English Harbour Small Batch Cask Finished Rum – Review

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Jan 152017
 
English Harbour Small Batch Cask Finished Rum - Review

Excellent young sherry-finished rum #335 There’s a special place in my heart for English Harbour rums from Antigua, and always will be. The company’s masterful 25 year old 1981, while dropping some in my estimation over the years, remains a touchstone of my reviewing experience (it was also Review #001).  Their five-year- and ten year old variations were pleasing and decent drinks that were like a mix of Bajan and Spanish rums, yet distinct from either; and I’ve always felt they were good introductions to the spirit, even if I myself have moved on to purer, stronger rums, which was [Click here for the full review…]


Vientiane Laotian Agricole Rhum – Review

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Jan 112017
 
Vientiane Laotian Agricole Rhum - Review

A white rhum from Laos, which comes out punching at 56% #334 The rums we see and drink share a certain geographic commonality. On the shelves are rums from the various Caribbean islands, those old British, Spanish and French (and Dutch, and yes, Danish) colonial possessions. Next to them are South and Central Americans tipples which are the inheritors of the Spanish traditions brought over centuries ago…no shortage of their products either. Then there are those from micro-ops from Canada and the USA, few of which make any sort of big splash but which gain an audience from the communications [Click here for the full review…]


Lazy Dodo Single Estate Rum – Review

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Jan 052017
 
Lazy Dodo Single Estate Rum - Review

Laid-back, but not lazy #333 The dodo, as most of us are well aware, is the subject of such well known epigrams as being dead as one; it remains a fixture of popular culture and language, often seen as a symbol of obsolescence, stupidity and (naturally) extinction. It is therefore something of an odd emblem for a rum company to use as its name and symbol, unless it’s considered so firmly associated with Mauritius that bird and island are seen as synonymous (which I don’t believe for a moment). So aside from the officially stated purpose of the logo raising [Click here for the full review…]


Velier Foursquare 2006 10 Year Old Barbados Rum – Review

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Dec 302016
 
Velier Foursquare 2006 10 Year Old Barbados Rum - Review

A spectacular rum from Foursquare (and Velier), perhaps the best they’ve ever made to date. #332 This is a rum that screaming aficionados were waiting for like fans at a Justin Bieber or Beyonce concert (or the Rolling Stones, maybe), and no write-up of the thing could be complete without mentioning the unbelievable sales pattern it displayed…in my entire rum-purchasing experience, I’ve never seen anything like it. The Velier/Foursquare collaboration was making the rounds of various masterclasses in festivals around the world for almost a year before actually going on sale, and then, when it became available in August 2016 [Click here for the full review…]


Foursquare “Port Cask Finish” (ECS Mark II) 2005 9 Year Old Rum – Review

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Dec 282016
 
Foursquare "Port Cask Finish" (ECS Mark II) 2005 9 Year Old Rum - Review

A rum that comes together in unexpected but ultimately satisfying ways #331 Finishing remains a hit or miss proposition for rum makers. Rum Nation’s finished Demeraras are pretty good, El Dorado’s 15 year old expressions in various wine finishes kinda work (in spite of the sugar adulteration), while neither the Legendario’s muscatel reek or the Pyrat’s orange liqueur nonsense ever appealed to me (and never will).  So what’s there to say about the port finished 2005 issued by Foursquare as part of their “Exceptional” series? A few good things, a few not-so-good ones.  FourSquare is far too professional, too competent [Click here for the full review…]


Ron Bacardi Añejo 6 Year Old (Puerto Rico, 1980s)

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Dec 272016
 
Ron Bacardi Añejo 6 Year Old (Puerto Rico, 1980s)

Rumaniacs Review 027 | 0427 Bacardi has had so many iterations of their rums over the decades, made in Mexico, Puerto Rico or Bermuda (or wherever else they squirrel away production these days), that it’s impossible to state with precision what the genuine article actually is any longer. This version clearly states on the label it was a Puerto Rican rum, six years old, imported into Italy, and I’ve been informed its was made and acquired in the 1980s.  Perhaps it was a forerunner, an experiment, to see whether aged rum sales held promise, and afterwards morphed into the current 8 year old [Click here for the full review…]


Rum 66 Family Reserve 12 Year Old Barbados Rum – Review

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Dec 262016
 
Rum 66 Family Reserve 12 Year Old Barbados Rum - Review

When a rum makes you want to try its stronger brother, you are left asking whether it has failed or succeeded. #330 It must be a preference thing.  My son the Little Caner (rapidly becoming the Big Caner) loves chocolate ice cream but detests the salted caramel Haagen-Dasz I scarf by the bucketload (before being noisily sick in the outhouse). My father (Grampy Caner) can’t get enough of El Dorado 15 year old yet I can’t get him to touch a full proof without shuddering. As for me, while I enjoy rums from around the Caribbean, have never been able [Click here for the full review…]


