The Lone Caner – Page 29 – A Solo Reviewer's Take on Rums

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

May 132019

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…]

Sang Som Special Rum (Thailand) – Review

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May 092019

Sang Som Special Rum (Thailand) - Review

Like most rums of this kind, the opinions and comments are all over the map. Some are savagely disparaging, other more tolerant and some are almost nostalgic, conflating the rum with all the positive experiences they had in Thailand, where the rum is made. Few have had it in the west, and those that did weren’t writing much outside travel blogs and review aggregating sites. And that’s not a surprise. If you exclude the juice emerging from new, small, fast-moving micro-distilleries in Asia, and focus on the more common brands, you’ll find that many adhere to the light latin-style column-still [Click here for the full review…]

Sangster’s Old Jamaica De Luxe Gold Rum (1980s/1990s)

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May 052019

Sangster's Old Jamaica De Luxe Gold Rum (1980s/1990s)

Rumaniacs Review #097 | 0621 As far as I can tell, Dr. Sangster arrived in Jamaica to lecture at UWI in 1967, got sidetracked into the rum business, and died in 2001. During his time on the island, Dr. Sangster did more to popularize rum cream and spiced / infused rums (pineapple, coconut, orange, etc – there were some 20+ varieties) than promote pure rums themselves, but he was also known for his blends, like Conquering Lion Overproof and this one, the Old Jamaica DeLuxe Gold which is definitely off the grid and, in a curious way, also quite modern. [Click here for the full review…]

1423 S.B.S. Mauritius 2008-2018 10 YO Rum – Review

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May 022019

1423 S.B.S. Mauritius 2008-2018 10 YO Rum - Review

Like those tiny Caribbean islands you might occasionally fly over, the Maria Loca cocktail bar in Paris is so miniscule that if you were to sneeze and blink you’d go straight past it, which is what happens to us, twice. When Mrs. Caner and I finally locate it and go inside, it’s dark, it’s hectic, it’s noisy, the music is pounding and the place is going great guns. At the bar, along with two other guys, Guillaume Leblanc is making daiquiris with flair and fine style, greeting old customers and barflies and rumfest attendees, the shaker never still. Even though [Click here for the full review…]

El Dorado Rare Collection PM+Diamond 2001-2017 16 YO Rum (Velier 70th Anniversary) – Review

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Apr 292019

El Dorado Rare Collection PM+Diamond 2001-2017 16 YO Rum (Velier 70th Anniversary) - Review

El Dorado and their high-end collection, the Rares, continue to inspire head scratching bafflement – they get issued with such a deafening note of silence that we might be forgiven for thinking DDL don’t care that much about them. Ever since 2016 when they were first released, there’s been a puzzling lack of market push to advertise and expose them to the rum glitterati. Few even knew the second release had taken place, and I suggest that if it had not been for the Skeldon, the third release would have been similarly low key, practically unheralded, and all but unknown. [Click here for the full review…]

Barbosa Grogue Pure Single White Rum – Review

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Apr 242019

Barbosa Grogue Pure Single White Rum - Review

Although the grogues of Cabo Verde have been seeping through our rumconsciousness for years now, it’s a curious thing that there are almost no reviews to be found online at all. All we have is rumours and quiet whispers in the dark corners of smoke-filled tiki-bars, random small comments on FB, and stories that Luca Gargano of Velier has been sniffing about the islands for years, perhaps putting together another series of organic, pure single rums designed to wow our socks off. 2019 might at last, then, be the year to change that, as grogues were quite visible in the [Click here for the full review…]

Inner Circle “Green Dot” Overproof Rum (Australia/Fiji) (2000s)

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Apr 212019

Inner Circle "Green Dot" Overproof Rum (Australia/Fiji) (2000s)

Rumaniacs Review # 096 | 0617 Inner Circle out of Australia is one of those rums originally made by a now-defunct company called the Colonial Sugar Refinery, which had a long history pretty much unknown outside its country of origin. Formed in 1855, CSR established refineries in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji by the 1890s, and in 1901 they opened a distillery in Sidney, using pot stills to make rums from Fijian and Australian cane. The Inner Circle brand name, which appeared in 1950, came from the limited high-quality rums they made for distribution to the favoured elite of the [Click here for the full review…]

