirits.

This white unaged rum is another from the southern state of Oaxaca in Mexico, and originates in a small hill town of some three thousand inhabitants called Santa Maria Tlalixtac, which is remote enough not to have any highway coming anywhere near it; one wonders how on earth the guys even found the place, let alone the third generation distiller who makes it, Isidore Krassel Peralta2. As with the Aguardiente noted above, the rum shares some DNA with grogues, clairins, backwoods cachacas, kokuto shochus, arrack and charandas – which is to say it is made individually according to their own methods, and primarily for local consumption (see historical notes below) and with tastes blasting out in all directions.

Consider the production stats: the masterfully minimalist label states it derives from cane juice made from Java cane, itself grown on small fields at altitude, hand harvested, crushed with a gas-powered trapiche, fermented with naturally-occurring (“wild”) yeast for five days3 in seven 1200-liter stainless steel tanks, and then squeezed through an 8-plate steel column still which is of the founder’s own design and make dating back to the 1930s (it’s been tinkered with ever since), and which produces no heads or tails.

What comes out the other end and bottled for El Destilado is nothing short of amazing. There I was in the Black Parrot bar in London (with the itinerant Richard Nicholson, both of us making occasional sheep’s eyes at the helpful and very pretty bartender Marine who was pouring our flight of five and laughing at our seriousness), and when I took my first sniff of the white rum that is the subject of this review, so astounding was the initial nose that my first tremblingly written and near disbelieving comment was “Would you just smell that!!”

Aromas jetted and frothed out of the glass in all directions – nicely intense musky and tart white cane juice spiked with alcohol were the first; then plasticine and rubber and brine, extremely dry and very very clear, stopping itself from being blade-sharp and dangerous by a mere whisker. Pine needles, lemon juice, yoghurt, olives and dish washing soap clashed and banged together without apology with crisp green apples, grapes and gooseberries, to say nothing of iodine, florals and even a touch of grass and herbs. The low strength — 41.5%, should have mentioned this before — which I would occasionally see as a problem, actually helps here because it tames what would otherwise be a hurricane of rumstink and tones it down so it actually becomes quite good and really accessible.

The fun doesn’t stop there, and the palate takes the handoff neatly, then sprints ahead.  It tastes dry, arid, minty, and reeks of alcoholic cane juice, like a mojito or a ti-punch but without the additional ingredients (no, really). There are tastes of watery sugar cane syrup, licorice, crushed mint, ripe apples, grapes and even green peas (!!), tart, briny, pine-y and smoky all at once. “It’s almost a mescal,” observed Richard sagely, his eyes crossed and his speech slurred (though it was only our first rum of the evening), as he tried masterfully not to upchuck his lunch of South Island orc flank. I concurred in principle, but honestly, you’d not mistake one for the other – this is a rum through and through and it concluded with a sort of rough, slouching grace: sharp, firm and gnarly, redolent of spearmint, sugar water, thyme, brine, half-ripe tart fruits and a bag of pepper-stuffed olives.

Man, that’s some experience, let me tell you, the more so because it does kind of come at you so unexpectedly, with all the in-your-face kinetic aggro of a 1970s Amitabh Bachchan movie. It’s a smorgasbord of smells and flavours that collapse together with a bang and the only real mystery is how a rum of a mere 41.5% can show off so much. Taken aback at first, I ended up with a completely positive opinion of the thing: because, at end, I truly felt that it was not some feeble attempt to copy nobler sires, but a celebration of gusto, of gumption, from a company unafraid to make bold gestures. Trust me, this is a rum from which you will not walk away unmoved. Unshaken you might be, but I can almost guarantee that you will be stirred.

(#998)(85/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Historical background

The distillery of make doesn’t seem to have a name or a company title.  It looks like it’s just called “Krassel’s” and they also make rum under their own brand of Cañada which is primarily marketed in the USA.  If the name sounds vaguely Teutonic, that’s because it is: the paterfamilias left Germany just before the First World war and came to Veracruz in 1917.  Working various odd jobs and constantly moving to where there was employment, he ended up in the Cañada region of Oaxaca, got married and assisted in small batch distillation on the distillery of the farm where he worked.  After he gained sufficient expertise, he designed and built his own still and began distilling aguardiente on his own account in Santa Maria Tlalixtac, where he settled down.

That still is understandably famous, not the least because it continued to be tinkered with and improved upon as the years passed by Max’s three sons (Max Jr., Isidoro and one other).  As the rum he produced improved in quality its reputation spread, but the lack of roads proved to be a hindrance to distribution and using mule pack trains to transport lots of 40-litre jugs was impractical.  By the 1960s and beyond, the sons got pilot’s licences, bought a Cessna and used it to ferry their rum around the small surrounding communities for their fiestas and local shops. The third generation continued to be involved in the family enterprise, mostly Isidoro’s four sons.

