The Lone Caner – Page 57 – A Solo Reviewer's Take on Rums

Appleton Estate 21 Year Old Rum – Review

Oct 042012

Though not as in your face as its older brother, it’s still too oaky for me. It’ll be the bees knees for anyone who prefers a rum with a drier mouthfeel, less sugar and more tannins in their rums than I do. This one’s all about opinion. The Appleton Estate 21 year old rum has been around long enough for most reviewers to have had a chance to check it out…in my case, I simply never got around to it, having been less than enthused about the Master Blender’s Legacy, the blend of which it said the 21 forms the backbone. [Click here for the full review…]

Raucous Rum Tasting 27 September 2011

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Sep 272012

The Raucous Rums of the evening Tuesday 27th September 2011 was one of those days in which I participated in an event about which, even though absolutely nothing went terrifically wrong, I have mixed feelings: of both appreciation and disappointment. I speak, of course, for the few of us who were there and know whereof I speak, of KWM’s second rum tasting event, rather euphemistically termed “Raucous Rums.” I suppose by this time I should come to terms with the fact that we Lovers of the Cane are second class citizens n the spirits world. I can’t speak for the vodka [Click here for the full review…]

Rhum Vieux Domaine de Courcelles Grande Reserve 1972 – Review

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Sep 152012

Rhum Vieux Domaine de Courcelles Grande Reserve 1972 - Review

I’m not an avowed fanboy of agricoles: yet this one may be the best I’ve ever tried, and certainly among the top tier of rums made anywhere, by any method. Rare, old, powerful, excellent, pricey and, well … yeah it’s worth it. Holy sweet mother of God, where has this rum been sitting? A snarling, awesome 58% beefcake of an agricole (I have my suspicions about this, see below), aged 37 years and one of the best of its kind I’ve ever tasted. This is where I get up on my soapbox and demand that rum makers start going stronger, [Click here for the full review…]

Renegade Guyana (Enmore) 1990 16 Year Old Rum – Review

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Sep 152012

Renegade Guyana (Enmore) 1990 16 Year Old Rum - Review

Slightly rougher than expected, but with a lovely taste all its own. You’re unlikely to get Renegade Rums anywhere in Canada unless you troll in obscure stores that may have ‘em gathering dust somewhere. In speaking to purchasing agents and spirits managers from Co-op, Liquor Depot and KWM, they all tell me the same thing – the rums are loss leaders and move off the shelves too slowly. And that’s a shame, really, for while I’ll be the first to concede that the line is uneven at best (remember my snarky comments on the Guadeloupe?), Bruichladdich does take a “cask [Click here for the full review…]

Appleton Jamaican Independence Reserve 50 Year Old Rum – Review

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Sep 082012

Appleton Jamaican Independence Reserve 50 Year Old Rum - Review

Publicity Photo from RumAuctioneer A truly wonderful rum which is simply too expensive for regular drinkers, in spite of its quality. It’s just too out of reach for us proles, alas. “I have left instructions in my will,” growled Kanflyer on the Ministry of Rum, echoing the sentiments of many, “For my grieving (?) widow to take the insurance settlement, find a bottle of this and toast my memory with my friends…both of them. There is no way I could spend $5k on a bottle of rum while I’m still kicking around.” In two humorously pithy sentences Kanflyer (may his [Click here for the full review…]

SMWS R5.1 Longpond 2002 9 Year Old Rum “Mint Humbugs” – Review

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Sep 082012

SMWS R5.1 Longpond 2002 9 Year Old Rum "Mint Humbugs" - Review

The most searingly powerful rum you are ever likely to try. Do not simultaneously bloviate and drink this, or spontaneous combustion may occur. (#119. 81/100) [Video Review] Don’t be frightened. A rum like the Scotch Malt Whisky Society’s R5.1 Longpond 9 year old, bottled at a grinningly ferocious cask-strength 81.3%, isn’t really out there to kill you: it just feels that way. I used to laugh at the way Bacardi 151 and Appleton 151 made wussie forty percenters run a hot chocolate delivery into their pants…well, here’s one that takes it a step further and indulges itself in a level of industrial overkill and outright belligerence [Click here for the full review…]

