Old Sam Demerara Rum (Rebranded) – Review

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Nov 152024
 

The other day I did a Rumaniacs retrospective on Edward Young & Co. Blue Mountain Old Liqueur Jamaican Rum dating back to the 1940s, made by an outfit founded in 1797. In doing the usual background research I found that one of my favourite low rent Canadian rums – the Youngs Old Sam – was originally made by the same company, and the current iteration’s label more references this connection more concretely than the original did.

That said, the pickings remain oddly thin. According to those sources I checked, the Newfoundland & Labrador Liquor Corporation (NLLC) picked up the brand in 1999 and have marketed it it as Young’s Old Sam ever since – until, that is, in 2021, when — with increased social consciousness arising from the BLM movement — the stylized drawing of a man on the original yellow label came under fire for being racially insensitive, and was promptly removed…although why they bothered is a mystery, since the “Old Sam 5” has the same drawing on it to this day. Anyway, the current label of this bottle has no graphics of any kind, just text: it says it’s “Old Sam Demerara Rum” (they dropped the “Young” for some reason, and I wonder, do they have permission to use the term “Demerara Rum”?) with additional text stating “Edward Young & Co, London and Liverpool, England.”  

But when all is said and done, it’s a blended Guyanese rum aged for 1-2 years, with distillate wholly or partly from the Enmore coffey still, and is bottled at 40%. For now I’ll accept it was aged in Guyana, if only because the NLLC website makes no mention of warehousing and ageing facilities of its own. The rum, by the way, is also quite dark, which means that it’s been coloured to conform to some non-knowledgeable dweeb’s perception that Demerara rums should be deep brown, or to pretend it’s aged more than it has been.

It noses very much like a Demerara rum, and has all the usual notes one would expect where some wooden still action is doing the tango. Initially the deep scents are of coffee grounds, plums, licorice, brown sugar, and cinnamon. Then, after letting it stand for a bit you can smell some bitter chocolate and well polished leather, and later still there are hints of burnt (yes, burnt) pastries, toffee, caramel, red wine and vinegar. But no real wooden still notes of the kind I would have expected from the Enmore still, not really. Certainly nothing along the line of pencil shavings, wet sawdust or freshly sawn timber.

The palate is less in all ways. It’s rather thin, and scratches bitchily at the tongue as if wanting nothing better than to be gone (and it is). It’s a touch salty, has dark fruits, raisins, figs and sweet soya notes.  Perhaps with some effort you can find the coffee grounds and unsweetened chocolate again, but overall, it’s just a bunch of scrawny but familiar flavours, held together with string, bailing wire and duct tape. It’s not a sipping rum by any means, as the hasty scramble for the exit demonstrated by the lacklustre finish amply demonstrates – it vanishes fast, with just the faint memory of dates, coffee, sweet soya and vanilla left behind (and that not for long).

All right, so perhaps that’s a bit snarky of me too. After all, it’s a low-priced young rum that is made to be put into a Cuba libre or whatever, and at that it does a decent job. And it does have some nice flavours for those who are (like me) somewhat enamoured of the Demerara style rum profiles. But I have to say that it seems a bit too confected to take at face value, and the taste doesn’t really live up to what the nose implies. The original unscored review I wrote was mildly positive about it (admittedly I was somewhat wet behind the ears at the time), but a decade and a half later I can’t really say that it should rate above 80 points, with the caveat that if you are more into cocktails, you might want to bump it up a notch.  That’s about as fair as I can be about it.

(#1099)(78/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Other notes

  • Video Recap is here. 
  • The rum tests out at 38.8% ABV, which indicates something else (~8 g/L) is in there besides the rum. That might account for the thick smoothness the nose suggests.
  • The back label says the rum is a “unique blend of rums…distilled on the world’s last operating Wooden Coffey Still…aged for a minimum of two years in oak barrels.” We need to unpack that brief declaration. For one, the company’s own website says that the blend includes “one of the marques […] produced…on the world’s last operating wooden coffee still” (sic) (while the label implies it’s all from that still); and specifically mentions that it’s aged for at least fifteen months, not two years, thought it adds that ageing is done in Guyana. Given that of late I have heard DDL is no longer exporting bulk rum from the heritage stills, one wonders if this situation can continue – though it is likely that for long term favoured clients, the rules may be bent.

Company Bio (summary)

Rock Spirits is the manufacturing arm of the NLLC which is a provincial crown corporation (effectively a government liquor monopoly, like the LCBO in Ontario) and is the only such corporation with its own manufacturing and bottling division. It was founded in 1954 and currently owns some fifteen brands sold across Canada, including rums like Screech, Cabot Tower, London Dock, George Street, Ragged Rock. Almost all of these are from Guyanese stocks, which implies a long standing relationship with DDL. 

