Chalong Bay LMDW Antipodes Collection Lightly Aged Rum (Thailand) – Review

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Jun 262023
 
Chalong Bay LMDW Antipodes Collection Lightly Aged Rum (Thailand) - Review

“Asia may be the next region to discover for rummies,” I wrote back in 2018 when introducing audiences to Chalong Bay for the first time, and nothing between then and now has caused me to significantly alter that off-the-cuff prognostication. Already, back then, we were seeing interesting (if not always world-beating) rums from Tanduay from the Philippines, Mekhong from Thailand, Amrut from India, Sampan from Vietnam, and Laotian from Laos. Australia was ticking along under everyone’s radar, the Pacific islands were just getting more well known, and of course there was always Nine Leaves out of Japan.  Not long after [Click here for the full review…]


That Boutique-y Rum Co. O Reizinho Rum (Batch 3) – Review

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Jun 192023
 
That Boutique-y Rum Co. O Reizinho Rum (Batch 3) - Review

Some rum independents just have a certain…something. A kind of vibe, a sort of cool marketing pizzazz and reputational cred that sets them apart from the increasing number of such companies crowding the marketplace.  It’s a varied sort of thing: sometimes it’s a colourful and interesting owner or brand rep, like Mitch Wilson, Josh Singh, Karl Mudzamba, Eric Kaye, Luca, Fabio or Florent Beuchet. Other times it’s because of really good rums that fly under the  radar, like Velier in the old days, or Tristan Prodhomme’s L’Esprit range, the one-off release of Stolen Overproof. And at other times it’s an [Click here for the full review…]


Ron Bacardi “Select” Rum (Puerto Rico)(1990s)

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Jun 162023
 
Ron Bacardi "Select" Rum (Puerto Rico)(1990s)

Rumaniacs Review #154 | 1006 In this series of Rumaniacs reviews (R-149 to R-154) we’ve been looking at a set of Bacardi rums from the 1970s to the 1990s that were all part of a small collection I picked up, spanning three decades and made in Mexico and Puerto Rico – they display something of what rums from that bygone era was like, and in this final review I’ll sum up what few observations that can be made. Preamble – The Select is a successor to the venerable “Black” or “Black Label” or “Premium Black.” Some of these labels were [Click here for the full review…]


Bacardi Superior “Premium Black” (Puerto Rico)(1970s/1980s)

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Jun 142023
 
Bacardi Superior "Premium Black" (Puerto Rico)(1970s/1980s)

Rumaniacs Review #153 | 1005 In this series of Rumaniacs reviews (R-149 to R-154) we’re looking at a set of Bacardis from the 1970s to the 1990s that were all part of a small collection I picked up, spanning three decades and made in Mexico and Puerto Rico – they display something of what rums from that bygone era was like, and the final review will have a  series of notes summing up what few conclusions we may be able to draw. Although some online references to the rum suggest a 1990s dating, the “Premium Black” is older, introduced much [Click here for the full review…]


Ron Bacardi Añejo (Mexico)(1970s)

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Jun 122023
 
Ron Bacardi Añejo (Mexico)(1970s)

Rumaniacs Review #152 | 1004 In this series of Rumaniacs reviews (R-149 to R-154) we’re looking at a set of Bacardis from the 1970s to the 1990s that were all part of a small collection I picked up, spanning three decades and made in Mexico and Puerto Rico – they display something of what rums from that bygone era was like, and the final review will have a  series of notes summing up what few conclusions we may be able to draw. The antecedents of the Bacardi Añejo — a word simply meaning “aged” in Spanish — are the same [Click here for the full review…]


Bacardi Gold Reserve (Puerto Rico)(1970s/1980s)

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Jun 092023
 
Bacardi Gold Reserve (Puerto Rico)(1970s/1980s)

Rumaniacs Review #151 | 1003 This series of Rumaniacs reviews (R-149 to R-154) is a set of Bacardis from the 1970s to the 1990s that were all part of a small collection I picked up, spanning three decades and made in Mexico and Puerto Rico – they display something of what rums from that bygone era was like, and the final review will have a  series of notes summing up what few conclusions we may be able to draw. Bacardi’s Gold rum (in all its iterations) is one of the oldest continuously made rums in existence, dating back to the [Click here for the full review…]


Bacardi Legendario “Carta Blanca” White Rum (Mexico)(1970s)

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Jun 072023
 
Bacardi Legendario "Carta Blanca" White Rum (Mexico)(1970s)

