The Lone Caner – Page 38 – A Solo Reviewer's Take on Rums

Gordon & MacPhail Demerara 1974-1999 25 Year Old Rum – Review

Oct 092017

#393 By now just about everyone knows that the Gordon and MacPhail Longpond 1941 58 year old walks and talks de Jamaican like a boss. That thing gave super-aged rums a massive boost in visibility, showing that the patient, off-the-scale ageing of rums can be done with some care in Europe and come out at the other end with a profile that zooms to the top of the charts. I seriously doubt a tropical aged rum could survive that long without being reduced to a thimbleful, and rarely with such quality. Alas, the feat has almost never been replicated (except [Click here for the full review…]

Key Rums of the World: El Dorado 21 Year Old Rum

5 Responses »

Oct 052017

Key Rums of the World: El Dorado 21 Year Old Rum

#392 As the years roll by, I have come to the conclusion that the last decade will be regarded as the Golden Age of Rum – not just because of Velier, Silver Seal, Moon Imports, Rum Nation, Ekte, Samaroli, Compagnie des Indes, Secret Treasures (and all their cousins), but also because of the amazing writers who have emerged to chronicle their adventures with rum. Somehow, social media and blogging software have formed a nexus with rum makers that allowed previously niche brands to simply explode onto the stage, raising awareness and knowledge to unprecedented heights. However, an unanticipated side effect [Click here for the full review…]

Rhum Barik Premiere Cuvée ESB Brut de Fût – Review

No Responses »

Oct 032017

Rhum Barik Premiere Cuvée ESB Brut de Fût - Review

#391 When in your cups, you could argue that Haitian clairins parallel the development of rum as a whole. Just as rum (and rhum) was ignored for a long time, so were the indigenous likkers of Haiti. And I posit that just as rum worldwide is going through a new golden age, so are clairins (with cachacas coming on strong). So far we have met amazingly pungent, raw and tasty white lightning from the stills of Sajous, Casimir and Vaval, which were promoted and given great visibility by Luca Gargano of Velier (to his lasting credit) and I’ve been fortunate [Click here for the full review…]

Compagnie des Indes Barbados (Foursquare) 2006 9 Year Old Rum (Denmark) – Review

No Responses »

Sep 292017

Compagnie des Indes Barbados (Foursquare) 2006 9 Year Old Rum (Denmark) - Review

#390 After messing round with other Bajan rums for a while, I finally came to the Compagnie des Indes FourSquare 9 year old, and had to concede that even setting aside the headline-grabbing 2006 or Triptych or Criterion releases, this was what I was looking for and which almost none of the three other caskers — the Cadenhead BMMG and 10 year old and the Isla del Ron — had not provided. Mount Gay’s indie fullproof bruisers were certainly interesting and made powerful statements for their distillery of origin, but either Florent picked more judiciously than Cadenhead or the Isla [Click here for the full review…]

Ron White Cat Caribbean Light White Rum

3 Responses »

Sep 262017

Rumaniacs Review #057 | 0457 Behind the please-don’t-hurt-me facade of this sadly underproofed excuse for a rum (or ron) lie some fascinating snippets of company and rum history which is a bit long for a Rumaniacs review, so I’ll add it at the bottom. Short version, this is a German made rum from the past, distributed from Flensburg, which was a major rum emporium in north Germany that refined sugar from the Danish West Indies until 1864 when they switched to Jamaican rum. But as for this brand, little is known, not even from which country the distillate originates (assuming [Click here for the full review…]

Isla del Ron 2000 12 Year Old Barbados Rum – Review

No Responses »

Sep 242017

Isla del Ron 2000 12 Year Old Barbados Rum - Review

#389 Based in Germany, Isla del Ron is not a very well known indie, and as of this writing seem to have only done 17 different single cask rum bottlings, from as wide afield as Barbados, Jamaica, Panama, Fiji, Brazil, Guyana, Cuba, Martinique, Nicaragua, and Reunion. Initially founded in 2009 by Thomas Ewer, it concentrated on bottling small quantities of Scotch whiskies, and began with rums in 2013. In the paucity of their history and selections, and their slim-pickin’s website, I get the impression they have a small operation going, something a bit bigger than, oh, Spirits of Old Man [Click here for the full review…]

Cadenhead Green Label Barbados 2000 10 Year Old Rum – Review

No Responses »