Nine Leaves “Encrypted” II 2 Year Old Rum (2017 release) – Review

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Apr 172019

Nine Leaves "Encrypted" II 2 Year Old Rum (2017 release) - Review

You just gotta love Yoshiharu Takeuchi, who hired a brand ambassador, travel agent, accountant, general manager, master distiller, janitor, chief cook and bottle washer, the cook, the baker and candlestick maker, and still only has a single employee in his Japanese rum-making outfit Nine Leaves – himself. And lest you think he’s a dour, serious, penny-pinching cost-cutting ninja who’d prefer to be making a Yamazaki single-handedly or something, you can take it from me that he’s a funny, personable, dynamic and all-round cool dude, a riot to hang out with in any bar in any country. Oh yeah, and he [Click here for the full review…]

Berry Bros. & Rudd 1982 33 Year Old Jamaica Rum – Review

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Apr 092019

Berry Bros. & Rudd 1982 33 Year Old Jamaica Rum - Review

The stats and the label speak to a rum that can almost be seen as extraordinary, which usually fills me with dread as a reviewer: for, how could any rum live up to that? I mean – from Jamaica in the 1980s, 33 years old, a cousin to another really good rum from there, bottled by an old and proud indie house…that’s pretty impressive, right? Yet somehow, against my fears, Berry Bros. & Rudd have indeed released something special. The initial tasting notes could come from any one of a dozen rums, but as it develops and moves along, it [Click here for the full review…]

Smooth Ambler “Revelation” 1990 23 YO Rum – Review

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Apr 072019

Smooth Ambler "Revelation" 1990 23 YO Rum - Review

When a bunch of the rum chums and I gathered some time back to damage some rums and show them who was boss, one of them remarked of this rum, “Easy drinking” — which initially I thought was damning it with faint praise until I tried it myself, and continued with it three or four more times after they all staggered back to their fleabag hotels, surprised by its overall worth. It’s not often you get to try (or be really pleased by) an indie bottling from the USA, given how much they are in love with starting whole distilleries [Click here for the full review…]

Moon Imports 1974-2004 30 YO Demerara Rum (Sherry Wood) – Review

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Apr 032019

Moon Imports 1974-2004 30 YO Demerara Rum (Sherry Wood) - Review

It’s entirely possible that in 2004 when this rum was released, just before the movement towards accuracy in labelling got a push start, that a label was hardly considered to be prime real estate worthy of mention. That might be why on this Moon Imports rum from 1974, Port Mourant is spelled without a “U”, the date of bottling and ultimate age of the rum is not mentioned and it’s noted as a “rum agricol – pot still.” Hang on, what….? So the search for more info begins. Now, if you’re looking on Moon Imports’ own website to find out [Click here for the full review…]

La Souris à Moustache Alban 1986 28 Year Old Full Proof Old Demerara Rum – Report

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Apr 012019

La Souris à Moustache Alban 1986 28 Year Old Full Proof Old Demerara Rum - Report

In late 2018, a relative of this writer was the lead taster of a focus group assembled to test-taste a rum from an Italian company which sought to re-vitalize and even supplant the Velier Demeraras by issuing a rum of their own. Your indolent-but-intrepid reporter has managed to obtain a copy of the official report of Ruminsky Van Drunkenberg, who is, as is widely known (and reported in last year’s authoritative biography of the Heisenberg Distillery) a man with pure 51 year old pot still hooch in his bloodstream, and whose wildly inconsistent analytical powers (depending on his level [Click here for the full review…]

Domaine de Séverin Rhum Agricole Blanc (1990s)

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Mar 262019

Rumaniacs Review # 095 | 0611 As noted in the biography of the Domaine de Séverin, what we’re getting now from the new owners is not what we were getting before. The company’s distillery changed hands in 2014 and such rums as were made back in the day immediately became “old”, and more obsolete with very passing year. From the old style design of the labels, I’d hazard that this one came from the 1990s, or at the very latest, the early 2000s, and I have no background on ageing or lack thereof – I would imagine that if it [Click here for the full review…]