Rumaniacs Review #150 | 1002 This series of Rumaniacs reviews (R-149 to R-154) we’ll be looking at over the next week or so, is a set of Bacardis from the 1970s to the 1990s that were all part of a small collection I picked up, spanning three decades and made in Mexico and Puerto Rico – they display something of what rums from that bygone era was like, and the final review will have a  series of notes summing up what few conclusions we may be able to draw. Dating this one was interesting. The Legendario Carta Blanca brand (sometimes [Click here for the full review…]


Bacardi Superior “Silver Label” White Rum (Puerto Rico)(Early 1970s)

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Jun 052023
 
Bacardi Superior "Silver Label" White Rum (Puerto Rico)(Early 1970s)

Rumaniacs Review #149 | 1001 This series of Rumaniacs reviews (R-149 to R-154) we’ll be looking at over the next week or two, is a set of Bacardis from the 1970s to the 1990s that were all part of a small collection I picked up, spanning three decades, and made in Mexico and Puerto Rico – they display something of what rums from that bygone era was like, and the final review will have a series of notes summing up what few conclusions we may be able to draw. This Bacardi Superior noted as being “Silver Label” is the doddering [Click here for the full review…]


The Last Drop Distillers 1976 Very Old Jamaican Rum – Review

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Jun 022023
 
The Last Drop Distillers 1976 Very Old Jamaican Rum - Review

As the seasons turn and the years pass, the rumiverse edges closer and closer to the hallowed Everest of aged rums, that crowning achievement of geriatric eld grasped and never relinquished (so far) by G&M’s 58 year old rum from 1941. Alas, rums from so far back in time are now a disappearing dream, vanished into blends, collector’s vaults or the gullets of earlier connoisseurs who knew not what they had. There are few, if any, multi-decade old rums from the 1960s or 1950s to be found – these days, it’s the 1970s that is the decade we’re left with, [Click here for the full review…]


Maraska Room Domaći (Croatia) – Review

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May 262023
 
Maraska Room Domaći (Croatia) - Review

Historically speaking, and indeed even in our times, there are alcoholic spirits out there that stretch the borders, let alone the definitions, of “rum”. Yet I continue to seek out, look for and try these things, whether they are almost unknown indigenous cane juice rums, proto-rums from Asia, or the old verschnitts and spirits of their ilk made in Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th century. Such bottlings — for example the Badel Domaci (Croatia), Casino 50 (Hungary) or the Tuzemak (Czech Republic) — exert a curious fascination, a compelling kind of pull. In a way they speak to [Click here for the full review…]


El Destilado Wild Fermented Oaxaca Unaged White Rum – Review

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May 222023
 
El Destilado Wild Fermented Oaxaca Unaged White Rum - Review

Few even within the rum world and almost nobody outside it, will remember the small UK indie bottler El Destilado about which I and a couple of others wrote in our reviews of the fascinating, off-the-reservation Aguardiente de Panela, a rum from a tiny back-country distillery in Mexico. The three British guys who run El Destilado are unabashed agave lovers and dabble with rums only as a kind of sideshow; yet so enormous was the impact that that single limited edition artisanal rum made, that not only did I immediately try to buy all available rums which the little indie [Click here for the full review…]


Bira! South Pacific 2008 12 YO Rum – Review

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May 192023
 
Bira! South Pacific 2008 12 YO Rum - Review

If the author of some fictional novel that somehow included rum were to make mention of a South Sea island hooch made in Fiji, sourced from the Pacific island directly by an African expatriate living in Western Canada (by way of New Zealand), who gave it to a nomadic, vagrant, itinerant (and occasionally fragrant) West Indian to try, he would probably be sneered at for having an overactive imagination and told to stick with something more realistic. And yet, that’s exactly what this product is, and that’s exactly what happened. To set the stage, I tried the rum (and its [Click here for the full review…]


Ron Añejo Pampero Deluxe Venezuelan Rum (1980s)

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May 152023
 
Ron Añejo Pampero Deluxe Venezuelan Rum (1980s)

Rumaniacs Review R-148 | 0996 Pampero is a lesser known Venezuelan rum brand founded in 1938 by two friends, Alejandro Hernández and Luis Toro, who established their distillery in Caracas, and soon became one of the more popular brands in the country with their light, golden rums.  In keeping with the times they eschewed really serious long term ageing, and stuck with the mid range, producing various youngish rons like the Añejo “Extra”, “Dorado”, “White”, “Especial”, “Premium Gold” and so on. These various brands have gone through several name changes over the years and nowadays the line is made up [Click here for the full review…]


