The Lone Caner – Page 53 – A Solo Reviewer's Take on Rums

Bristol Spirits Caroni 1974 34 Year Old Rum – Review

Oct 292014

This is the first review in a set of about six which deals with Caroni rums. I’m unabashedly starting with the oldest, which is a top-notch rum with few disappointments and flashes of greatness underpinning a rock solid performance. Even before heading to Europe in October 2014, I resolved to sample what I could from the now-defunct Caroni distillery in Trinidad which regrettably closed in 2004. Part of this is simply curiosity, mixed with a collector’s avarice…but also the high opinion I formed years ago when I tried the A.D. Rattray 1997 edition, and was an instant convert. Alas, in [Click here for the full review…]

Spirits of Old Man Special Cask Rum No.3 – Guyana 16 Year Old Rum – Review

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Oct 242014

Spirits of Old Man Special Cask Rum No.3 - Guyana 16 Year Old Rum - Review

You’ll want to coat your tongue with fire suppressant material before drinking, because once you start, the Uitvlugt 16 year old grows fangs and attacks your face like a junked-out xenomorph. Curiosity. That’s what got me here: simple curiosity. I’ve never tried anything by Old Man Spirits, but man, I thought, how can you even begin to argue with that cool distillery, and the strapping libido of 62.9%, which is powerful enough to make Cadenhead and A.D.Rattray take a respectful step backwards and cross their knees. And I loved the Spartan, zen-like simplicity of the bottle, which resembled [Click here for the full review…]

Velier

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Oct 202014

It’s no surprise that I start the “Makers” section of this website with Velier. Perhaps no other company since Rum Nation has so captured my attention the way this one has, and with both it’s about their focus. The scotch makers like G&M, Cadenhead, A.D. Rattray and Bruichladdich also produce year-specific, limited editions of rums, but their product lines are somewhat diluted by not concentrating solely on rums but on the whiskies which are their primary products (at least in my opinion). Velier in contrast has made its name primarily by doing something quite different – they issue all of [Click here for the full review…]

Velier Uitvlugt 1997 17 Year Old Full Proof Rum – Review

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Oct 162014

Velier Uitvlugt 1997 17 Year Old Full Proof Rum - Review

An exceedingly well-made, clean, relatively light rum with remarkable depth of flavour and beautiful mouthfeel. Velier, as its barrels mature in Guyana, issues annual releases when they feel they are ready, much as Rum Nation and other craft rum makers do. This presents a particular and peculiar problem to rummies, because there is no consistency to any of them: in other words, while a DDL El Dorado 21 Year Old will be more or less the same no matter when you buy it, a Velier PM 2013 release will not be the same as a Velier PM 2014 release, even [Click here for the full review…]

Damoiseau Rhum Vieux Millésimé 1980 18 Year Old – Review

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Oct 122014

Damoiseau Rhum Vieux Millésimé 1980 18 Year Old - Review

A deeply rich and remarkable rum – 1980 was a damned good year for this company When one buys a raft of intriguing aged rums and then samples several dozen more (especially after a protracted absence), the issue is which rum to start reviewing first. Since my intention on this go-around was to run through several Caroni rums from Trinidad, as well as to give more weight to agricoles from the French West Indies, I decided that one of the best of the latter deserved some consideration. And that’s this sterling Damoiseau. The Bellevue au Moule estate and distillery was established at [Click here for the full review…]

Rum Nation Jamaica 1986 Supreme Lord VI 26 Year Old (Long Pond) – Review

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Jul 152014

Rum Nation Jamaica 1986 Supreme Lord VI 26 Year Old (Long Pond) - Review

Rich sipping rum of remarkable complexity and flavour, one of the best I’ve ever had out of Jamaica. Rum Nation’s Supreme Lord VI (the Jamaican 26 year old 2012 edition by any other name) is as good as its 2010 brother, if not actually surpassing it. It shows what can be done with an aged rum if time and care and patience – and some artistry – is brought to bear. I loved the Supreme Lord V, which I reviewed a while back – and I must say, the VI does dial it up a few notches. (Full disclosure [Click here for the full review…]

