The Lone Caner – Page 23 – A Solo Reviewer's Take on Rums

Big, Bad & Brutal – A Short History of the 151s

Apr 232020

Introduction Brutta ma buoni is an Italian phrase meaning “ugly but good”, and as I wrote in the SMWS 3.5 “Marmite” review, describes the oversized codpieces of the “151” types of rums very nicely indeed. These glute-flexing ABV beefcakes have been identifiably knocking people into stupors for at least since the 1930s and possibly even before that — and while they were never entirely good, when it came to serving up a real fast drunk with a hot-snot shot of whup-ass, they really couldn’t be beat. Flavours were often secondary, proof-power everything. Everyone involved with rums — whether bartender, barfly [Click here for the full review…]

1423 S.B.S. Brazil/Barbados 2019 2YO Blended Rum – Review

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Apr 202020

1423 S.B.S. Brazil/Barbados 2019 2YO Blended Rum - Review

It’s not often we see a multi-country or multi-style blend released by an independent bottler. The trend in IBs in recent years has more been towards the exacting individuality of a single cask from a single place (or a single still, in the case of the Guyanese rums). And that makes sense, especially for up-and-coming new micro-indies, who work with one barrel at a time, for economic reasons if nothing else. That hasn’t stopped some companies from trying to push the envelope, of course, in the never ending Red Queen’s race to wring a few extra points of taste out [Click here for the full review…]

Gordon & MacPhail Demerara 1974-2003 29 Year Old Rum – Review

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Apr 162020

Gordon & MacPhail Demerara 1974-2003 29 Year Old Rum – Review

1974 was clearly a good year for barrel selection by the Scottish whisky maker Gordon & MacPhail. So good in fact that they were able to release several exceptional rums from that year – one was in 1999, the near spectacular 25 year old, which my Danish friends kicked themselves for missing when it came up for a tasting one year in Berlin. They got their own back at me by locating this slightly older version that was laid to sleep in the same year, emerged 29 years later (in 2003), and which is also a quietly amazing aged Demerara [Click here for the full review…]

Compagnie des Indes Nicaragua 1998 17 YO Rum – Review

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Apr 132020

Compagnie des Indes Nicaragua 1998 17 YO Rum - Review

Of all the Central American rums I’ve tried, Nicaraguan rums from the Flor de Caña facilities probably are the least like that light Spanish style so popularized by Bacardi. They inhabit a tasting style niche that isn’t quite Latin (or Cuban, if you will), but something that blends the light column still taste with something a bit deeper and richer. It makes for a nice amalgam, though it must be said that their own rums don’t always showcase that effectively, and sometimes it takes an indie to make the point with a single barrel expression. Not as a rule, not [Click here for the full review…]

Superb Tortuga Light Rum (1980s)

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Apr 092020

Rumaniacs Review R-113 | 0717 My apologies to anyone who has bought and enjoyed the Superb Tortuga Light Rum on some Caribbean cruise that docked in the Cayman Islands for the last three decades or more….but it really isn’t much of anything. It continues to sell though, even if nowadays its star has long faded and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone of the current crop of writers or commentators who has ever tried it. The white rum, a blend of unidentified, unspecified Jamaican and Barbadian distillates bottled at 40%, is not really superb and not from the island [Click here for the full review…]

Limtuaco Single Cask Pot Still Heavy Rum – Review

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Apr 062020

Limtuaco Single Cask Pot Still Heavy Rum - Review

I should begin by warning you that this rum is sold on a very limited basis, pretty much always to favoured bars in the Philippines, and then not even by the barrel, but by the bottle from that barrel – sort of a way to say “Hey look, we can make some cool sh*t too! Wanna buy some of the other stuff we make?”. Export is clearly not on the cards…at least, not yet. But most of it is blended with the same company’s middling rum called the Very Old Captain, which wasn’t “very” anything, not all that old, and [Click here for the full review…]

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society

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Apr 012020

Introduction If ever there was a hook, a cachet, a point of distinctiveness, something that set apart an independent bottler’s rums from the pack of baying pretenders, surely the SMWS has nailed it. Here is a bottler of primarily whiskies, that does no advertising, issues barely any rums, and yet whose rum-cred can be said to be up there with any of the Big Names. And this is in spite of their relative obscurity and rarity, and their cost. Their rums are never available on supermarket racks, only on the shelves of its own Members’ Rooms, its partners or online [Click here for the full review…]

