Havana Club Añejo Reserva (1980s)

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Apr 302017
 
Havana Club Añejo Reserva (1980s)

Rumaniacs Review #034 | 0434 By now we are all aware of the two different kinds of Havana Club.  This rum is the one from Cuba, not the Bacardi version made in “not Cuba” and hails from the 1980s which, coincidentally, is when I started drinking DDL’s King of Diamonds (a useless factoid, I know).  No point rehashing well-known details of the brand, so off we go. Colour – Amber Strength – 40% Nose – Oh well, very nice indeed, quite a few steps ahead of the Facundo Paraiso.  Dare I say “the real deal”?  Better not.  Initially it smells very [Click here for the full review…]


Velier La Bonne Intention (LBI) 1998 Full Proof Old Demerara Rum – Review

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Apr 272017
 
Velier La Bonne Intention (LBI) 1998 Full Proof Old Demerara Rum - Review

#360 The LBI 1998 starts out with a nose that is on the good side of remarkable, but not quite edging into wow! territory.  That’s not at all a criticism, just an observation that it lacks the sort of rabid uniqueness that characterizes many of Velier’s legendary rums, and therefore this one may be among the most accessible “regular rum” profiles ever made by the company (if one discounts the earlier 40% offerings like the LBI 1985 or the Enmore 1987 that were bottled by Breitenstock and can’t really be considered part of the oeuvre).  It starts with deep acetones, nail [Click here for the full review…]


Cachaça Agacana – Review

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Apr 242017
 
Cachaça Agacana - Review

#359 “Aguacana” is as good a term for this cachaça as any other, denoting as it does “water of the cane”  There are few titles more appropriate, because at 37.5% you’re really not getting very much out of the Brazilian drink, and even in a mix I sort of wonder what the point is and how well something this frail would fare in a caipirinha.  I’m aware that it’s somewhat snobby, but seriously, 37.5% is edging out of spirits territory altogether and into some kind of never-never land of “please don’t hurt me” for the timid, and my preferences don’t [Click here for the full review…]


Ron Canalero Añejo – Review

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Apr 202017
 
Ron Canalero Añejo - Review

“Dale paso al placer” reads the bottle label, which translates into “Give way to pleasure.”  Obeying that would encourage me to give away the bottle. #358 If the Panamanians (and other rums made in the light Spanish style), don’t up their act soon, I have a feeling they’ll be left behind in an era where tougher, more muscular, and more original rums — many of which are pot still based — are being made both by independent bottlers and more farsighted big distillers in other parts of the Caribbean.  There’ll always be a market for standard strength rums – low price [Click here for the full review…]


Zuidam Flying Dutchman White Rum – Review

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Apr 172017
 
Zuidam Flying Dutchman White Rum - Review

#357 The blurbs about the rum refer to this as being made from “very pure” cane molasses (as opposed to, I’m guessing, very impure or merely pure molasses).  Said molasses are fermented for two weeks using two different yeast strains, triple distilled in copper pot stills; from which the rum is taken at 80% ABV, diluted down to 60% and then laid to rest for a minimum of six months to a year in charred oak barrels before being filtered to within an inch of its life to produce this 40% clear mixing agent.  It’s a relatively new rum on [Click here for the full review…]


Svenska Eldvattan Weiron Super Premium Aged Caribbean Rum – Review

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Apr 132017
 
Svenska Eldvattan Weiron Super Premium Aged Caribbean Rum - Review

“Super Premium”? Not at all…but still quite a tasty dram. Surprised they didn’t call it a “Navy”. #356 Bottled at an assertive but not excessive 50%, the Svenska Eldvattan Weiron is a blended rum out of Sweden made by the same happy bunch of guys who are behind the Rum Swedes lineup, which I’ve never tried but about which I’ve heard many good things.  That said, they don’t limit themselves to rum, and are primarily into bottling various whiskies, with a gin and a tequila or two for good measure.  This one is rather daringly called the “Super Premium Aged [Click here for the full review…]


Bacardi Facundo Paraiso XA

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Apr 122017
 
Bacardi Facundo Paraiso XA

Rumaniacs Review #033 | 0433 The Facundo rum series from Bacardi which was launched in 2013, is an attempt by the company to insert itself into the premium market with a series of aged blended rums.  Strictly speaking, it’s not a true Rumaniac vintage (the idea is to write about old stuff that isn’t actually in production any longer), but every now and then a more current expression slips through the cracks without having gone through the process of being recalled only by the elderly, filtered through their fond recollections of where they had been when they first tried it.  You know [Click here for the full review…]