Sep 212017

Cadenhead Green Label Barbados 2000 10 Year Old Rum - Review

#388 Marco Freyr, in between his densely researched articles on Barrel-Aged-Mind, indulges himself with tasting independent bottlers’ wares, all at cask strength. Marco does not waste time with the featherweight Bacardis of this world – he goes straight for the brass ring, and analyzes his rums like he was a Swiss watchmaker looking for flaws in the Vacheron Constantin Reference 57260. Some time back he shipped me some Bajan fullproofs – being amused, perhaps, at my earlier work on Mount Gay’s XO, and feeling I should see what others did with their juice, both now and in the past. This [Click here for the full review…]

Rhum Negresco “First Quality” Very Old

1 Response »

Sep 172017

Rumaniacs Review #056 | 0456 I got this curious thing through separate channels from the usual Rumaniacs (a trend I foresee continuing) and it’s a mini-bottle insufficient to allow me to share it to everyone…so, sorry mes amis. Still, it’s one of these delightful mystery rhums about which just about nothing turns up on a search, except an old French eBay listing which suggests this is a French West Indian rhum from 1953 (unconfirmed, but how cool is that year, right?) bottled at 44% ABV, so in that sense it conforms to all the reasons the ‘Maniacs exist in the [Click here for the full review…]

Cadenhead’s Barbados Rum “BMMG” Mount Gay 2000 8 Year Old – Review

2 Responses »

Sep 142017

Cadenhead's Barbados Rum "BMMG" Mount Gay 2000 8 Year Old - Review

#387 Mount Gay out of Barbados is somewhat in the background of Bajan rum-making these days, maybe feeling like Huzur in Satyajit Ray’s 1958 classic “The Music Room”. Understandable, since all the headlines these days are about the 2006 ten year old, the Criterion, Triptych and all the other amazing Foursquare releases. And that’s a shame because there are some interesting indie bottlings out there from the island, as well as Mount Gay’s own recent cask strength work which I’ll get to one of these days. Today, then, let’s discuss the mastodon of the Cadenhead BMMG 66.3% which was [Click here for the full review…]

Saint-James Cuvée 250 Ans

No Responses »

Sep 102017

*** Rumaniacs Review #055 | 0455 About the only place this rhum falls down is that for all the information we have on it, it leaves us begging for more. It is a heritage (or “halo”) edition rhum, a bland of six millésimes, those years considered to be of exceptional quality – the legendary 1885 (R-010, remember that?), 1934, 1952, 1976, 1998 and 2000, and yeah, what else could we possibly want? Well, how much of each was in the blend, for one, and how old each of those components was, and further, how much (if at all) the final [Click here for the full review…]

Rum Nation Small Batch Collection – Port Mourant 1999 17 Year Old – Review

No Responses »

Sep 062017

Rum Nation Small Batch Collection - Port Mourant 1999 17 Year Old - Review

#386 Let’s be honest – 2017 is the year of FourSquare. No other company since Velier’s post-2012 explosion on the popular rum scene, has had remotely like this kind of impact, and if you doubt that, just swim around the sea of social media and see how many references there are to Triptych and Criterion in the last six months. Which is admittedly an odd way to begin a review of a competing product, but I wanted to mention that for all the (deservedly) amazing press surrounding the latest hot juice in the rumiverse, there remain equally solid names as [Click here for the full review…]

Neisson L’Esprit 70º Blanc

No Responses »

Sep 042017

Rumaniacs Review #54 | 0454 The fourth in the Rumaniacs Neisson lineup (though I’m sure they will be more), this thing is a massive falling anvil of oomph, and takes Le Rhum Par Neisson (R-053), also a blanc, out behind the schoolyard and whomps it with an extra twenty degrees of proof…and while the previous blanc elicited strong opinions for and against its quality, thus far I think the general consensus of this one is that it it one hell of a white rhum, to be had with a mixture of caution and enjoyment. Colour – white Strength – 70% [Click here for the full review…]

Mombacho 1989 19 Year Old Central American Rum – Review

No Responses »

Aug 312017

Mombacho 1989 19 Year Old Central American Rum - Review

#385 Perhaps it would be better to start with the straightforward tasting, lest my snark bend your mind were I to lead in with the commentary instead of finishing with it. The Mombacho 1989 Central American rum does, admittedly, boast and flourish some impressive chops on the label: 19 year old rum (1989-2008), finishing for the final two years in armagnac casks, reasonable strength of 43% (I said ‘reasonable’, not ‘outstanding’). Looking at other bottles of their range it seems within the bounds of reason to assume it’s from Nicaragua, though the ‘Central American’ noted on the label might suggest [Click here for the full review…]