Kirk & Sweeney 18 Year Old Rum – Review

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Mar 292020

Let’s dispense with the origin story right away. Call me jaundiced, but after doing this for over ten years, I not only roll my eyes when I read about rum heritage and pirates and prohibition heroes and (in this case) rum-running schooners, but fight a near-overwhelming urge to fall asleep. The facts are as follows: this is a rum named after a boat; it is made by Bermudez in the Dominican Republic; launched in 2012; it is claimed to be 18 years true ageing (a statement that is something of a bone of contention); it is a light, standard-strength Latin-style [Click here for the full review…]

Rhum Rich Vernhes (~1960s)

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Mar 252020

Rumaniacs Review #112 | 0714 Bought at an auction for curiosity and an interest in old rhums, it was dated in the listing to the sixties or seventies, and because of its association with two other (Bardinet) bottles from Martinique, it was also deemed to be from there (the info was provided by the seller, so it strikes me as reasonable). The address given on the label is now a modern building which houses a Hermes shop, and one of the only clues that an online search provides is a 1906 listing from the Milan International Exhibition, which notes Vernhes [Click here for the full review…]

Trois Rivières Rhum Vieux Agricole Millésime 2006 (Cask Strength) – Review

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Mar 232020

Trois Rivières Rhum Vieux Agricole Millésime 2006 (Cask Strength) - Review

If I had a single regret about tasting this exceptional cask strength millésime rum from Trois Rivieres which was distilled in August 2006 and bottled eight years later, it’s that I neglected the opportunity to find and try the single cask version of the same vintage. That one was bottled at 43% while the cask strength I was trying here was more than ten points higher, and it would have been fascinating to see how they ranked against each other. Yet even without that comparison, there’s no doubt when you put together a range of variously aged agricoles (as I [Click here for the full review…]

La Mauny Rhum Ambrė Agricole (Heritage 1749) – Review

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Mar 192020

La Mauny Rhum Ambrė Agricole (Heritage 1749) - Review

Staying with some of the lesser-known agricoles I’ve delayed writing about for far too long, let’s talk about La Mauny for a bit. This is one of the larger establishments on Martinque, and now owned by Campari, which bought both it and Trois Rivieres in late 2019, ending nearly three hundred years of (various) families’ or witless conglomerates’ control over it. That history is a bit lengthy, so I’ll put it at the bottom and dive right in to the main schtick. The La Mauny distillery remains one of the largest in Martinique, both for its planted cane area and [Click here for the full review…]

La Favorite Rhum Agricole “Coeur Ambrė” – Review

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Mar 162020

La Favorite Rhum Agricole "Coeur Ambrė" - Review

With all those distilleries dotting the landscape of Martinique, one could be forgiven for thinking there’s rather little to chose among the agricoles they make aside from canny marketing. I used to think so myself, until I began to amass an ever-increasing series of tasting notes and memories on these rhums from the myriad estates, and realized that there are indeed noticeable points of difference between any one and any other. And that’s not just between the distilleries, but among the various expressions issued from the same one, as well. Saint James is a good example of this, with their [Click here for the full review…]

Cor Cor “Green” Okinawan White Rum – Review

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Mar 122020

Cor Cor "Green" Okinawan White Rum - Review

The Cor Cor “Green”, cousin to the molasses-based “Red” (both are actually white – the colours refer to their labels’ hues) is an order of magnitude more expensive than its scarlet labelled relative, largely because it is made from cane juice, not molasses, and therefore rather more seasonal in production. The question is, how does the cane juice white compare when run up against its intriguing (if off-beat) molasses-based white. Both are, after all, made by the same master blender who wanted to apply an awamori sensibility to making rum. Tasting the Red and Green side by side, then, is [Click here for the full review…]

