Hamilton 151 Overproof Rum – Review

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Oct 052020
 
Hamilton 151 Overproof Rum - Review

Although just about every conversation about the Hamilton 151 remarks on its purpose to replicate the Lemon Hart 151 as a basic high proof bar-room mixer, this is a common misconception – in point of fact its stated objective was to be better than Lemon Hart. And if its reputation has been solidly entrenched as a staple of that aspect of the drinking world, then it is because it really is one of the few 151s to satisfy both rum drinkers and cocktail shakers with its quality in a way the LH did not always.  Back in the late 2000s [Click here for the full review…]


High Spirits 1975 Fine Old 32 YO Demerara Rum – Review

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Sep 302020
 
High Spirits 1975 Fine Old 32 YO Demerara Rum - Review

In spite of rums from various 1970s years having been issued throughout that period (many are still around and about and surfacing every now and then at wallet-excavating prices), it is my contention that 1974-1975 were the real years that disco came to town.  No other years from the last century except perhaps 1986 resonate more with rumistas; no other years have as many Demeraras of such profound age, of such amazing quality, issued by as many different houses.  I’d like to say I’ve lost count of the amount of off-the-scale ‘75s I’ve tasted, but that would be a damned [Click here for the full review…]


Smatt’s Silver Jamaican Rum – Review

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Sep 272020
 
Smatt's Silver Jamaican Rum - Review

It’s peculiar how little information there is on Smatt’s that isn’t all razzamatazz and overhyped positive posturing meant to move cases. Almost nobody has written anything of consequence about it, there’s no review of credibility out there, while the product website is a cringeworthy mass of spouting verbiage long on gushing praise and short on anything we might actually want to know. When you’re relegated to furtively checking out Rumratings and Difford’s to at least see what drinkers are saying, well, you know you’ve got an issue.   Smatt is, according to those sources I’ve managed to check, a small-batch, boutique, [Click here for the full review…]


Skotlander V (1400 sømil) Danish Rum – Review

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Sep 222020
 
Skotlander V (1400 sømil) Danish Rum - Review

Let’s start at the beginning.  Skotlander rum is not made in Scotland, but in Denmark, for the very good reason that the founder, Anders Skotlander, is a Dane with the name. Denmark has long been known (to me, at any rate) as home of some of the most rum-crazy people in Europe, and Anders decided to walk the walk by actually creating some of his own, in 2013. He purchased a Müller copper pot still, sourced sugar cane molasses and in 2014 released 1000 bottles of RUM I, a white, at 40%. It promptly won a gold medal at the [Click here for the full review…]


Compagnie des Indes Dominican Republic 2000-2016 15 YO Rum – Review

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Sep 212020
 
Compagnie des Indes Dominican Republic 2000-2016 15 YO Rum - Review

One of the interesting things about the Compagnie des Indes Dominican Republic rum we’re looking at today, is that we don’t often see rums from the half island go into anything except a mild standard strength blend.  It’s rare to see a single cask version and even rarer at this kind of power – 64.9%. Here is a rum that at that level of oomph had to be a special edition for Denmark only (see other notes), probably because nobody back in the day wanted to take a chance on a rum and a country not known for individualistic excess [Click here for the full review…]


Savanna Cuvée Maison Blanche 2005 10YO Rum – Review

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Sep 172020
 
Savanna Cuvée Maison Blanche 2005 10YO Rum - Review

Savanna’s 2005 Cuvée Maison Blanche 10 Year Old rum, in production since 2008 is a companion to the 2005 10 YO Traditionnel and a somewhat lesser version of the superb 2006 10YO HERR issued a year later, and that one, you will remember, blew my socks off back when I tried it.  Going strictly  by the numbers, it hardly seems to be very different from the various traditionnel (i.e., molasses based) rums that are released with great regularity by the distillery.  But actually, these “White House” 10 YO rums date back to when the 1998 edition was first released as [Click here for the full review…]


Savanna Lontan Grand Arôme Unaged White Rum – Review

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Sep 142020
 
Savanna Lontan Grand Arôme Unaged White Rum - Review

It’s perhaps unfair that only with the emergence of the 2016 HERR 10 YO and the LMDW 60th Anniversary white in the same year, that the distillery of Savanna on Reunion began to pick up some serious street cred. I think it’s one of those under-the-radar distilleries that produces some of the best rums in the world, but it always and only seems to be some special limited edition like the Cuvee Maison Blanche, or a “serious” third party bottling (e.g. from Habitation Velier, Rum Nation or Wild Parrot) that gets people’s ears to prick up.  And it’s then that [Click here for the full review…]