Le Rhum Par Neisson (Blanc)

No Responses »

Aug 272017

Rumaniacs Review #053 | 0453 Another Neisson in the series, one to leave a drinker scratching his head in bafflement. It’s not a bad rum, just an odd one, exhibiting some of the characteristics of other unaged whites, then going off to check out some side roads…not always to its advantage Colour – White Strength – 52.5% Nose – Hello Sajous…I mean Neisson, sorry. Whew, quite a bite here – salty, briny, and then…labneh, or fresh yoghurt. And sugar, so weird, like sucking tea through a white sugar cube. Some tar, herbals, iodine and medicine, and light (very light) florals [Click here for the full review…]

Chantal Comte L’Arbre du Voyageur 2001 Reserve Speciale – Review

No Responses »

Aug 242017

Chantal Comte L'Arbre du Voyageur 2001 Reserve Speciale - Review

#384 The rhums of Chantal Comte have been of consistently high quality throughout my relatively brief acquaintanceship with her brand. Mme Comte, you may recall, is an independent bottler with the twin advantages of having a long association with spirits (she is the owner of a wine making chateau in France) as well as a boatload of familial connections and wasta in Martinique. The La Tour L’Or HSE, the 1980 Trois Rivieres and the 1977 Trois Rivieres rhums were all products that impressed, and I had thought so even when my experience with agricoles was more limited. There was something [Click here for the full review…]

Some Miscellaneous Rum Trivia…

1 Response »

Aug 222017

So the other day a guy on reddit wrote that he was was due for surgery and bored out of his mind and could us redditors perhaps post some facts about rum which he didn’t know? Well, now, that was a challenge, and while I may have missed the US National Rum Day, the idea took hold of me and after jotting down maybe ten or fifteen points of my own, I sent off a blast to all my rum chums, asking them for small anecdotes and trivia and facts they might know of, which are not all that well [Click here for the full review…]

Neisson 2004 Single Cask Rhum Agricole Vieux

No Responses »

Aug 202017

Neisson 2004 Single Cask Rhum Agricole Vieux

Rumaniacs Review #052 | 0452 None of the ‘Maniacs seem to have written anything on how old this things is, which is surprising given its price tag (about €170 or so), but both WhiskyAuction and Reference-Rhum say’s it’s a ten year old; the label (below) says its eleven so we’ll go with the older one. Another odd thing is the strength – my sample said 45%, and various online shops quote it as being variously 45.4%, 46.2% or 42.7% – so after some digging around it seems that 2004 was a particularly good year and several single barrel issues were [Click here for the full review…]

Kléren Nasyonal Premium Blend Rhum Blanc – Review

No Responses »

Aug 162017

Kléren Nasyonal Premium Blend Rhum Blanc - Review

#383 When one tastes a raft all kinds of rums from around the world and across the ages over an extended period, there is a normal tendency to look for stuff that’s a little different while still conforming to commonly-held notions of what a rum is. After all, how many times can one try a basic rum redolent of molasses, caramel, sugar, banana and maybe raisins and citrus without getting a little bored? Well, for sure there’s no shortage of new and interesting popskull coming on the market in the last few years, and I’m not just talking about the [Click here for the full review…]

Rhum Neisson Extra Vieux

No Responses »

Aug 132017

Rumaniacs Review #051 | 0451 Today we amble on over to Martinique, where Neisson is to be found: I have four of these fascinating AOC rhums to play with, and here’s the first of them to sate the intangible palate and add to the historical record. Neisson is, in my own opinion, one of the most singular makers of agricole rhum on Martinique, and I’ve used words like “fascinating”, “unusual” and “distinctive” to describe their remarkable products…there’s always something slightly off kilter in them, some cheerful, almost whimsical, sort of “essayons de cette façon,” or “leh we try dis” approach. [Click here for the full review…]

Renegade 2003 Port Mourant 6 Year Old Rum – Review

No Responses »

Aug 102017

Renegade 2003 Port Mourant 6 Year Old Rum - Review

#382 Renegade rums continue to hold a peculiar sort of fascination for me, because they were the first rums made by any outfit other than the big island producers or major corporations with which I came into contact. They made it into Canada just as I was starting my rum scribbles, and were the only ones I saw for many years. Given our current familiarity with unadulterated rums made by independents, and adding to that something of a nostalgia factor, perhaps this Port Mourant succeeds better than it should, but I guess by the end of this review you can [Click here for the full review…]

Older Entries Newer Entries