It’s unclear when this happened — my guess is over the last decade ort so — but two American distributors now manage the rum brand’s importation into the USA, so its profile is definitely increasing there. El Destilado is, however, a UK company run by a trio of young enthusiasts and is separate from these; they do not mention the Cañada brand at all and distribute mostly in the UK and Europe.

Other notes

  • The company website for Krassel’s is quite informative and is worth a read through
  • Alex over at the The Rum Barrel Blog has reviewed the overproof version of this rum in 2021 and scored it 81/100 on his scale (about 86 on mine).  Rum-X has two ratings, one of 7/10 and one of 8/10. Not much else out there
  • Good background notes on aguardientes and Mexican rum culture can be found in the Panela review mentioned above.

 

Pitterson “Dry Rum” Rhum Blanc – Review

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Apr 242023
 

It’s almost a foregone conclusion that 99% of the readers of this article won’t know a thing about this rhum and its brand, and until I started researching the bottle, I didn’t either.  That’s an increasingly rare thing these days, considering that the writings of so many stellar bloggers over the last decade, combined with Rum Ratings and Rum-X, make it almost impossible for any brand to escape notice. Yet here we are, sipping at a peculiar bottle of white rum I bought completely on a whim (mostly because I can’t resist not knowing more about it).

The company that released it was once an independent French bottler in Bordeaux called William Pitters who mostly specialised in cognac, and occasionally rums as well – a couple of years ago Oliver Scars procured a 1970 HSE they had released, for example. They appear to have mostly issued rhums from Martinique as well as some punches and whiskies (Sir Pitterson whisky was a thing even if we don’t know who he was either) and on top of that, been something of a distributor too – but the source of their rhum was never disclosed. The date of formation of the company looks to be 2001, from a coming together of many tiny brands, and nowadays a much larger conglomerate called Marie Brizard Wine & Spirits is the owner4. This is more tangential to the review, though, so I provide their history below.

Exactly what we have in the glass is unclear – for one thing, I’m not entirely sure the brand exists or is being made any longer. The source distillery is a mystery – as noted, Pitterson did issue a rhum from HSE before, and Marie Brizard, the subsequent owner, had a distribution relationship with La Mauny – so we don’t know source or still or (maybe) age. Yet, although no review or online store is to be found carrying this rhum, I suspect it’s still around, and if it’s been discontinued then it was in all likelihood fairly recently; the bottle and label design is too sleek and modern, the price paid was too low, and several small restaurants, bars and cafes in France mention on their menus that they have it. 

Leaving aside the murkiness of the rhum’s origin, I can see why they would. It may “only” be a standard strength white rhum, it has a lovely opening nose of white chocolate, praline, almonds and nougat – in other words, a bar of white toblerone (of the kind Grandma Caner reliably sends me every year at least once). It’s creamy and delicate, hardly seemingly dry at all; there is a light herbal aroma, grassy notes and sugar water that characterises an agricole, but here it’s mixed in with Danish butter cookies, chocolate cake batter like your mother allowed you to lick off the spoon after she was done; and unsweetened yoghurt. 

The way it goes down is nice as well – nothing too bombastic, nothing too aggressive, just an easy sip, tasting of vaguely salty butter cookies, sugar water, vanilla and blancmange, plus a little toasted wonderbread and cheerios cereal (go figure). The herbal aspects of the aroma don’t really carry over here, and there are few if any citrus or acidic notes – what one gets is mostly ‘neutral’ fleshy fruit like sapodilla, melon, dates, papaya, and the finish is mostly without distinction, being short, easy and mild, giving a last dash of cereal and sugar water fruits, with perhaps a bit of watermelon thrown in.

Overall it’s a rum that plants its flag firmly in the midrange. It appears made to be a mixing rum and is just good and easy enough to sip on (though this would not really be my recommendation). It may only be 40% ABV, but feels somehow heavier, firmer, a tad stronger and even if you’re used to more powerful cask strength fare, it can’t be denied that the rhum tries its best, gives a good account for itself, and is a decent price for what it does deliver. As I say, it’s not clear whether it remains a commercially manufactured product, but if you see a bottle for sale someplace on your rumshop excursions, it’s no loss if you get one.

(#991)(82/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Other notes

  • The rum does not claim to be an agricole – it implies such by the use of the “rhum blanc” on the label.  Yet, given it supposedly hails from Martinique, the wording and spelling is not unjustified. Overall, based on taste, I’d say that it is indeed an agricole.
  • My bottle has a Portuguese tax stamp; I bought it with a batch of Madeira rhums so it may have simply ended up there.  The lack of production and geographical information is unfortunate.