Cihuatán 8 Year Solera Rum – Review

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Apr 102017
 
Cihuatán 8 Year Solera Rum - Review

#355 Back in 2015 I wrote about the Ron Maja 12 year old rum which purported to be from El Salvador based on the place of origin of the family behind it, but really wasn’t when one considered the location of the production process.  Here’s another one from that country, which earns its geographical appellation somewhat more, though overall, there isn’t much more to it than its cousin. The dark gold Cihuatán is a molasses-based 40% Salvadorean rum aged in white oak ex-bourbon barrels, with the base distillate going into the 5-layer solera system in 2004 for eight years – [Click here for the full review…]


Amrut Two Indies Rum – Review

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Apr 062017
 
Amrut Two Indies Rum - Review

#354 Amrut, that Bangalore company which makes the Old Port rum I tried many years ago, as well as whiskies many swoon over, is no stranger to making rums, but their marketing effort is primarily aimed at the subcontinent itself, and perhaps other parts of Asia (maybe they’re chasing Old Monk, which was once the #1 rum in India).  There’s not much of a range (five rums in all), and I rarely saw any of them in Canada – this one was bought in Europe.  Given that this particular rum is a blend of – get this! – Jamaican, Bajan, [Click here for the full review…]


HSE Extra Vieux Small Cask 2004 9 Year Old Rum – Review

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Apr 042017
 
HSE Extra Vieux Small Cask 2004 9 Year Old Rum – Review

#353 Particular attention should be paid to the “small cask” moniker in the title here, because what it means is that this sterling and near-outstanding little rum was matured in small French Limousin oak casks called “octaves” that hold fifty-five liters, not a couple hundred or more as in the “standard” (and it not a single cask, by the way).  Combine both the tropical maturation and the smaller cask size, and what we can expect with such a product, then, is a rum of some intensity of flavour.  Which it is, and it delivers, in spades.  In the blind tasting [Click here for the full review…]


The Caputo 1973 Full Proof Old Demerara Rum – Review

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Apr 012017
 
The Caputo 1973 Full Proof Old Demerara Rum - Review

#352 After the near riot caused by the emergence of the Caputo 1973 last year, when (my distant relative) Ruminsky van Drunkenberg was mobbed in Berlin by the horde of reviewers demanding their samples (local police nearly had to declare a state of emergency), they lapsed into silence, and none of them published any review after the fact.  It was only after sampling it myself that I understood the reason for their malfunction: they weren’t being reticent, they weren’t holding off out of some semblance of courtesy — they were recovering from the near catatonic shock of actually having tried [Click here for the full review…]


Velier La Bonne Intention (LBI) 1985 15 Year Old Rum – Review

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Mar 282017
 
Velier La Bonne Intention (LBI) 1985 15 Year Old Rum - Review

One of Velier’s initial expressions, and somewhat of an exception to their rule of excellence. #351 The amber-coloured Velier La Bonne Intention (LBI) Old Demerara Rum 1985 15 year old rum is not for everyone, and is rather more an artifact than a must-have. For aficionados who are used to the fullproof bruisers with which Luca made his bones, it is more a historical relic than truly representative of his ideas, very much as the Enmore 1987 was (perhaps that’s because both rums were bottled by Breitenstein* in Holland in 2000 and imported by Velier, so it’s possible that Luca [Click here for the full review…]


Ron Caney Añejo Superior 1960s/1970s

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Mar 272017
 
Ron Caney Añejo Superior 1960s/1970s

Rumaniacs Review #032 | 0432 Over and above the skimpy details of the company provided in the notes written for the Carta Oro (Rumaniacs-031) there’s nothing new here, except to note that this rum is definitely better, and I enjoyed it a lot more.  So let’s dive right in and be briefer than usual Nose – Very Spanish in its lightness.  Cornflakes, cereal, lemon peel, vanilla and salted butter come to the fore.  It’s a little spicy and tart for 40%, something like a lemon meringue pie, very nice actually, if a little gentle. Opens up to smoke and leather [Click here for the full review…]