Domaine de Séverin

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Mar 252019

Quick, name five Guadeloupe rum brands. Yeah, not that easy, is it? You could probably reel off Longueteau, Damoiseau, Bielle, Bellevue, Capovilla, Labatt, Reimonenq, Karukera, and then with some head scratching remember Gardel and Courcelles (which is closed). And then there’s this little guy in the mid-north of the left “wing” of the butterfly-shaped island called La Domaine de Séverin. If you have not heard of it before, that’s little surprise, as it is possibly among the least known French Island distilleries around (Bologne, Monte Bello, Simmonet and Mon Repos are others, and there are a plethora of small ops [Click here for the full review…]

Domaine de Séverin Rhum Vieux (1990s)

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Mar 212019

Rumaniacs Review # 094 | 0610 Séverin is a small distillery in the north of the left “wing” of Guadeloupe (called Basseterre), whose history can be divided into three parts: 1800-1928 when different owners held the small estate and grew various agricultural crops like pineapples and sugar, 1928-2014 when the Marsolle family held it and created the marque of Domaine de Séverin for their rhums, and the post-2014 period when the distillery (but not the whole estate) was sold to a local businessman called Jose Pirbakas. Although there was a cessation of operations after the takeover due to differences in [Click here for the full review…]

Isautier “Louis & Charles Isautier” Cuvée 70 Old Rum – Review

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Mar 192019

Isautier "Louis & Charles Isautier" Cuvée 70 Old Rum - Review

Whether or not you can place Reunion on a map, you’ve surely heard of at least one of its three distilleries: Savanna, and that high-ester still of theirs that’s driving rum geeks into transports of ecstasy. Yet for almost the same time, there have been two other distilleries on the island, Riviere du Mat (which made the delicious Millesime 2004 and XO rums) and the oldest of the three, another family owned outfit called Isautier, which I wrote about in a brief bio a few days back Isautier, among all their punches and arranges, make an interesting selection of aged [Click here for the full review…]

Isautier (Réunion)

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Mar 172019

Réunion is an island to the east of Madagascar, and has had a long history with European colonizers, which resulted in a bewildering plethora of names. The Portuguese who were the first on the scene named it Santa Apolónia in the very early 1500s; then a century later the French took over in the 1630s, calling it Île Bourbon in 1649 after the French royal House of Bourbon. Colonisation started in 1665, when the French East India Company sent the first settlers, after which the island was retitled “Île de la Réunion” in 1793 with the fall of the House [Click here for the full review…]

Brugal Ron Dominicano Blanco – Review

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Mar 132019

By today’s standards, Brugal, home of the very good 1888 Gran Reserva, made something of a fail in the genus of white rums with this Blanco. That’s as much a function of its tremblingly weak-kneed proof point (37.5%, teetering on the edge of not being a rum at all) as its filtration which makes it bland to the point of vanilla white (oh, wait….). Contrast it with the stern, uncompromising blanc beefcakes of the French islands and independents which blow the roof off in comparison: they excite amazed and disbelieving curses — this promotes indifferent yawns. To some extent remarks [Click here for the full review…]

Appleton Special Jamaican Rum (2016)

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Mar 122019

Rumanics Review #93 | 0607 The Appleton Special is not yet a true Rumaniacs rum, since it’s still commonly available – it was, for quite a long time, one of the most common low-end starter rums available in North America and Europe, so it’s more than likely that one can still find a bottle. However, in 2016 it was retired from active service and put out to pasture, to be replaced by the not-quite-as good J. Wray Jamaica Gold rum – I think they tweaked the blend somewhat since the taste is almost, but not quite, similar. So, since it [Click here for the full review…]

J. Wray Jamaica Gold Rum – Review

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Mar 102019

In the previous review of the Florida Caribbean Distillers industrially-produced Florida Reserve 2 year old rum, it was treated and written about with some disdain, because as far as I was concerned, it had nothing to make it stand out at all. It was a low rent mass-produced column-still rum that did exactly nothing to distinguish itself and could at best be used to spike a drink with alcohol, without leaving any trace of itself behind, not even a grin. Move on now to another minimally aged rum marketed to the masses, cheaply priced, easily available (at least, in Toronto, [Click here for the full review…]

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