Velier Antigua Distillers 2012 6 YO Rum – Review

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Dec 062018
 
Velier Antigua Distillers 2012 6 YO Rum - Review

  Not only was the Antigua Distilleries’ English Harbour 1981 25 YO the very first rum review posted on this site, but for a long time it was also one of my personal top sipping rums (as well as the highest priced), and ever since, I’ve had a fond place in my heart for their work.  In 2017 I tried their new sherry matured rum and was impressed and intrigued at the directions in which they were going – but the 2012 rum issued the following year as part of the Velier 70th anniversary collection, that one was something really [Click here for the full review…]


Tilambic 151 Overproof Mauritius Rum – Review

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Dec 042018
 
Tilambic 151 Overproof Mauritius Rum - Review

Ten years ago, the 151s were regarded with the sort of wry caution with which one approaches a crazy old uncle who may lash out with either invective or drool at any moment, depending on the circumstances.  They encouraged adverbial density, were the strongest rums available to the rumworld, and used exclusively as cocktail bases and mixing agents. Myself, I was always a little amused by their ferocity and used their elephantine profiles as an excuse to write reviews that didn’t take themselves too seriously (like the Bacardi, Lemon Hart, Cavalier, or Appleton 151 reviews, for example).  But what else to do? I [Click here for the full review…]


Old Fort Reserve Rum (St. Lucia) – 2000s

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Dec 022018
 
Old Fort Reserve Rum (St. Lucia) - 2000s

Rumaniacs Review #087 | 0574 As with the Bucaneer rum in R-086, the Old Fort Reserve rum is from St. Lucia Distillers, and while it won an award in the 80-proof light category in an (unknown) 2003 “Rumfest”, it was withdrawn from the company’s lineup in that same year.  Bucaneer did not fit the portfolio as the company had decided to concentrate on brands like Bounty; and the Old Fort Reserve had a similar fate – it was overtaken by the Chairman’s Reserve brand.  What this means, then, is when you taste an Old Fort (and you are interested in [Click here for the full review…]


Samai Gold Rum (Cambodia) – Review

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Nov 292018
 
Samai Gold Rum (Cambodia) - Review

Now here’s an interesting standard-proofed gold rum I knew too little about from a country known mostly for the spectacular temples of Angor Wat and the 1970s genocide.  But how many of us are aware that Cambodia was once a part of the Khmer Empire, one of the largest in South East Asia, covering much of the modern-day territories of Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Viet Nam, or that it was once a protectorate of France, or that it is known in the east as Kampuchea? Samai is a Khmer word for modern (it has subtleties and shades of meaning beyond [Click here for the full review…]


Issan White Rum (Thailand) – Review

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Nov 272018
 
Issan White Rum (Thailand) - Review

Thailand doesn’t loom very large in the eyes of the mostly west-facing rum writers’ brigade, but just because they make it for the Asian palate and not the Euro-American cask-loving rum chums, doesn’t mean what they make can be ignored; similar in some respects to the light rums from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Panama and Latin America, they may not be rums du jour, yet they continue to produce for their own local audiences and sell very nicely worldwide, thank you very much.  There’s a market for the profile, and given the enormous population of Asia, it’s no surprise that [Click here for the full review…]


Buccaneer St. Lucia Rum (1990s)

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Nov 242018
 
Buccaneer St. Lucia Rum (1990s)

Rumaniacs Review #086 | 0571 Ed Hamilton, in his 1995 book Rums of the Eastern Caribbean, made mention of the Buccaneer rum as a regular part of the St. Lucia Distillers lineup, but nowadays the rum is no longer in production – the last reference to it was an award given to it in the 2003 Rum Fest (which fest it was is somewhat open to conjecture), and a notation that it was discontinued, later confirmed by Mike Speakman that it was in the same year.  So we can assume that the Buccaneer I tasted is at best an early [Click here for the full review…]


Cadenhead Uitvlugt Distillery “MPM” 1998 Guyanese 12 Year Old Rum – Review

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Nov 222018
 
Cadenhead Uitvlugt Distillery "MPM" 1998 Guyanese 12 Year Old Rum - Review

It’s an old joke of mine that when it comes to Cadenhead, they produce great rums and confusing letter combos. To use this one as an example, the label might lead more to head-scratching confusion than actual enlightenment (for nerd or neophyte alike) but a little background research can ferret out the basic details fairly well when it comes to Guyanese rums. In this instance, the “MPM” moniker probably stands for Main Port Mourant or some variation thereof – the key fact it purports to convey is that the rum within is from a pot still rum from there, which [Click here for the full review…]