Rum Nation Small Batch Collection – Port Mourant 1995 21 Year Old – Review

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Dec 222016
 
Rum Nation Small Batch Collection - Port Mourant 1995 21 Year Old - Review

  *** A grand old PM. Best of the three Small Batch selections from 2016. #329 It’s reasonable to wonder whether there isn’t some self-cannibalization going on here.  Since their inception back in 1999, Rum Nation’s flagship products were always the old-enough-to-vote Jamaicans and Demeraras, all issued at around 43-45%.  The old wooden box and jute packing gave way to sleeker, modernist boxes, but the ethos remained the same, and happily for the aficionados, there were always several thousand of these floating around, as Fabio Rossi never bottled just one cask, but several. (As an aside, something of the evolution [Click here for the full review…]


Rum Nation Small Batch Collection – Enmore 2002 14 Year Old – Review

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Dec 202016
 
Rum Nation Small Batch Collection - Enmore 2002 14 Year Old - Review

*** #328 It really is amazing how many different ways there are to express the outturn from a single Guyanese still, Enmore or Port Mourant or any of the others  We might have to approach them like James Bond movies (or Sherlock Holmes short stories)…enjoying the similarities while searching for points of variation, which gives us the rare rum equivalents of  masterpieces like Skyfall versus occasionally indifferent efforts like A View to a Kill. Rum Nation’s first serious foray into multiple-edition small-batch cask strength rums probably deserve to be tried as a trio, the way, for example, DDL’s three amigos [Click here for the full review…]


A History of the Heisenberg Distillery and the Caputo 1973

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Dec 192016
 
A History of the Heisenberg Distillery and the Caputo 1973

It is a little known fact that in the 1800s, several small families whose names were to become intertwined with the history of unknown, unspeakable and unmentionable rum, started to arrive in what was then British Guiana. The Heisens may have been the first; and from this line descended the Heisenberg Distillery, as well as the all but disappeared Alban estate run by a branch of the family begun by Grogger Heisen, later to become the Banban marque; and coiling among them all were the Fagnants, illegitimate, piratical rum makers of ill-repute who claimed without justification or evidence, to be [Click here for the full review…]


Rum Nation Small Batch Collection – Diamond 2005 11 Year Old – Review

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Dec 182016
 
Rum Nation Small Batch Collection - Diamond 2005 11 Year Old - Review

#327 What a change just a few years have wrought. Back in 2009-2010, cask strength rums were hardly on the horizon, “full proof” drinks were primarily Renegade at 46% with a few dust-gatherers from independent bottlers like Secret Treasures, Cadenhead, Berry Bros., or Samaroli making exactly zero waves in North America, and Velier’s superlative rums issued almost a decade earlier known to few outside Italy.  Rum Nation took two years to sell a pair of 1974 and a 1975 25 year old Jamaican rums bottled at 45%….and they were around since 1999! As 2016 comes to a close, observe the [Click here for the full review…]


Ryoma Japanese 7 Year Old Rum – Review

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Dec 142016
 
Ryoma Japanese 7 Year Old Rum - Review

An essay in Oriental and Caribbean fusion #326 Outside the cognoscenti, the rabid fanbase or deep-field researchers, few know (or care) much about rums from outside the Western hemisphere.  Yet rums from India and Thailand and Australia are massive sellers in the East, to say nothing of the emergent makers from Japan.  Nine Leaves is the newest outfit from the Land of the Rising Sun to garner major accolades in the larger rumiverse, but rum has been made from locally grown sugar for a very long time, and it’s no surprise that other companies have been quietly doing business in [Click here for the full review…]


Compagnie des Indes Enmore 1988 27 Year Old Rum – Review

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Dec 112016
 
Compagnie des Indes Enmore 1988 27 Year Old Rum - Review

Single word summary – superlative. #325 Compagnie des Indes burst in the scene in late 2014, which may be a rather melodramatic turn of phrase, but quite apt. The first of their line that I tried was the Cuban 1998 15 year old, which enthused me about the company immensely, and as the years moved on I’ve sampled up and down the range, from the less than stellar blends, to an Indonesian and a Fijian, and to more standard Jamaicans (with more coming). In all that time they have rarely made a bad rum, and if they eschew the tropical [Click here for the full review…]


