Ron Santiago de Cuba 25 Year Old – Review

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Jul 142019
 
Ron Santiago de Cuba 25 Year Old - Review

It’s been some time since a current production Cuban rum not made by a third party crossed my path.  Among those was the Santiago de Cuba 12 YO, which, at the time, I enjoyed a lot, and made me anxious to see how older versions from the Cuba Rum Corporation’s stable would work out.  So when the 25 YO became available, you’d better believe I snapped it up, and ran it past a bunch of other Latin rums: a Don Q, the Diplomatico “Distillery Collection” No. 1 and No. 2 rums, a Zafra 21 and just because I could, a [Click here for the full review…]


1423 S.B.S. Enmore 1988 28 Year Old Guyana Rum – Review

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Jul 112019
 
1423 S.B.S. Enmore 1988 28 Year Old Guyana Rum - Review

There’s another S.B.S rum from Trinidad I should really be writing about, tried on that magical evening in Paris when I ran heedless and headfirst into the Mauritius 2008 and the Jamaican DOK 2018, but naah – there’s this other one they made back in 2016, probably long sold out and gone, which I remember equally well.  And that’s the S.B.S. Enmore, distilled in 1988, bottled twenty seven years later, with the sort of solid 51.8% ABV strength that would make the near legendary Bristol Spirits PM 1980 nod approvingly and dab a single ethanol tear from its metaphorical eye. [Click here for the full review…]


Rum Nation Réunion Traditionelle “Cask Strength” 2011 7 YO Rum – Review

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Jul 072019
 
Rum Nation Réunion Traditionelle "Cask Strength" 2011 7 YO Rum - Review

“Austere” says the back label of Rum Nation’s massive rum beefcake from Réunion, and they weren’t kidding. The rhum traditionalle from the French Department is bottled at 60.5% ABV, is seriously violent, a tropically-aged molasses-derived brown bomber, and to my mind it’s quite a step up from the lower-proofed 45% 7 year old agricole they had previously released in 2016.  It is not recommended for people who don’t know what they’re getting into. Why?  Because insofar as it has those wild, fierce and pungent smells and tastes, it’s very much like the new wave of Jamaican rums now making such [Click here for the full review…]


Velier Uitvlugt 1996 18 Year Old Demerara Rum (Mod GS) – Review

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Jul 042019
 
Velier Uitvlugt 1996 18 Year Old Demerara Rum (Mod GS) - Review

2014 was both too late and a bad year for those who started to wake up and realize that Velier’s Demerara rums were something special, because by then the positive reviews had started coming out the door, the prices began their inexorable rise, and, though we did not know it, it would mark the last issuance of any Demeraras of the Age by the Genoese concern headed by Luca Gargano.  Yesu Persaud – DDL’s chairman – was slated to retire by the end of that year, and in early 2015 the new chairman terminated the preferential relationship. That said, it [Click here for the full review…]


M&G Rhum du Cap-Vert Grogue Velha (Aged) – Review

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Jul 012019
 
M&G Rhum du Cap-Vert Grogue Velha (Aged) - Review

M&G out of Cabo Verde, as noted in the review of their tasty little white, stands for Musica e Grogue, a hat tip to the love of island music and island rum that characterized the founders, Jean-Pierre Engelbach (with his fascinating involvement in the dramatic and musical arts over the decades), and Simão Évora, a local Cabo Verde grogue producer and music-devotee. Using one of the five grogue producers in the tiny village of Tarrafal (population = 450, stills = 5, a stat that fascinates everyone who’s ever read it) they produce two main products, the white, and a slightly [Click here for the full review…]


Palmera White Aruba Rum – Review

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Jun 262019
 
Palmera White Aruba Rum - Review

The fourth and last of the four Dutch West Indies rums that I obtained solely to shed some light on the islands is a pale 35% shrug of indifference called the Palmera White Aruba rum. You know me, I have a thing for unapologetically barking-mad high-proofed white rums – but dis ain’ dat, as my bushmen squaddies would say back in the old days. Were you to google it, you’d find that the Palmera Quality Products company produces several rums – notably the White and the Dark “authentic Arubian rums with a rich heritage flavour” at standard strength, and is [Click here for the full review…]


