The Lone Caner – Page 50 – A Solo Reviewer's Take on Rums

Trois Rivières 1977 Rhum Vieux Agricole Millèsime

May 202015

*** Rumaniacs Review 001 | 0401 Not entirely sure how old this is…I think it was bottled in 2000 or so, making it at least a twenty three year old. AOC controlled from Martinique, pot-still-made from cane juice (of course). Nose: Bright, flowery, quite spicy, but also very clean. Cinnamon, breakfast spices, cloves, some dried fruits (banana, fleshy pears just starting to go). All this is shouldered aside by a rather startling brininess and musty vegetal pungency after a while…y’know, like cardboard in an old, unaired cellar. Not unpleasant, but not your standard fare either Taste: Oh, nice, very well [Click here for the full review…]

Three Cachaças from Delicana

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May 132015

(#214) Although a huge market for cachaça exists in Brazil where it is the national tipple they sometimes call pinga, very little of it makes it to other countries in comparison to agricoles (let alone more popular molasses based rums). For rummies, it’s something like an undiscovered country. A cane-juice-based spirit, it has certain basic similarities to agricoles and has been referred to as a type of brandy, of the aguardente family. Cachaças are often unaged and like clairins in Haiti, run the gamut from underproof to overproof drinks, and are often bottled clear. I should mention, however, that [Click here for the full review…]

J. Bally Rhum Vieux “Pyramide” 7 Year Old – Review

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May 072015

J. Bally Rhum Vieux "Pyramide" 7 Year Old - Review

Cool bottle, great product. Almost the perfect mid-range rhum, not too young to be raw, not too old to be over-pricey, or unavailable. The zippy, funky young J. Bally Ambrè agricole was an interesting rhum from Martinique, and I enjoyed it, simply feeling it had some growing up to do – which is perhaps natural for a rhum aged less than five years. The Vieux 7 year old certainly addressed many of these concerns, and was a better rhum in almost every way. Ageing may not always confer quality (neither does price) I’ve heard it said, but I think the [Click here for the full review…]

Clairin Sajous Unaged White Rhum – Review

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Apr 302015

Clairin Sajous Unaged White Rhum - Review

Drinking this rum is knowing what harpooning Moby Dick felt like. A wild-haired full-proof bodybuilder of a rhum, so absolutely unique in taste that it it defied easy description. I sampled it and knew I wanted to write about it immediately. So there I was in Paris at La Maison du Whiskey in April 2015, with some fellow rummies. Hundreds of bottles of rhum and rum beckoned from groaning shelves. Samples from years past – decades past! – winked in their little bottles, inviting us to get started. Straight-out rumporn, honestly. Our hands were itching to start the pours, but [Click here for the full review…]

Velier Caroni 1994 Heavy Trinidad Rum – Review

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Apr 172015

Velier Caroni 1994 Heavy Trinidad Rum - Review

This Caroni isn’t the strongest one in the rumosphere but it conforms to most of the expectations taste-wise – a shade more dark and it could probably be used to surface a road somewhere. A good to great exemplar from the closed distillery. This is one of five or six rums I bought in an effort to raise the profile of the now-defunct Caroni Distillery from Trinidad. That it was made by Velier didn’t hurt either, of course, because almost alone among the rums makers out there, Luca Gargano has the distinction of making just about all of his rums [Click here for the full review…]

Bristol Spirits Caroni 1989 19 Year Old Rum – Review

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Apr 082015

Bristol Spirits Caroni 1989 19 Year Old Rum - Review

Another, slightly lesser brother from the same mother. It stands in the shadow of the company’s magnificent 34 Year Old. It’s possible that Bristol Spirits decided to play it safe (again) with the 43% expression from the closed Caroni Distillery of Trinidad…y’know, give it a wider audience than the drop-down-dead-of-old-age 34 year old 1974 variation which would dig a deep hole in both your wallet and your marriage. Or maybe that’s how the barrel played out when it came time to bottle the liquor (notice that 2008 was the same year they produced the 1974, so both were issued simultaneously). [Click here for the full review…]