Ron Caney Carta Oro Superior 1960s/1970s

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Mar 272017
 
Ron Caney Carta Oro Superior 1960s/1970s

Rumaniacs Review #031 | 0431 This is a Cuban rum from a company that still exists in Santiago de Cuba and now called Ron Caney: the holding company was (and may still be) called Combinado de Bebidas de Santiago de Cuba and was supposedly formed around 1862…however, it is also noted to be operating out of a former Bacardi factory, so my take is that it’s using expropriated facilities, which is confirmed by Tom Gjelten’s book, Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba.  This rum is from the late 1960s or early 1970s, is also known as “Gold,” and for sure is no [Click here for the full review…]


Savanna HERR Millésime 2006 10 Year Old Rum – Review

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Mar 262017
 
Savanna HERR Millésime 2006 10 Year Old Rum - Review

#350 The Savanna Millésime 2006 High Ester Rum from Réunion (or HERR, as it is labelled) is a steroid-infused Guadeloupe rum mixing it up with a Caroni and a Bajan. It may the closest one will ever come to one of Worthy Park or Hampden’s Jamaican taste bombs without buying one, betters them in sheer olfactory badassery and is possibly one of the best of its kind currently in production, or the craziest.  It’s very likely that once you try it you’ll wonder where it was hiding all this time. It emphatically puts Réunion on the map of must-have rum [Click here for the full review…]


Rum Fire “Velvet” Jamaican White Rum – Review

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Mar 152017
 
Rum Fire "Velvet" Jamaican White Rum - Review

#349 If I didn’t know better, I’d almost suggest this was a clairin.  It was so potent and pungent, so powerful in taste and profile, that I had to double up the amount of controls I was tasting it with, just to make sure it really was a Jamaican rum and not some uncured white lightning out of Haiti.  If you ever thought that Jamaicans were getting too easy, or you were getting bored with the regular run of Appletons, allow me to recommend (cautiously) this amazing white popskull from Hampden estate, which was gifted to me by Gregers and [Click here for the full review…]


Ogasawara Japanese Rum – Review

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Mar 152017
 
Ogasawara Japanese Rum - Review

Starts off weird and then develops very nicely #348 A recent post on the reddit rum forum – perhaps the only real Q&A alternative to FB rum clubs on the net – remarked on the discovery by one person of Japanese rum, using the Ryoma 7 year old as an example.  Having written about that particular product – I thought it an interesting essay in the craft, having a profile both similar to and at odds with, more traditional rums with which we are more familiar — I remembered this other one by Ogasawara which I bought in Paris last [Click here for the full review…]


Alfred Lamb Special Reserve Rum 1949 (URM)

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Mar 132017
 
Alfred Lamb Special Reserve Rum 1949 (URM)

Rumaniacs Review #30 | 0430 This rum is one of the reasons I love the spirits made so long ago – they shine a light into the way things were back in the day.  Alfred Lamb started making dark rum from West Indian bulk rum back in 1849, ageing his barrels in cellars below the Thames and laid claim to making “real” Navy rum.  These days the company seems to make supermarket rum more than any kind of serious earth-shaking popskull…but the potential remains, as this rum (almost) points out.  It’s issued by United Rum Merchants, who trace their own heritage back [Click here for the full review…]


Moscoso Distillers / Barik (Haiti)

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Mar 112017
 
Moscoso Distillers / Barik (Haiti)

Moscoso Distillers (also known as Barik) is a third-generation Haitian rum-maker whose klerens caught my attention as I was researching rums from there that were specifically not Barbancourt or distributed by Velier.  You’d think that some enterprising producers would extoll their family ancestry by tracing it back to Toussaint L’Ouverture’s great grandfather’s first cousin as part of the company legend, but as with many other things, Haitians do seem to enjoy confounding expectations.  In fact, the official founder of the company, Jules Moscoso, came over from the Dominican Republic in the early 1900s and settled in a small town called [Click here for the full review…]


El Dorado 25 Year Old Rum (1986)

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Mar 102017
 
El Dorado 25 Year Old Rum (1986)

Rumaniacs Review #029 | 0429 Issued around 2011, the El Dorado 25 YO received an update from the original 1980 version, with the blend tweaked a little.  The enclosure and bottle remained the same, however, and unfortunately for the modern rumporn brigade of the millenial teens, not enough was done to upgrade the rum to what a current (2017) connoisseur would consider par for the course – unadulterated and cask strength.  Instead, sticking with the tried and true formula which sold so well in the past, it remained 43%, and perhaps we should consider it a favour that the reported [Click here for the full review…]


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