Le Galion Grande Arôme Matinique Rum – Review

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Nov 192018
 
Le Galion Grande Arôme Matinique Rum - Review

It was the words “Grand Arôme” that caught my eye: I knew that term.  “Galion”, which I seemed to remember but didn’t, quite. And “Martinique,” hardly seeming to go with either.  It had no brothers and sisters to its left and right on the shelf, which, in a shop stocking rows and rows of Plantations, Rum Nation, BBR, Saint James, Bally, HSE, Dillon, Neisson and all the others, struck me as strange (that and the rather “poor-relation-from-the-backcountry” cheap label and tinfoil cap).  What on earth was this thing? I bought it on a whim and cracked it in the company [Click here for the full review…]


San Pablo “Platinum White” Curaçao White Rum – Review

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Nov 152018
 
San Pablo "Platinum White" Curaçao White Rum - Review

Smaller Caribbean islands can be sleepy sorts of places where (partly in my imagination, partly in my boyhood experiences) old, lovingly-maintained Morris Oxfords and Humber Hawks sedately roll down leafy, sun-drenched boulevards reminiscent of the colonial era, and pass rumshops on every corner where men slam down dominos and drink paralyzingly powerful local white lightning with coconut water while discussing Sobers, Kanhai, Lloyd and Lara from the Windies’ long-past glory days with plenty “suck-teet” and “styupsin” and “cuss-up”. All right so that’s a bit of poetic license, but in my youth, it really was like that up and down the [Click here for the full review…]


San Pablo “Gold Label” Curaçao Rum – Review

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Nov 132018
 
San Pablo "Gold Label" Curaçao Rum - Review

Let’s move away from the full proofed rums released by indies and the major Caribbean companies, and switch over to something we don’t see very often, rums from the smaller islands —  these traditionally sell well to the tourist trade, the minibars of cheap hotels and within their local markets, but don’t make much of a splash elsewhere. Some are considered undiscovered steals, and the internet is rife with throwaway comments on personal blogs and travel sites about some rum nobody ever heard about being the best they ever had. One of these is the golden 40% San Pablo rum [Click here for the full review…]


Velier NRJ “Long Pond TECC” 2007 11 YO Jamaican Rum – Review

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Nov 112018
 
Velier NRJ "Long Pond TECC" 2007 11 YO Jamaican Rum - Review

So now we are the fourth and last ester-boosted rums issued in 2018 by Velier from the distillery of Long Pond in Jamaica, and in a strange way it sums up the preceding three rums in a way that emphasizes many of the best parts and tones down the excesses of all of them.  This is all the more curious a statement since it has the highest ester counts of the quartet, and one would expect the massive taste-bomb effluent of the TECA to be jacked up a few notches more…to “12”, maybe. And yet it doesn’t. It’s a really [Click here for the full review…]


Velier NRJ “Long Pond TECA” 2003 15 YO Jamaican Rum – Review

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Nov 072018
 
Velier NRJ "Long Pond TECA" 2003 15 YO Jamaican Rum - Review

“Pungent f*cker, isn’t it?” smirked Gregers, responding to my own incredulous text to him, when I recovered my glottis from the floor where the TECA had deposited and then stomped it flat. Another comment I got was from P-O Côté after the Vale Royal review came out: “Can’t wait to read your thoughts about the TECA…!! … Hard to describe without sounding gross.” And Rumboom remarked on a taste of “sweat” and “organic waste” in their own rundown of the TECA, with another post elsewhere actually using the word “manure.” I start with these varied comments to emphasize that I [Click here for the full review…]


Velier NRJ “Cambridge STC❤E” 2005 13 YO Jamaican Rum – Review

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Nov 052018
 
Velier NRJ "Cambridge STC❤E" 2005 13 YO Jamaican Rum - Review

For those who are deep into rumlore, trying the quartet of the National Rums of Jamaica series issued by Velier in 2018 is an exercise I would recommend doing with all four at once, because each informs the other and each has an ester count that must be taken into consideration when figuring out what one wants out of them, and what one gets – and those are not always the same things.  If on the other hand you’re new to the field, prefer rums as quiescent as a feather pillow, something that could give the silkiness of a baby’s [Click here for the full review…]