Bristol Spirits Reserve Rum of Peru 8 Years Old – Review

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Mar 312015

Bristol Spirits Reserve Rum of Peru 8 Years Old - Review

A clean, warm and smooth rum from Peru, which is extremely accessible to anyone who doesn’t like cask strength rums. Into the shadowed world of dronish and often-boring label design, the screaming green of the Peruano stands out like a neon tarantula on a wedding cake. It’s an assault on the visual cortex that can’t help but make you catch your breath, mutter an amused “wtf?” and move in for a closer look. Not that this has anything to do with the quality of the rum inside, of course. I merely bring up the point to remark on the fact [Click here for the full review…]

J. Bally Rhum Ambrè Agricole – Review

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Mar 242015

Young, rambunctious, uncoordinated, somewhat raw, and a riot in a mix of any kind. Even neat it has a funky, raw charm all its own. In that, it’s an agricole all the way through. The J Bally Ambrè Agricole is a young rhum that is still finding its legs, and places its origins in an estate on Martinique that stretches back to 1670, when the Lajus sugar plantation was founded. It was one of those rhums from a company that has long had its place in the roll call of honour of the French West Indies – HSE, Trois Rivieres, [Click here for the full review…]

Ron Maja 12 Year Old Rum – Review

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Mar 182015

This is definitely a rum to chillax with. A solid, relaxed and very pleasant Salvadorean rum which should be given some attention…even if it’s actually from Panama. Assume you were a new outfit in a country A and were making a new rum whose brand was once owned and which was once made, by your family; you sourced distillate from another country, B; used that country B’s facilities to make and age the finished product; and hired a Master Blender, also from that B country. Now, the question is, whose rum is it? A or B? This is not [Click here for the full review…]

Velier EHPM (Enmore and Port Mourant) 1998 16 Year Old Rum – Review

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Mar 112015

Velier EHPM (Enmore and Port Mourant) 1998 16 Year Old Rum - Review

An assembly of two rums that are great on their own, made even better by being blended before ageing. Permit me a brief box-ticking here: Velier issues cask strength monsters akin to top end whiskies (but which cost less); they hearken to individual distilleries, sometimes to individual stills within that distillery; and Luca Gargano, the maitre, has stocks of Guyanese rums and the Trini Caronis that beggar the imagination; and while occasionally there are rums that don’t quite ascend to the brilliance of others, the overall oevre is one of enormous collective quality. Here, Velier has taken something of a [Click here for the full review…]

How to Start Reviewing Rums – Part 5

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Mar 062015

Part 5 – Keeping things going So let’s sum up the preceding four parts.[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] Understand what you’re getting into, and why you’re doing it Go with a comfortable writing style that suits you Design a nice look to your site Know how to taste, score, note and write (and practice a lot) Know your rums and the larger world around them Sample around extensively (safely!!! I am not advocating rampant boozing) Be courteous Be consistent If you’ve made it to fifty or more reviews, passed a year of writing, then it’s reasonable to [Click here for the full review…]

How to Start Reviewing Rums – Part 4

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Mar 052015

Part 4 – Which rums to start with In conceptual and generalized terms, this series has so far covered the startup philosophy, the website and postings, and added pointers on sampling and reviewing. Today I move into more familiar territory. I have a feeling quite a few people were waiting for this post. Alas, no, this isn’t entirely what you thought it would be, because making such a list is a tricky, even controversial, subject to opinions varying as widely as the Pacific. I’d suggest that you begin with what’s available to you easily and at a relatively [Click here for the full review…]

How to Start Reviewing Rums – Part 3

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Mar 052015

Part 3 – Sampling, and the review itself In the first part of this series I discussed figuring out how to get your head around what to write, and followed that up in Part 2 with some general remarks on how to deal with your actual website postings. Today I continue in a similar vein about tasting, scoring and the conceptuals of a review. *** When I taste I scribble my initial notes immediately; then I have to retaste, usually with other rums in play as controls or comparators, then score. Then I have to turn the whole thing [Click here for the full review…]