Renegade Guadeloupe 11 Year Old 1998 Rum – Review

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Aug 312012

Renegade Guadeloupe 11 Year Old 1998 Rum – Review

Never had a rum that tasted so much like a peated whisky. And yet….and yet…. If ever there was a rum that exemplified the inconsistency of the Renegade line, this is it. I’m not saying it was a bad rum, just one that didn’t conform to any profile of rum that people could say they recognize as a rum. And in that fact lay (in my opinion) its failure. Of course, like all Renegades, it was lovely to look at, with the now-familiar frosted glass enclosure and a label that gave as much information as one would wish. Column-distilled in [Click here for the full review…]

Secret Treasures Single Cask Old Demerara Rum – Enmore 1989 14 year old

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Aug 282012

Secret Treasures Single Cask Old Demerara Rum – Enmore 1989 14 year old

I had to go to Germany to pick up this rum, and the greatest surprise for me was the fact that it’s a Swiss concern that makes it. Swiss? I can hear you say…what the hell are the cantons doing making what is culturally seen as a tropical (Caribbean, let’s be honest) tipple? Fassbind AG is taking a leaf out of the book of those dour Scots of Cadenhead and Bruichladdich et al, and have taken rum deriving from the Enmore distillery in Guyana, and bottled it after slumbering for fourteen years down there in Mudland. This rum reinforces my [Click here for the full review…]

Ron Palma Mulata de Cuba 12 Años – Review

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Aug 072012

Ron Palma Mulata de Cuba 12 Años - Review

Strong beginning is marred by a disappointing failure on the back end stretch. This rum will one day (hopefully) be a good one…right now it’s merely serviceable. For a 12 year old, that’s quite a disappointment. Stuart and Mary, two very good friends of mine, had the decency to leave behind an excessively hefty portion of their newly purchased Mulata upon their return from Cuba the other day. This was one of those occasions when I had to do the tasting and evaluation right away, which was perfectly fine, of course. We get Cuban rums around here – Canadians lack [Click here for the full review…]

Flor de Caña 5 year old Black Label rum – Review

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Jul 272012

Flor de Caña 5 year old Black Label rum - Review

A deep and relatively dark medium bodied rum that isn’t quite sure what it wants to be. Decent mixing agent, a shade too uncouth to sip…springing for the seven year old sibling might be a better idea. I must have squirrelled the Flor de Caña 5 year old so far behind all the other bottles of hooch in the casa that it simply drifted out of sight and memory. Not too difficult when you consider my house is packed with piles of books, DVDs, computer gear, cameras and photo equipment, children’s toys (and children), camping gear, extra stuff for visitors [Click here for the full review…]

A Tale of Four Fives

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Jul 232012

Inspired by the amazingly refreshing (and original) website andabattleofrum which has a world cup of rums – well worth a look for sheer inventiveness and style – I decided to implement an idea that both that site and the ongoing whisky range tastings on allthingswhisky.com have done so well. Having sampled the Flor de Cana 5 and the Juan Santos 5 at the same time, I resolved to make a go of two other five year olds in the larder, and run all four through their paces to see how they stacked up against each other: after all, trying them individually was [Click here for the full review…]

Ron Zacapa 23 Anos Solera – Review

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Jul 182012

First posted 18 July 2012 on Liquorature. The Zacapa 23 is some kind of touchstone for rum drinkers as a tribe. It consistently appears on Ministry members’ rum lists as a favourite, and garners high points across the spectrum of whole populations, has received unbelievable ratings from international panels and is a perennial reviewers’ favourite. When I was over at the Arctic Wolf’s lair some months ago and he offered me a try from his collection, it was the Zacapa 23 I asked for. Some see it as the benchmark by which all soleras are measured. I’m not one of [Click here for the full review…]

Juan Santos Ron Añejo “Oro” 5 Year Old Rum – Review

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Jul 142012

Juan Santos Ron Añejo "Oro" 5 Year Old Rum - Review

Too light for a five year old, and almost too delicate to be a rum at all. It says a lot for my collection and where I store it that occasionally, in pawing around searching for a possible Friday night sundowner, I run across a bottle I forgot was there and which is not even opened, let alone reviewed. Such is the case with the Juan Santos 5 year old, which is the last of the Colombian rums from this lineup yet to be addressed (the others are the Café, the 9 year old, 12 and 21). Five year old rums can be considered [Click here for the full review…]