Velier NRJ “Vale Royale VRW” 2006 12 YO Jamaican Rum – Review

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Nov 042018
 
Velier NRJ "Vale Royale VRW" 2006 12 YO Jamaican Rum - Review

This whole week I’ll be looking at the quartet of stern, forbidding black and white bottles of the National Rums of Jamaica, which have excited a slowly rising conversation on social media as pictures get posted and more and more people try them.  Certainly, they’ve got all the Jamaican rum punditry in transports already (plus they are issued by Velier, which is clear from the minimalist label and box design). All four will be written about in a sequence, because there’s simply no way to speak to them individually at long intervals without missing the point, which is that they’re [Click here for the full review…]


Bristol Spirits 1986 Rockley Still 26 YO Barbados Rum – Review

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Oct 302018
 
Bristol Spirits 1986 Rockley Still 26 YO Barbados Rum - Review

My friend Henrik from Denmark told me once that he really dislikes the rums of WIRD. “There’s just something off about them,” he grumbled when we were discussing the output from Little England, the development of the Foursquare Exceptionals, and the Velier collaborations.  On the other hand, another rum-kumpel from Germany, Marco Freyr, has no problems with them at all, and remarked that he could absolutely pinpoint any Rockley Still rum just by sniffing the glass (I have since come the the conclusion that he’s absolutely right).  Coming to this Bristol Spirits rum after a long session of Bajan bruisers [Click here for the full review…]


Clarke’s Court “Kalypso” Grenada White Rum (1990s)

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Oct 282018
 
Clarke's Court "Kalypso" Grenada White Rum (1990s)

Rumaniacs Review #85 | 0561 There are three operations making rum in Grenada – Westerhall, Rivers Antoine and Clarke’s Court, the last of which was formed in 1937, operating under the umbrella of the Grenada Sugar Factory (the largest on the island) and named after an estate of the same name in the southern parish of St. George’s.  This title in turn derived from two separate sources: Gedney Clarke, who bought the Woodlands estate from the French in the late 1700s, and a bay called “Court Bay” included with the property (this in turn was originally titled “Watering Bay” because [Click here for the full review…]


Rum Nation Ilha da Madeira Rum Agricole White – Review

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Oct 252018
 
Rum Nation Ilha da Madeira Rum Agricole White - Review

No, that’s not another typo in the title, it’s just the way the bottle spelled “rum” so I followed along even if it is an agricole-style product and by convention it might have been better termed “rhum” (though the words mean the same thing – it’s purely a matter of perception).  Since looking at the Engenho Novo aged rum last time, I thought it would be fitting to stick with the island of Madeira and see what one of their whites would be like, especially since I had been so impressed with the RN Jamaican Pot Still 57% some years [Click here for the full review…]


Rum Nation Small Batch Collection – Engenho Novo 2009 8 YO Rum – Review

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Oct 222018
 
Rum Nation Small Batch Collection - Engenho Novo 2009 8 YO Rum - Review

The mark of the successful long-term independent bottler in the public perception rests upon two main pillars – one is of course the quality of the rums they put out the door (and perhaps, how consistently); and the other is the level of originality they bring to the game.  By that I mean how often do they stray from the mainstream of the standard pantheon and go in new directions, seek out different maturations, different ages, different barrels, different distilleries (or whole countries). It is because Velier nails both of these aspects that they are as successful as they are, [Click here for the full review…]


Key Rums of the World: The Foursquare Exceptional Cask Series (Barbados)

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Oct 182018
 
Key Rums of the World: The Foursquare Exceptional Cask Series (Barbados)

As noted in the Mount Gay XO revisit, that company ceded much of the intellectual and forward-looking territory of the Bajan rum landscape to Foursquare — in the last ten years, correctly sensing the shifting trends and tides of the rumworld, Richard Seale bet the company’s future on aspects of rum making that had heretofore been seen as artistic, even bohemian touches best left for the snooty elite crowd of the Maltsters with their soft tweed caps, pipes, hounds, and benevolent fireside sips of some obscure Scottish tipple.  He went for a more limited and experimental approach, assisted in his [Click here for the full review…]


Longueteau Rhum Blanc Agricole 62° – Review

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Oct 112018
 
Longueteau Rhum Blanc Agricole 62° - Review

In the last decade, several major divides have fissured the rum world in ways that would have seemed inconceivable in the early 2000s: these were and are cask strength (or full-proof) versus “standard proof” (40-43%); pure rums that are unadded-to versus those that have additives or are spiced up; tropical ageing against continental; blended rums versus single barrel expressions – and for the purpose of this review, the development and emergence of unmessed-with, unfiltered, unaged white rums, which in the French West Indies are called blancs (clairins from Haiti are a subset of these) and which press several of these [Click here for the full review…]


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