Chantal Comte Rhum Agricole Extra Vieux (Depaz) 1975 – Review

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Mar 092020

Chantal Comte Rhum Agricole Extra Vieux (Depaz) 1975 - Review

In a time of exploding visibility of masterful ladies in the rum world – Joy Spence, Maggie Campbell, Trudiann Branker, Karen Hoskins, Dianne Medrano, and so many others – it’s good to also remember Chantal Comte, who bottled her first rum in 1983 (it was a Depaz, and possibly even this one, though I’m still tracking that down), who has fiercely and doggedly stuck with her first love of the French islands’ rums in all the years from then to now. She is, in my opinion, along with Tristan Prodhomme, one of the undiscovered treasures of the indie bottling scene. [Click here for the full review…]

Cor Cor “Red” Okinawan White Rum – Review

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Mar 052020

Cor Cor "Red" Okinawan White Rum - Review

Given Japan has several rums which have made these pages (Ryoma, Ogasawara, Nine Leaves, Helios, Seven Seas), by now most should be aware that just about all of them source their molasses out of the southern islands of Okinawa, if not actually based there themselves. The Grace distillery, who make the Cor Cor line of rums, conforms to that informal rule, yet is unusual in two ways – first, it is still very much a manual operation, somewhat surprising for a nation with a massive technological infrastructure; and it produces rums from both molasses (the red labelled rum we’re looking [Click here for the full review…]

Ron Castillo Imperial (Mexico, 1980s)

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Mar 042020

Rumaniacs Review #111 | 0707 Back country Mexico has creole hooch like the Paranubes to keep the flame of pure rums alive, and larger, better known brands like Mocambo, Ron Prohibido, Los Valientes et al are there for those with deeper wallets or more upscale tastes. And Bacardi has long been known to have made rum in the country – not just their own eponymous brand, but also a lower-priced, lesser-ranked ron called Castillo, which was created specifically to take on low cost alternatives which were cutting into Bacardi’s market share. That’s the rum I have in front of me, [Click here for the full review…]

Fortin “Heroica” Paraguay Rum – Review

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Mar 022020

Every now and then we find some peculiar, almost completely unknown rum in some unlikely spot, and are struck by exactly how far flung and widespread the production of the spirit really is. I mean, if you aren’t a rumfest junkie or deep diver (and perhaps even if you are), can you recall much about Paraguayan rums? Paraguay — one of two landlocked countries in South America (quick, name the other one) — is something of a newcomer on the international rum scene, and most of the rums they have made that are distributed abroad have only come on the [Click here for the full review…]

Mad River PX Limited Edition Rum – Review

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Feb 272020

Mad River PX Limited Edition Rum - Review

It must be something intrinsic to the USA and their commercial distilling culture, that almost every distillery I’ve come across seems to like making ten different thing off their apparatus. It’s as if they view a single point of focus, a single product line, as an anathema – a still must be multipurpose, and work to earn its keep by wringing the maximum different amount of spirits out of it. And this leads to my oft-repeated remark that American distillers seem to like making whiskies, gins, vodkas and other stuff — and produce rum not because of real love for [Click here for the full review…]

Saint James Rhum Vieux Agricole 7 Year Old – Review

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Feb 232020

Saint James Rhum Vieux Agricole 7 Year Old - Review

Recently we’ve looked at rums from Jamaica, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Japan, India, Australia, Guadeloupe, Haiti and Mauritius (and that’s just since the year began) which goes a far way to showcasing the incredible variety of the spirit. Today we’ll try something from Martinique – and when one considers the fame of Saint James, home of the near legendary 1885 Rhum (one of oldest rhums I’ve ever tried) and from which I’ve tasted several old editions from the past, well, it’s a wonder I haven’t come here more often to try their current offerings. At this time, the Saint James [Click here for the full review…]

Doctor Bird Jamaican Rum – Review

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Feb 192020

The strangely named Doctor Bird rum is another company’s response to Smith and Cross, Rum Fire and the Stolen Overproof rum. These are all made or released in the USA (Stolen hails from New Zealand but its rum business is primarily in the US), but the rums themselves come from Jamaica, and there the similarity sort of breaks down, for the Doctor Bird is one of the few from Worthy Park — one of the New Jamaicans which has quietly been gaining its own accolades over the last few years — and not from Hampden or Monymusk or Longpond or [Click here for the full review…]

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