How to Start Reviewing Rums – Part 2

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Mar 042015

Part 2 – The Website, writing and your postings Yesterday I wrote about getting the mental philosophy of what you’re doing straight, sort of like getting your battle preparations right. In this part, I speak to your website, your writing and the attitude towards interacting with the world. In no particular order of importance, then: 1. Hardly needs to be said, but design your website for the long term, and organize your space neatly. This is one of those elementary things that is often and surprisingly overlooked. Maximize useful space at the left and right with widgets, links, categories or [Click here for the full review…]

How to Start Reviewing Rums – Part 1

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Mar 032015

Introduction There are a lot of people who write engagingly and have an interest in rum, and some of them, not unnaturally, want to start their own website regarding matters of the cane. Some want to review rums; others want to blog about cocktails; in other cases the new bloggers address themselves to spirits in general. After a while, hits go up, production goes up, and the site takes off. And then, in some cases, it slides into a moribund state of somnolescence. It’s because I wish we had more rummies out there that I decided to put together some [Click here for the full review…]

Rhum J.M. 1995 Très Vieux 15 Year Old – Review

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Mar 032015

Rhum J.M. 1995 Très Vieux 15 Year Old - Review

A unique fifteen year old agricole that lacks something of the deep dark depth of the Damoiseau 1980 I so liked, but is a great and tasty example of the style nevertheless…as long as your tastes run that way. As adolescents, among our most fervent wishes was to have coitus without interruptus the way a hobbit has breakfast: whenever possible, preferably all the time, twice daily if we could manage it (well, what teenager hasn’t?) But as the years wound on, some reality entered that little fantasy: the truth is that unlimited anything gets boring after a while. One does [Click here for the full review…]

Alt-Enderle “India” Rum – Review

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Feb 232015

An entry level rum with some unusual and remarkably pleasant flavours that one has to work too hard to find in the raw scrape of underaged alcohol. One of the things I noted when nosing this dark mahogany-red rum from the German outfit Alt-Enderle, was the baking spices that presented themselves almost immediately. At 43% strength there was no real savagery here, and I didn’t bother letting it rest before trying it (when you practice on cask-strength muscle-twitching bodybuilders, anything under 50% seems easy), and all I remarked on at the inception was how many different, mild, spiced up elements [Click here for the full review…]

Cavalier Rum Puncheon White Overproof – Review

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Feb 192015

Cavalier Rum Puncheon White Overproof - Review

A relatively light and sweet potent white lightning that sits square between a white agricole and full-proofed island hooch, with a charm and power all its own. The very first review ever published by The ‘Caner was written for Liquorature (the predecessor to this site) and was for the Antigua Distillers’ masterful English Harbour 25 year old 1981. In later years, I had my suspicions about it – from the similarity of profiles, I thought it was a rebranded, perhaps re-blended version of the Cavalier 1981, which was an understated and excellent rum in its own right, and the sales [Click here for the full review…]

La Favorite Cuvée Privilège 30 Year Old – Review

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Feb 152015

La Favorite Cuvée Privilège 30 Year Old - Review

This is a pricey and very good rum that should have had the guts to go higher than its issued strength; but you’ll still be extremely happy with what you get, because there’s a lot going on until it runs out of steam at the finish. Indulge my love of history for a while: La Favorite is a small family owned distillery in Martinique which has an annual rum production of around 600,000 litres (as comparative examples, Bacardi sells in the tens of millions and the craft maker Rum Nation somewhere less than 200,000). The original sugar plantation was initially called “La [Click here for the full review…]

Cadenhead Trinidad Rum TMAH Trinidad Distillery 1991 21 yr old – Review

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Feb 122015

Cadenhead Trinidad Rum TMAH Trinidad Distillery 1991 21 yr old - Review

A Spartan rum, sporting a massive codpiece, ripped eight-pack, and real attitude. Not for the lovers of softer or sweeter fare. You just gotta shake your head with appreciation when you regard Cadenhead and their commitment to muscle-bound zen machismo in rums. They’ve always had a certain retro charm and a daring to go off the reservation that I grudgingly admired, and they have continued along that path here with this monster full proof. Leaving aside the squat, glowering psycho-orange-and-yellow bottle with its cork stopper which is almost a Cadenhead signature, it should simply be noted that Cadenhead hewed to [Click here for the full review…]

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