Watson’s Trawler Rum – Review

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Sep 102020
 
Watson's Trawler Rum - Review

It’s been many years since the first of those blended dark-coloured UK supermarket rums dating back decades crossed my path – back then I was writing for Liquorature, had not yet picked up the handle of “The ‘Caner”, and this site was years in the future.  Yet even now I recall how much I enjoyed Robert Watson’s Demerara Rum, and I compared it positively with my private tippling indulgence of the day, the Canada-made Young’s Old Sam blend — and remembered them both when writing about the Wood’s 100 and Cabot Tower rums. All of these channelled some whiff of [Click here for the full review…]


Cadenhead Green Label 25 Year Old Guyana Rum – Review

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Sep 072020
 
Cadenhead Green Label 25 Year Old Guyana Rum - Review

Cadenhead just refuses to depart the rum scene, which is probably a good thing for us.  We see rums too rarely from Berry Bros & Rudd, Gordon & MacPhail or AD Rattray, who were among the first introductions many of us ever had to fullproof single cask rums (even if they were sadly misguided whisky bottlers who didn’t know where or what the good stuff truly was). And there’s Cadenhead, persistently truckin’ away, releasing a bit here and a bit there, a blend or a single cask, and their juice goes up slowly but steadily in value (e.g. the fabled [Click here for the full review…]


Key Rums of the World – The Habitation Velier Series

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Sep 022020
 
Key Rums of the World - The Habitation Velier Series

As the memories of the seminal and ground breaking Demeraras fade and the Caronis climb in price past the point of reason, and the smaller outturns of Velier’s limited editions vanish from our sight, it is good to remember the third major series of rums that Velier has initiated, which somehow does not get all the appreciation and publicity so attendant on the others, or climb in price so rapidly on secondary markets.   This is the Habitation Velier collection, which to my mind has real potential of joining the pantheon of Caronis and those near-legendary Guyanese rums which are so [Click here for the full review…]


St. Lucia Distillers “1931” 4º Edition Rum (2014)

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Aug 302020
 
St. Lucia Distillers “1931” 4º Edition Rum (2014)

Rumaniacs Review #120 | 0757 Each of the 1931 series has some sort of tweak, a point of uniqueness or interest, to make it stand out. The first two, in my estimation at least, were fairly conservative pot-column blending experiments (but very well done). The Third Edition added some sugar to a blend of all four stills and upped the complexity some. By the time they got to 2014, it was clear there was a gleeful maniac running free and unsupervised in the blending area, and he used a bit of just about everything he had in the lab (including [Click here for the full review…]


St. Lucia Distillers “1931” 3º Edition Rum (2013)

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Aug 262020
 
St. Lucia Distillers “1931” 3º Edition Rum (2013)

Rumaniacs Review #119 | 0756 It’s important that we keep in mind the characteristics and backstories of these St. Lucian rums, even if they were discontinued within the memory of just about everyone reading this.  And that’s because I feel that before we turn around twice, another ten years will have passed and it’ll be 2030, and sure as anything, someone new to rum will pipe up and ask “What were they?” And I don’t want us all to mourn and bewail, then, the fact that nobody ever took notes or wrote sh*t down just because “wuz jus’ de odder [Click here for the full review…]


St. Lucia Distillers “1931” 2º Edition Rum (2012)

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Aug 232020
 
St. Lucia Distillers "1931" 2º Edition Rum (2012)

Rumaniacs Review #118 | 0755 It’s been years since I sipped at the well of a “1931” St. Lucian rum – at that time the 2011 First Edition was all that was available and I gave it a decent write up (I liked it) and moved on to the Admiral Rodney, Chairman’s Reserve and other products the company made. However, I never lost my interest in the range and over the years gradually picked up more here and there, with a view to one day adding them to the Key Rums of the World as a set: but since they [Click here for the full review…]


New Grove 2004 Single Barrel 9 YO Mauritius Rum – Review

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Aug 202020
 
New Grove 2004 Single Barrel 9 YO Mauritius Rum - Review

Last time, I was looking at the really quite excellent St. Aubin 10 year old from Mauritius, which was a cane juice, pot-still, decade-old rhum, a type we don’t see very much of – to my memory only the Saint James Coeur de Chauffe comes close, and that wasn’t even aged. St. Aubin certainly seems to like making rums their own way, while New Grove, also from that Indian Ocean island, provides us with rums that seem somewhat more familiar – they flit in profile between El Dorados and Barbadians, I think, with an occasional dash of Worthy Park thrown [Click here for the full review…]