Ron Superior Carta Reserva Aruba Rum – Review

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Jun 242019
 
Ron Superior Carta Reserva Aruba Rum - Review

This is one of those strange rums that clearly exists, but about which nobody seems to know anything, even though I was informed it remains on sale in Aruba to this day. Jazz Singh out of the UK couldn’t help – he rather witheringly remarked that the only local stuff he found on the island was “a lot of imported column rubbish” and that the one distillery Aruba used to have is definitely closed. And good luck with finding any info on the company whose name is on the label, Playa Liquor and Bottling Co, ‘cause that’s equally opaque and [Click here for the full review…]


12 Rum Bottles, Sitting on a Wall…

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Jun 232019
 
12 Rum Bottles, Sitting on a Wall...

It makes no difference one way or the other what kind of bottle encloses a rum…at least not to those who just want to taste it. But let’s be honest: presentation sells, cool design is cool design and sometimes we come across rums which stand out on the shelf just because they look so different from the standard barroom bottle, akin to a wooden chess set of unrecognizable but oh-so-beautiful pieces bought in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar.  And sometimes that has less to do with a fancy label than it does with the very shape of the bottle itself. I am [Click here for the full review…]


M&G Rhum du Cap-Vert Grogue Natural (White) – Review

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Jun 202019
 
M&G Rhum du Cap-Vert Grogue Natural (White) - Review

The “M&G” in the rhum’s title is not, as you might expect, the initials of the two founders of this small operation in Cabo Verde. In a lyrical twist, the letters actually stand for Musica e Grogue: Music and Grog.  Which is original, if nothing else, because artistic touches are not all that common in our world, and such touches are often dismissed as mere frippery meant to distract from a substandard product. In this case, however Jean-Pierre Engelbach, who founded the company with local Cabo Verde grogue producer and music-lover Simão Évora, has an interesting background in the dramatic [Click here for the full review…]


1423 S.B.S. Jamaica 2018 (DOK) Rum – Review

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Jun 172019
 
1423 S.B.S. Jamaica 2018 (DOK) Rum - Review

It’s remarkable how fast the SBS line of rums have exploded onto the rumconsciousness of the world. This is a series released by 1423, the same Danish outfit which made the really quite elegant 2008 Mauritius rum I wrote about with such love a while back, and has received enormously positive word of mouth on social media for the last year or so.  The only similar company I can call to mind that rose so quickly in the public’s esteem would be the Compagnie des Indes, which shared a similarly exacting (and excellent) sense of which barrels to choose and [Click here for the full review…]


Romdeluxe R1 “Wild Tiger” Jamaican Rum (Hampden) – Review

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Jun 132019
 
Romdeluxe R1 "Wild Tiger" Jamaican Rum (Hampden) - Review

Romdeluxe in Denmark is at this point (2019) more a commercial rum club that makes private label bottlings and runs promotions around the country, than a true independent bottler — but since they do several releases, I’ll call them an indie and move right on from there.  Earlier, in May 2019, they lit up FB by releasing this limited-edition high-ester funk-bomb, the first in their “Wild Series” of rums, with a suitably feral tiger on the label. I can’t tell whether it’s yawning or snarling, but it sure looks like it can do you some damage without busting a sweat [Click here for the full review…]


Vulcão Cabo Verde Grogue – Review

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Jun 092019
 
Vulcão Cabo Verde Grogue - Review

“Could grogue be the next clairin?” asked Dwayne Stewart in a facebook post the other day, when he and Richard Blesgraaf were discussing the Vulcão, and his respondent (you could almost see him smile) replied with a sort of yoda-like zen calm, “Clairin is clairin.”  Which is true. Because beyond the superficial similarities of the two island nations – the relative isolation of the islands, the artisanal nature of their juice, the mom-and-pop rural distillation of the spirit far away from modern developments or technological interference – the truth is that you could not mistake one for the other. At [Click here for the full review…]


Helios Distillery “Kiyomi” White Japanese Rum – Review

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Jun 032019
 
Helios Distillery "Kiyomi" White Japanese Rum - Review

The Kiyomi white rum is made by the Helios Distillery, the same outfit in Japan that makes the very tasty five year old Teeda rum we looked at before. Formed by Tadashi Matsuda in the postwar years (1961) at a time of economic hardship and food privation for Okinawa , the decision was made to distill rum because (a) it could easily be sold to American soldiers stationed there (b) Okinawan sugar was readily available and (c) rice, which normally would have been used to make the more popular local sake, was needed as a food source and could not [Click here for the full review…]