Historical notes – Marie Brizard

The firm of Marie Brizard was founded way back in 1755 by (you guessed it) Marie Brizard whose anisette was hit among the members of the ancien régime and who soon branched out into citrus liqueurs. The company stayed privately held by her descendants, and moved into sales all over the American continents over the following century; they started their own modern advertising in the late 1800s and were even exhibited in several World’s Fairs. Expanding the portfolio to include other spirits (as well as fruit juices and cordials) were good business decisions for the company, and by the post-WW2 years, due to canny product placement in French films of the time, the brands became near-iconic. William Grant bought in with a minority stake in the 1980s as a consequence of their distributorship arrangement for whisky dating back to the 1950s, but were so excluded from any decision-making that in 1994 they relinquished their association.  

This situation of familial ownership, control and decision making continued until 2013, when a severe downturn in the market and mounting losses forced Marie Brizard to convert debt to shares…which were then snapped up by an American investment firm Oaktree Capital Management, who held nearly 20% of the voting rights. Continuing cash flow problems opened the doors for capital injections and share purchases by Compagnie Européenne de Prize de Participation (COFEPP, holding company which heads the La Martiniquaise Bardinet group), which as of 2019 held a majority shareholding of 51% while aiming for more, and can therefore be said to own the company…and so also the Pitterson brand. 

Damoiseau Rhum Agricole Blanc 50% White Rhum – Review

 1 Response »
Apr 172023
 

After more than a decade of writing about rhum agricole, its not entirely surprising that I’ve written more about Martinique rhums than Guadeloupe’s or Reunion’s or Madeira’s…yet more about Damoiseau’s products than any other distillery on any of these islands.  There’s just something about the subtly sumptuous roundness of their rhums that appeals to me, which is an observation I’ve made about Guadeloupe rhums as a whole before. Martinique rhums may be more elegant, more artistic, more precisely dialled in…but Guadeloupe’s rhums are often a whole lot more fun.

Therefore my statistical appreciation for Damoiseau makes it peculiar that I’ve never actually written anything about one of their solid, down to earth island staples – the 50º rhum agricole blanc, in this case, which is one of their regular line of bartenders’ rhums that also comes in variations of 40º and 55º (the numbers represent the ABV). And oddly, I’ve been keeping a weather eye out for it, ever since Josh Miller did his personal agricole challenge back in 2016 and the 55º came out on top.

Today we’ll get to that, and to begin with, let’s run down the stats. It is a cane juice rhum (of course), immediately set to ferment after crushing for a day or two (24-36 hours is the usual time), before being run through a traditional column still to emerge frothing, hissing, spitting and snarling at around 88% ABV (this is what Damoiseau’s own site says, and although there are other sources that say 72%, you can guess which one I’m going with). Here’s where it gets interesting: the rhum is in fact aged a bit – except they don’t call it that. They say it’s “rested” – by which they mean the distillate is dunked into massive wooden foudres of perhaps 30,000-litre capacity and left to chill out and settle down and maybe play some dominos while being regularly aerated by constant stirring and agitation. Then after it’s considered to be ready — which can be anywhere from three to six months — it’s drawn off, diluted to the appropriate strength, and bottled. It’s unclear whether any filtration takes place to remove colour but somehow I doubt it – there’s a pale yellow tinge to it that hints at the wood influence, however minimal.

Anyway, what does it sample like? In a word – lekker. It reminds me of all the reasons I like unaged white rhums and why I never tire of sampling agricoles.  It smells of gherkins and light red peppers in sweet vinegar; brine and olives and sweet sugar water.  Then of course there are pears, cooking herbs (parsley and sage and mint), green grasses, watermelon, and papaya and it’s just a delight to inhale this stuff.

While the stated purpose of such white rhums is to make a ti’punch — at which I’m sure this does a bang up job — for consistency’s sake I have to try ‘em neat and here too, there’s nothing bad to say…the heated pungency of the rhum is amazing (I can only imagine what the 55º is like).  It is unapologetically rough when initially sipped without warning, then calms down quickly and ends up simply being strong and unyielding and flavourful beyond expectations. There is the obligatory note of sugar cane sap, the sense of new mown grass on a hot and sunny day with the sprinkler water drying on hot concrete alongside. There are the watery fruit the nosed promised – pears, white guavas, papayas; some delicate citrus notes (lime zest and cumin); a touch of basil and mint; and overall a smooth and almost-hot potency that slides on the palate without savagery or bite, just firmness and authority. And the finish is exactly like that – a bit shortish, sweet, minerally, and herbal with sugar cane sap, light fruits…the very model of a modern major agricole.