Ron Aldea Tradición 22 Year Old Rum – Review

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Dec 062016
 
Ron Aldea Tradición 22 Year Old Rum - Review

A unassuming and ultimately flawed 22 year old rum #324 As one goes through the line of the various Ron Aldeas, which are serviceable mid-tier rums, one notices that the clear agricole profile gets progressively more lost, which I attribute to primarily the strategy of using variously toasted barrels in varying proportions.  Depending on whether you want an agricole-style rum to taste like one, this may not be to your liking.  This rum does not hail from the French islands or subject to the AOC (its influences are more Spanish than anything else), and therefore what we are tasting is [Click here for the full review…]


Ron Aldea Familia 15 Year Old Rum – Review

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Dec 052016
 
Ron Aldea Familia 15 Year Old Rum - Review

A decent fifteen year old faux-agricole trying to move away from its origins. #323 Sorry, but “Chairman’s Select Hidden Treasure,” “Special Top Brass Only Reserve,” “Family Laid Away” casks, you know the kind of special rums to which I refer…stuff like this just makes me smile.  Largely because I see it as nothing more than a name applied so as to move product.  Of course, in the old days of landed estates run by the plantocracy, such special hooch really was made, exclusively for the caudillos and the nobility, for the chairman, business titans, princes, presidents, political hacks, Government apparatchiks, [Click here for the full review…]


Ron Aldea Superior 10 Year Old Rum – Review

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Dec 042016
 
Ron Aldea Superior 10 Year Old Rum - Review

#322 With respect to companies which don’t want to make (or be seen to make) spiced or flavoured sugar bombs, it’s always instructive to observe the techniques that they use to avoid the dreaded “A” word. Some play with ageing or blends, some with finishing (the new El Dorado 15 year old series comes to mind), some with unorthodox schemes (like Lost Spirits or 7 Fathoms), some with toasting, but all are trying to do the same thing – impart an extra smidgen of taste to their rum, without actually adding anything to it, which I’m sure makes any rum [Click here for the full review…]


Mauritius Club Rum 2014 (Sherry Finish) – Review

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Dec 012016
 
Mauritius Club Rum 2014 (Sherry Finish) - Review

Too young, too dressed up, when it didn’t need to be #321 The Mauritius Club Rum 2014 (Sherry Finish) is an interesting essay in the craft, and for my money, slightly better than the Gold of Mauritius Dark rum I looked before. The sherry finishing makes its own statement and adds that extra fillip of flavour which elevates the whole experience in a way that drowning the Gold in port casks for a year did not.  Note that there’s a strange disconnect between what I was told in 2015 by the brand rep, who informed me it was aged three [Click here for the full review…]


Gold of Mauritius Dark Rum – Review

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Nov 302016
 
Gold of Mauritius Dark Rum - Review

Good with dessert. #320 You’d think that with the various encomiums the rum has gotten that it’s some kind of diamond in the rough, an undiscovered masterpiece of the blender’s art. “Incredibly rich…mouth watering…a cracker,” enthused Drinks Enthusiast; and the comments of Master of Malt (which one should take with a pinch of salt), are almost all four- and five-star hosannas. Me, I think that although it has a nifty squared off bottle and a cool simple label, beyond that there’s not much to shout about, though admittedly it has its points of originality in simplicity that must be acknowledged. [Click here for the full review…]


Berry Bros. & Rudd 1975 Demerara Rum

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Nov 272016
 
Berry Bros. & Rudd 1975 Demerara Rum

Rumaniacs Review 026 | 0426 While the 1975 30-year old rum issued by Berry Bros isn’t actually one of their “Exceptional Cask” series, it remains one in all but name and is one of the best of the Demeraras coming out of the 1970s, taking its place in my estimation somewhere in between the Norse Cask 1975 and the Cadenhead 1975, maybe a shade behind the Velier PM 1974 and the Bristol Spirits PM 1980.  It could have been even better, I think, if it had been a tad stronger, but that in no way makes it a lesser rum, [Click here for the full review…]


Velier Enmore 1987 13 Year Old Rum – Review

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Nov 222016
 
Velier Enmore 1987 13 Year Old Rum - Review

Among the first Velier Demerara rums, eclipsed by its better-made brothers in the years that followed #319 It’s become almost a game to ferret out the initial issuings of rums made by companies whose names are made famous by the passing of time. Back in 2000, who had ever heard of Velier outside of Italy?  Yet even then, the company was forging into the future by issuing rums defiantly called full proof, although there could have been few who were entirely sure what the term meant. 40% ruled the roost, “cask strength” was for whiskies, and only the occasional Demerara [Click here for the full review…]


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