Velier Skeldon 1973 Full Proof 32 Year Old Rum – Review

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May 102014

Velier Skeldon 1973 Full Proof 32 Year Old Rum – Review

It’s official. Velier has raised the bar for super premium rums, with an extraordinary 32-year old blast from the past that will excavate a punt-wide trench in your wallet if you ever find one. The 544-bottle run of the Skeldon 1973 Old Demerara Rum has, since being released in 2005, become something of an object of cult worship. In 2012 a single bottle went for sale on eBay for close to €500. I searched for three years before I found a gent in France willing to part with his (and at a cost I’m glad my wife never found out [Click here for the full review…]

Velier Port Mourant 1974 Full Proof 33 Year Old Rum – Review

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Apr 172014

Velier Port Mourant 1974 Full Proof 33 Year Old Rum - Review

A worthy addition to the Port Mourant canon. A magnificent, excellently rich and fruity full-proof rum. Allowances should be made for my personal palate: I do believe that rum deriving from the Port Mourant still in Guyana may be among the very best available, largely because the distillate runs through the only wooden still in the world. This provides the rum with a depth of flavour and richness that I have consistently scored high in all its iterations: Berry Brothers & Rudd 1975, the El Dorado 21 and 25 (PM forms part of the blend), Bristol Spirits PM 1980 and [Click here for the full review…]

10 Reasons to Prefer Rums…

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Mar 312014

Poor rums. They always get a bad rap. That piratical background, the snootiness of the whisky world (and my friends, who cast me the pitying glances reserved for congenital defectives, every time I trot out a new and favoured libation). The classiness perceived of all things British. The purported complexity of the Scottish brew, the Russian tipple, or the Mexican hooch. We who sing of the pleasures of the cane just don’t get no respect. Sometimes I feel like a go-player in a chess world. But you know, for a long time whiskies, tequilas, vodkas et al, took back seat [Click here for the full review…]

Three Italian Rhum Fantasias

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Mar 192014

These three rums are aged curiosities. There’s one from the 60s, and two from the 70s. Information on their origins is maddeningly obscure. The labels are crap, and the corks aged and faded and cracked by decades of rough handling. There’s never been a review of any that I was able to find, and their makers are likely long gone. Yet these three bottles exist, and if for no reason than their history, I review them here, make what remarks I can, score them as best I’m able. Italy in these days is no stranger to rums, of course. [Click here for the full review…]

Velier Blairmont 1991 Full Proof 15 Year Old Rum – Review

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Feb 252014

Velier Blairmont 1991 Full Proof 15 Year Old Rum - Review

A paradox of rum, marrying a lighter than expected profile with a stunningly intense full proof taste, compliments of the House of Luca When I first poured a shot of the Velier Blairmont 1991 15 year old rum into my glass (after having waited over a year and a half for the privilege), I immediately remarked its colour: a straw coloured light amber rum. After sampling five other Veliers in the past year, all of which were dark, brawny, bearded beefcakes, this came as something of a surprise. According to the literature on the bottle, seven barrels of the [Click here for the full review…]

Ron Barceló Imperial – Review

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Sep 062013

A subtle, supple rum, undone by a lack of courage and strength Consider for a moment my score on the Barceló Imperial. A 78 rating for me is a decent rum, if nothing to write home about. For a premium product, it’s something of a surprise – so here I should state straight out that that score reflects primarily its lesser proof and maybe excessive ladling in of sugar, not any other intrinsic quality. Frankly, it could have been higher. When I originally read the Barceló Imperial review from Josh Miller at Inu A Kena, I immediately fired off [Click here for the full review…]

DDL Superior High Wine – Review

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Aug 092013

The DDL Superior High Wine is not superior and not a wine, but will get you high without breaking a sweat. One of the first rums I ever had as a young man was this one, and the last time I drank was it nearly thirty years ago, when I was thinking of dropping out of University, depressed about my future, and downing a whole raft of shooters in a small beer garden one still, hot afternoon, with a bowl ’ice and my one-armed friend Greg from UG. A few weeks later my life got upended and put me on [Click here for the full review…]