 

This is a blanc rhum that still surprised with its overall quality. For one thing, it was more civilised than other such rhums I recall (and I remember the Sajous), and there were subtle notes coiling through the experience that suggested the foudres in which it rested had a bit more to offer than just sage advice.  For another it’s quite clean goes down rather more easily than one might expect and while never straying too far from its cane juice roots, still manages to provide a somewhat distinct, occasionally unusual experience.

So, rested or aged, oak or steel, unaged or not quite…it doesn’t really matter – my contention is simply that any time in a reactive environment, however short, does change the base distillate, if only a little. That’s merely an observation, mind, not a criticism; in any case, the taste profile does support the thesis — because the 50 is subtly drier, richer and more complex than some completely fresh unaged still strength cane juice popskull that I’ve had in years past. It tastes pretty damned fine, and at the end, it comes together with a sort of almost-refined rhythm that shouldn’t work, but yet does, and somehow manages to salvage some elegance from all that rough stuff and provides a tasting experience to savour.

(#989)(85/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Compagnie des Indes Fiji 2010 (Secret Distillery) 10 Year Old – Review

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Mar 232023
 

Compagnie des Indes, run by the flamboyant and cheerful Florent Beuchet, was one of the first independent bottlers whose rums I found and started reviewing, along with Rum Nation and the original Renegade and yes, Velier. The small company is still going strong, and after having made its bones with some really good single cask bottlings — I have fond memories of their Indonesian rum, for example — did some very unusual one-offs (Florida, Thailand, Ghana, El Salvador), and also expanded into blends, much as 1423 has done, with names as evocative as Tricorn, Blacklice, Boulet de Canon, Veneragua, Barbagaya, Caraibes, Dominidad, Kaiman and (on my list to try for sure) the Great Whites. Yet, as with most independents, while it is the softer blends that provide the cash flow, it’s the cask bottlings that are deemed the cream of the crop, and form the edifice upon which the Compagnie’s reputation is considered to rest.

The rum for today is one of these: a molasses-based rum from Fiji, distilled in 2010 on a column still, aged seven years there and three years in Europe, resulting in an outturn of 407 bottles, and whose provenance is not disclosed.

The precedent for such demure modesty in the naming is admittedly not new. Sometimes pre-existing sales arrangements with other brands — even the distillery’s own — come with the condition that third party bottlings don’t get to capitalise on the distillery’s name; sometimes it’s because the provenance is not entirely nailed down; sometimes it’s reverse marketing. Whatever the reason, upon further consideration, the amused cynic in me posits that perhaps there’s a good reason for a rum coming from the only rum-making enterprise on Fiji to proclaim it comes from a “Secret Distillery”: the fact that the rum, alas, isn’t that interesting. 

There is, you see, not a whole lot going on with the nose as it stands. Granted 44% isn’t the strongest rum I’ve ever tried, and indeed it was the puniest of the rums in that evening’s first flight. Yet even taking that into account the rum is something of a lightweight: some light apples, cider and yoghurt, followed by wispy, watery fruits (pears, watermelon, papaya), some grapes, and licorice. There’s a line of sugar cane sap and lemon meringue pie here and there, just difficult to come to grips with and it wafts away too quickly. There should be more to a sipping rum from one barrel than a nose this ephemeral, I’m thinking.

Tasting it reinforces this impression of “move along folks, nothing to see here.” The rum has a firm feel on the tongue, yet you’d be hard pressed to discourse on any single component of what comprises it. Some light, white fruits – guavas, pears, melon – tasting the slightest bit salty at times, overlaid with a whiff of acetone. If you pushed you might hazard a guess that you sense papaya or kiwi fruit, sugar water and maybe a slight briny aspect, akin to salt caramel chocolate. And the finish is just that, a finish, and a quick one at that.  White guavas, a hint of brine, flowers and acetone, all weak and airy and very hard to detect.

Several years ago I tried an earlier one of the Compagnie’s Fiji rums – that one was from 2004, also from South Pacific, also ten years old, also 44%.  At the time it was too new for me to make any sweeping statements about it, though I remarked that it wasn’t quite my cup of tea (for reasons other than those noted here). In the interim there have been quite a few more candidates from the distillery, including those released by Bounty, Samaroli, L’Esprit, TCRL, the Rum Cask, Duncan Taylor, and even the Compagnie a few more times.  None have had this almost indifferent aroma and vague palate, at any strength.

So we know from years of subsequent experience that both the Compagnie and South Pacific can do a whole lot better, and there is rum out there from the distillery which is just shy of magnificent.  Since I know that, I can only assume that the barrel this was aged in was simply exhausted and had nothing left to give except maybe good advice.  My own recommendation, then, is simply that it’s a pass. Fortunately, given the sheer volume and variety of excellent rum that Florent has put out over the last decade, there is no shortage of good and better rums from the Compagnie that can take its place.

(#983)(79/100) ⭐⭐⭐

 

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