St. Aubin 2003 10 YO Traditional Old Mauritius Rum – Review

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Aug 172020
 
St. Aubin 2003 10 YO Traditional Old Mauritius Rum - Review

Mauritius is another one of those rum producing areas that flits in and out of our collective rumconsciousness, and seems to come up for mention mostly (and only) when a blogger checks out a new indie expression (SBS and Velier spring to mind). Cognoscenti might recall Penny Blue, New Grove, Chamarel or Lazy Dodo rums from the graveyard of reviews past, but honestly, when was the last time you saw one yourself, tried one, or even bought one? St. Aubin is one of the Indian Ocean island distilleries that have been gathering some goodwill of late and should not be [Click here for the full review…]


Santiago de Cuba “Carta Blanca” Cuban White Rum – Review

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Aug 132020
 
Santiago de Cuba "Carta Blanca" Cuban White Rum - Review

There’s a peculiar light yellow lustre to the Santiago de Cuba rum somewhat euphemistically called the Carta Blanca (“White Card”), which is a result, one must assume, of deliberately incomplete filtration. The rum is aged three years in oak casks, so some colour is inevitable, but in anonymous white barroom mixers, that’s usually eliminated by the charcoal used: so whatever colour remains can’t be an accident. It’s likely, in this case, that the makers figured since it was issued at a trembly-kneed sort of please-don’t-hurt-me sub-proof strength, it might be better to leave something behind in case people forgot it [Click here for the full review…]


Pusser’s British Navy “Gunpowder Proof” Rum – Review

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Aug 092020
 
Pusser's British Navy "Gunpowder Proof" Rum - Review

Black Tot day came and went at the end of July with all the usual articles and reviews and happy pictures of people drinking their Navy Rum wannabes. Although it’s become more popular of late (a practice I’m sure rum-selling emporia are happy to encourage), I tend not to pay too much attention to it, since several other countries’ navies discontinued the practice on other days and in other years, so to me it’s just another date. And anyway, seriously, do I really need an excuse to try another rum? Hardly.   However, with the recent release of yet another ‘Tot [Click here for the full review…]


Cadenhead Uitvlugt 1964 36 YO Guyana Rum (PM) – Review

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Aug 052020
 
Cadenhead Uitvlugt 1964 36 YO Guyana Rum (PM) - Review

The Cadenhead 1964 Port Mourant is one of the great unicorns of our time, a rum whose 36 years of ageing sail majestically across the senses, impervious and indifferent to the up-and-coming claimants for the crown of “oldest” and “strongest’ and “bestest” and “mostest”.  Not since the Age of Velier have we seen anything like this and in some ways it supersedes even those behemoths we had all ignored back in the day, because they were “too expensive.” And expensive this is: in June 2020 a variant bottle of this thing (bottled in 2000, 70% ABV) was bid up past [Click here for the full review…]


1423 S.B.S. Versailles 2003 12 Year Old Guyana Rum – Review

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Aug 032020
 
1423 S.B.S. Versailles 2003 12 Year Old Guyana Rum – Review

The three wooden stills now all gathered at DDL’s Diamond facility are called Heritage stills, their wooden greenheart components regularly serviced and replaced, and the questions they pose about the matter of Theseus’s ship are usually ignored. That’s not really important, though, because they may be the three most famous stills in existence, and the taste profiles of the rums they create are known by all dedicated rumistas, who enjoy nothing more than relentlessly analyzing them for the minutest variations and then bickering about it in a never-ending cheerful squabble. My own preference has always been for the stern elegance [Click here for the full review…]


Ron Caribe Añejo Superior 5 Year Old Rum – Review

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Jul 302020
 
Ron Caribe Añejo Superior 5 Year Old Rum - Review

Although the unrealized flashes of interest and originality defining the Mexican Ron Caribe Silver still make it worth a buy, overall I remain at best only mildly impressed with it. Still, given the opportunity, it’s a no-brainer to try the next step up the chain, the 40% ABV standard-strength five year old Añejo Superior. After all, young aged rums tend to be introductions to the higher-end offerings of the company and be the workhorses of the establishment – solid mixing ingredients, occasionally interesting neat pours, and almost always a ladder to the premium segment (the El Dorado 5 and 8 [Click here for the full review…]


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