Helios Distillery “Teeda” 5 Year Old Japanese Rum – Review

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May 302019
 
Helios Distillery "Teeda" 5 Year Old Japanese Rum - Review

In any rum festival, if you are moving around with a posse or simply keep your ears open, there’s always one or two new or unknown rums that create an underground buzz. You drift from booth to booth, tasting, talking, writing, thinking, listening, and gradually you separate voices from the din, that quietly remark “Check out that one over there” or “Did you hear about….?” or “You really gotta try…” or a simple, disbelieving “Holy crap!” The Whisper Antigua rum was one of those, Lazy Dodo another; in various years there was the Toucan white, the Compagnie’s Indonesian rum,  the [Click here for the full review…]


Key Rums of the World – Pusser’s 15 Year Old Original Navy Rum

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May 272019
 
Key Rums of the World - Pusser's 15 Year Old Original Navy Rum

When you really get down to it, Pusser’s claim to fame rests on two main planks. The first is that it is they are the true inheritors of the actual British Navy rum recipe after Black Tot Day in 1970.  The second is that they follow it. Unfortunately, neither is completely true, depending on how you look at the background. With respect to the first point, any research done on Navy rums shows that Lyman Hart, Lamb’s and ED&F Man, among others, sold rums to the Royal Navy back in the 1800s (Man became the major supplier in the 1900s, [Click here for the full review…]


Sampan Rhum Vietnam Overproof – Review

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May 262019
 
Sampan Rhum Vietnam Overproof - Review

The Sampan Vietnamese Rhum is made by the Distillerie d’Indochine: and Antoine Pourcuitte, a long haired Frenchman who seems to be channelling Fabio and who lives in Vietnam, is the man who bootstrapped his desire to make good rums into a business that combines a small hotel and bar close to the beach with a distillery he pretty much built himself (officially it opened for business in late 2018). This newly constructed establishment, which produces one of those excellent white rhums which must be causing the French islands conniption fits, is his brainchild… and it can take its place proudly [Click here for the full review…]


Laodi Pure Sugar Cane Rhum (Brown) – Review

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May 222019
 
Laodi Pure Sugar Cane Rhum (Brown) - Review

Let me run you past the tasting notes of this lower-proofed, higher-aged companion rum to the Laodi White I wrote about last time. It was an amber-coloured 42% which was aged, according to the rep at the 2019 rhumfest in Paris, for 5 years in French oak…so it seemed like it would be relatively tame and mild, taking into account the milquetoast strength and a barely-enough aging regimen (at least, compared to its unaged 56% blanc bro’). But it wasn’t. To begin with, the nose – well, that was quite a nose, a Cyrano de Bergerac of rum noses.  It [Click here for the full review…]


Laodi Pure Sugar Cane Rhum (White) – Review

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May 202019
 
Laodi Pure Sugar Cane Rhum (White) - Review

The word agricole is nowadays used indiscriminately to refer to any cane juice distillate, no matter where it is made, and by consumer and producers both.  Discussions have recently popped up on FB arguing that appropriating the term under such circumstances was (and is) theft of reputation and quality, which the French Island rum makers had garnered for themselves over long decades (if not centuries) of quality rhum-making, and was therefore being ripped off by any producer not from those islands who used the term.  And here comes a rum company from the Far East, Laodi, seeming to have found [Click here for the full review…]


Tanduay CLX Chairman’s Reserve Philippine Rum – Review

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May 152019
 
Tanduay CLX Chairman's Reserve Philippine Rum - Review

Tanduay, for all its small footprint in the west, is one of the largest rum makers in Asia and the world (they’re either 1st or 2nd by sales volume, depending on what you read and when), and have been in business since 1854. Unsurprisingly, they see fit to commemorate their success with special editions, and like all such premiums with a supposedly limited release meant only for the upper crust, most can get one if they try. The question is, as always, whether one should bother. The presentation of the CLX rum is good – boxed enclosure, shiny faux-gold label, [Click here for the full review…]


Naga “Java Reserve” Indonesian Double-Aged 7 YO Rum – Review

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May 132019
 
Naga "Java Reserve" Indonesian Double-Aged 7 YO Rum - Review

Everything you research on Naga is likely to make you rend your robes with frustration at what little you do manage to dig up. Yet paradoxically, everything you do find out about the rum itself seems guaranteed to keep you reading, and make you buy it, if no other reason than because it seems so damned interesting. The label seems designed specifically to tantalize your curiosity.  Perusing it, you can with equal justification call it “Naga Batavia Arrack” (“made with Indonesian aged rum” says the script, implying there it’s arrack plus rum), or “Naga Double Cask rum” or “Naga Java [Click here for the full review…]


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