Plantation “Original Dark” Rum – Review

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May 122023
 
Plantation "Original Dark" Rum - Review

For all the bad press Plantation gets, it is, as I remarked in the Rumcast interview back in 2021, in no danger of going out of business any time soon. Its stable of rums, whatever their provenance, is simply too wide ranging and useful — and often affordable — to ignore, and many of them have become reliable workhorses of backbars the world around. Not the high end stuff, of course, like the single cask bottlings  of the Extreme Series which are regarded with desire or despite in any representative rumdork population…but the modest and less ambitious rums of the [Click here for the full review…]


J. Gow “Fading Light” Pure Single Rum (Scotland) – Review

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May 072023
 
J. Gow "Fading Light" Pure Single Rum (Scotland) - Review

If I enjoyed the naming J. Gow’s growling salvo across the rum world’s bows, the “Revenge,” then as a lover of language and an avid amateur photographer, I must confess to liking and appreciating the quiet romanticism the “Fading Light” title even more. And since that wasn’t enough for VS Distillers (the company behind the brand), it was also a more distinctive, even better rum than the “Revenge”…which as you may recall from last week’s review, was no slouch itself. I won’t rehash the background of this new Scottish distillery ensconced on a tiny island in the Orkneys, so far [Click here for the full review…]


J. Gow “Revenge” 3 YO Pure Single Rum (Scotland) – Review

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May 022023
 
J. Gow "Revenge" 3 YO Pure Single Rum (Scotland) - Review

More and more we are ceasing to regard rum as being the province of just the great geographical areas which have long stratified the spirit into styles which promoted – and are limited by – the regional perceptions of old colonial empires. British (Jamaican, Barbadian, Guyanese), Spanish/Latin and French are the best known of course, and Matt Petrek has long argued (correctly, in my view) that they are best seen as production classifiers than true regional markers — but ultimately the one thing that that particular series of classification did was that it centred our minds in the western hemisphere, [Click here for the full review…]


Ironworks Distillery Amber Rum – Review

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Apr 282023
 
Ironworks Distillery Amber Rum - Review

Returning to Canada and observing the rumscape that has developed over the last decade has not filled me with elation and confidence. Most of what I’ve found and tasted thus far is low level mixing hooch – which wouldn’t be so bad if the majority wasn’t just the kind of barely-aged, insipid, uninspiring, boring blah that Merchant Shipping Co. white rum so splendidly exemplified. They didn’t have to be — after all, I’ve tasted unaged and lightly aged rums from all over the map which exceeded their humble origins and became unexpectedly and quietly impressive products. But up until last [Click here for the full review…]


Pitterson “Dry Rum” Rhum Blanc – Review

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Apr 242023
 
Pitterson "Dry Rum" Rhum Blanc - Review

It’s almost a foregone conclusion that 99% of the readers of this article won’t know a thing about this rhum and its brand, and until I started researching the bottle, I didn’t either.  That’s an increasingly rare thing these days, considering that the writings of so many stellar bloggers over the last decade, combined with Rum Ratings and Rum-X, make it almost impossible for any brand to escape notice. Yet here we are, sipping at a peculiar bottle of white rum I bought completely on a whim (mostly because I can’t resist not knowing more about it). The company that [Click here for the full review…]


Whaler’s The Original Dark Rum (Rare Reserve)(Green Label)(1970s / 1980s)

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Apr 212023
 
Whaler's The Original Dark Rum (Rare Reserve)(Green Label)(1970s / 1980s)

Rumaniacs Review R-147 | 0990  After an hours-long tasting session of old rums from the seventies and eighties that were straining to reach the pinnacle of their mediocrity (and mostly failing), there were few surprises left when I came to the another one of the Hawaiian Distillers’ rums called Whalers.  For those who are curious there is some background in the other “Original Dark” review, the Hana Bay entry, as well as that of the Spirit of Hawaii: all of these brands were made by the same company, and although Hawaiian Distillers no longer exists, the brand of Whalers does [Click here for the full review…]


Damoiseau Rhum Agricole Blanc 50% White Rhum – Review

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Apr 172023
 
Damoiseau Rhum Agricole Blanc 50% White Rhum - Review

After more than a decade of writing about rhum agricole, its not entirely surprising that I’ve written more about Martinique rhums than Guadeloupe’s or Reunion’s or Madeira’s…yet more about Damoiseau’s products than any other distillery on any of these islands.  There’s just something about the subtly sumptuous roundness of their rhums that appeals to me, which is an observation I’ve made about Guadeloupe rhums as a whole before. Martinique rhums may be more elegant, more artistic, more precisely dialled in…but Guadeloupe’s rhums are often a whole lot more fun. Therefore my statistical appreciation for Damoiseau makes it peculiar that I’ve [Click here for the full review…]


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