Wood’s 100 Old Navy Rum – Review

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Aug 052013

Rich, simply flavoured, overproofed Navy-style rum that has a skinnier corpus than expected There’s nothing much I can tell you about Wood’s Rum Distillery itself because (a) it’s not a distillery and (b) there’s not much online about it, even on their own website (and my books barely speak to the big names so what hope is there for the small ones?), but the brand did exist for over a century before being acquired by William Grant in 2002 – these are the boys who also own Sailor Jerry and the OVD rum brands and supposedly dabble in minor [Click here for the full review…]

Berry Bros. & Rudd Barbados 13 Year Old Rum – Review

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Jul 292013

Good all round Bajan rum from Berry Brothers & Rudd, that’s worth its price and is a good note on which to close your day. What a relief it was to try this well-aged rum, and to find that its Fijian 8 year old cousin which I had tried some weeks back was indeed something of an iconoclastic aberration. There’s not much I could say about a line of rums of which I have only ever sampled three, and it would have been wrong to extrapolate based on such a small sample size. So it’s a happy matter that I [Click here for the full review…]

SMWS R3.4 Barbados 2002 10 Year Old Rum (“Makes You Strong Like A Lion”) – Review

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Jul 142013

This feels and tastes mean, largely because it is. But just because it treats you like life on Keith Richards’s face isn’t an automatic disqualification…I just call it inspired insanity, and have (much to my own surprise) given it the highest rating I’ve ever awarded to a 75% overproof. “Makes you strong like a lion”, the label remarks, in one of those tongue-in cheek references with which the SMWS likes to charm its buyers. After being battered into near insensibility (on more than one occasion) by the raging yak that was the SMWS R5.1 Longpond 9 year old 81.3%, you’ll [Click here for the full review…]

Murray McDavid 1995 Nicaragua 10 Year Old Rum – Review

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Jul 092013

Murray McDavid 1995 Nicaragua 10 Year Old Rum - Review

Butch mixed in with a bit of Ziggy Stardust. Whisky fans will know all about Murray McDavid, which is part of Bruichladdich, those fine folks who make the many inconsistent (if always interesting) Renegade Rums. It’s actually possible that this rum was a precursor to the whole Renegade line, being made somewhat earlier (mid-2000s) and adhering as it does to many of the principles of those rums: casks sourced from the Caribbean and elsewhere, aged in Scotland and finished in a wine of some kind. Nicaragua is of course the home of a very decent range of rums, the [Click here for the full review…]

Rum Nation Demerara Solera No.14 (2010 Release) – Review

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Jul 052013

Rum Nation Demerara Solera No.14 (2010 Release) - Review

A Demerara rum that may not be a true solera in spite of its name. Lovely, affordable, interesting rum. With this review, I have finally, after nearly two years of getting around to it, come to the end of the Rum Nation 2010 line of rums I bought all in one fell swoop, after being introduced to the series at Kensington Wine Market’s Raucous Rums tasting back in 2011. Since that time I have become quite a fanboy of Fabio Rossi’s products, and wish I could get more of his yearly releases: largely because I have not tasted a single [Click here for the full review…]

Ron Centenario 5 Year Old “Selecto” – Review

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Jul 012013

Passive,easy, light, indifferent, with a finish as short as this review Put aside my issues with underproof rums in general, and the five year old rum made by Centenario Internacional SA out of Costa Rica comes off as a reasonable rum, quite soft, and in line with many of their other jelly-kneed products: which is to say, pleasant and perfectly drinkable, but ultimately uninspiring (to me). As before, I simply note that I’m unclear who the rum is made for, since it’s too weak to appeal to an aficionado or to make a mix where strength is called for, and [Click here for the full review…]

Brugal 1888 Ron Gran Reserva Familiar – Review

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Jun 252013

A subtle, complex, tasty sipping rum You don’t see many of the Brugal rums here — I’ve only ever reviewed one of them, years ago when I was starting to populate the site: that one got a review, a shrug and a meh (which in retrospect may have been a touch condescending, as was my initial scoring), and I remember it principally because of its really lovely finish. The 1888 Ron Gran Reserva Familiar is something else again, and perhaps it’s sad that we don’t get to see more shops carrying it, ‘cause it’s a pretty nifty drink, and deserves [Click here for the full review…]

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