Rum Nation Panama 18 Year Old Rum (2010 Edition) – Review

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Jul 042012

Rum Nation Panama 18 Year Old Rum (2010 Edition) - Review

A more rambunctious, slightly less cultured younger brother of the same company’s 21 year old rum – complex, hearty, smooth and a full-out tonsil-pleaser. If the Rum Nation Panama 18 year old had been released on its own without further statement, as it first was in 2000 (I got the 2010 release), it would have been a success by any yardstick, and indeed I make no bones about this – it’s damned good. It does not fail next to its older sibling…it’s simply a shade different. And though the 21 year old is better (yes it is), this should not diminish the [Click here for the full review…]

Rum Nation Panama 21 Year Old – Review

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Jun 152012

Drink this and marvel. Who would have thought the El Dorado 21 or the Juan Santos 21 might have serious competition? For a whisker over $100, Rum Nation’s Panama 21 year old rum will titillate your palate, lift your spirits and be your best friend for life. We are always wrestling – philosophically speaking – with change. And as we get older, we who instituted change, embraced it, championed it…we regret the passing of the old ways which we once loved, but perhaps not well enough to preserve, and now can only remember. I think this way on occasion, and [Click here for the full review…]

Raucous Rum Tasting (05 June 2012)

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Jun 052012

The latest KWM’s Raucous Rums tasting was held in the KWM shop tasting room in Calgary on June 5th, and as usual I squirreled myself (and on this occasion, my grown-up daughter) off into a back corner – she had evinced an interest in the tasting process and I wanted to show her what it was I was interested in and why (though my own feeling is she might have more wanted to cross something off her personal bucket list or something). We nibbled a bit and watched the Scotchguy do his intro. Note that I have given up [Click here for the full review…]

Santa Teresa Bicentenario Rum – Review

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Jun 022012

A good, and very pricey ultra-premium solera, the top of the food chain from Santa Teresa A.J. Vollmer in Venezuela. I’m going to go on record as thinking it’s too much price for too little premium. The $315 Santa Teresa Bicentenario solera rum is made by the privately owned Venezuelan outfit A. J. Vollmer, who also produce the 1796 rum (also a solera, and about which I was unenthused at the time…it may be due for a revisit). It’s a rum I have avoided for over two years in spite of its premium cachet, and because of its price. Every time I’ve [Click here for the full review…]

Cruzan Single Barrel Estate Rum – Review

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Jun 022012

A solid and well put together rum of intriguing complexity and excellent overall quality. More should not be said, and, indeed, need not be said. It’s good as a sipper or a mixer, over ice or neat. Enjoy. Cruzan is that distillery from St Croix in the West Indies which makes one of my favourite under-$50 rums, the single barrel dark rum, written about and appreciated before I started assigning scores to my reviews. Unlike that somewhat more commercial rum, this one, clearly noted as an estate rum, was also marked as being bottle #344,450 of barrel 86158 and certified by a [Click here for the full review…]

Cabot Tower 100 Proof Demerara Rum – Review

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May 262012

Cabot Tower 100 Proof Demerara Rum - Review

A better than expected, overproof: smoother, tastier, more engaging. Should be tried neat before you bastardize it with a mix, ’cause it may just surprise you too. Yeah. Smell that sucker. That whap you feel in your schnozz is a hundred proof hitting you in da face. This is a rum which indulges in a level of unapologetic phallocentrism that would make Ron Jeremy weep with envy This is what they would serve in Buxton’s Tipperary Hall to my squaddies Biggers and Evan, if they could ever get it. I mean, a hundred proof, wow – sure, his is a [Click here for the full review…]

Mekhong Thai Rum – Review

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May 152012

A gentle, easygoing underproof rum-wannabe. There’s nothing really outstanding about it, and it’s too weak to appeal to me personally: like other Asian rums, however, it does have a taste all its own, and for those who don’t like forty-or-greater percenters, this one will satisfy. Is this a rum at all? Liquorature is littered with comments from both the purists (who disdain any additions) and the tolerant (who don’t mind), and the bone of contention between them is always the same: can a spirit be made from less than 100% cane juice, with additives for taste and profile, and still [Click here for the full review…]

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