They also have partnership agreements with other brands, which is why Smuggler’s Cove Rum from Glenora Spirits in Nova Scotia is apparently made in Newfoundland (and this makes sense since they don’t list it, or any other rum, on their own website, as they rather embarrassedly did back in 2010 when I first looked in on them). While it’s not stated outright anywhere, it’s likely that they provide blending services and bottling runs for other companies as well.

 

JimmyRum “RumRum Batch #4” 4YO Australian Rum – Review

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Oct 282024
 

With the upcoming release of the new 2024 Australian Advent calendar, I should speed up the process of writing about the 2023 calendar, where we still have about four to go. And so today, I return to one of the first producers whose rums I tried back with the initial calendar, JimmyRum, that casual, humorous, insouciant little distillery down in the south (see a brief bio below the review).

Several ranges of rums are now part of the distillery’s stable, and you want to be careful with them, because while they are clearly and distinctively named — Queen’s Cut, Oaked, Cane ‘n’ Grain, Silver, RumRum and so on — these series are individually issued in batches. And while those batches are identified on the website, I’m not sure whether it’s as clearly noted on the labels, or whether the year is identified anywhere. It can cause confusion to the casual buyer.

Anyway, this rum is Batch #4 and it can be considered part of the “standard” lineup with none of the flourishes or other touches that set apart more romantically named editions (like the Navy or Queen’s Share.e.g.). As noted in my previous reviews, the molasses derives from Sunshine Sugar in New South Wales, and the wash is done in two 5000-litre fermenters, which are temperature controlled to less than 25°C with an initial Brix of approximately 19. Distillation remains on “Matilda” (the 1500 litre Italian-made hybrid still), and ageing is for a minimum four years in four ex-bourbon 200L American oak casks – these were initially filled at 65% ABV, in this case the rum was reduced to 50.3% ABV specifically for the Calendar. It’s also an unfiltered version, hand bottled and hand labelled. Cute. 

Publicity photo (c) JimmyRum

I’ve quite liked JimmyRum from the inception (the Silver scored 79, the RumRum 3YO nabbed 84) and they have kept on creeping up the scale with this one, because it’s a really nifty piece of work. It has, for example, a dusty opening nose, like a wooden barrel filled with apples in the cellar. There are spices, strawberries, peaches, apricots, kiwi fruit, freshly sliced pineapple skins, and to that is added a mild citrus note of 7-Up sugar water and zest. As if this was not enough, a kitchen sink floats by, filled with laban, miso soup, sour yoghurt, sweet balsamic vinegar (the kind that has essence of, say raspberries in it) and whipped cream sprinkled with cinnamon and lemon peel. It really is an aromatic rum.

And the palate is also nothing to sneeze at either: honey, tawny wax notes, brown sugar, brine and olives. Freshly baked croissants with butter, maple syrup, strawberries, butterscotch and vanilla, some bitter chocolate and coffee grounds, set off by the faintest sweet-sour note of a freshly cracked tamarind pod (and that’s not a bad thing in this context, really). The finish is all right – neither overstaying its welcome, nor being overly shy. There are hints of tamarind, ruby grapefruit, apricots, vanilla and cinnamon; not a whole lot more, though, and it leaves without breaking new ground or making any larger statement for itself.

Well, I quite liked this one. Young rums don’t always get a good hearing – witness my own occasional shredding of cheap mixing-grade blends like ambres, golds or other young cocktail fodder made with equal parts indifference and disrespect – but I do find that smaller distilleries often provide a good product. Like here, where we get lots of flavours, a solid strength and more than enough quality to set it apart from others its own age. If I had a quibble, it’s that Golds are cheaper mass market rums that can be had for peanuts, while something like this, even for its youth, costs way over a hundred hucks in Australia (so God knows how much it’ll be when we get it out west)

Still, in re-tasting it, I once again note that there’s a lot of breakfast on this tray. It’s a voluptuous, tasty, well-balanced treat; and while my imagination may be overactive, it’s no small thing for a rum, any rum, by itself, to so easily evoke the kind of autumn thoughts this one does. I keep daydreaming of a confident and beautiful woman in a green coat walking home from work on a crisp cool evening, treating herself to a bag of freshly baked pastries, fruits from the grocery, and a hot toddy steaming in her hand. What can I say? Rum does that to me sometimes. So pardon me while I close this review, lean back to finish my sample, and indulge them some more. I think I want to meet this rum…and maybe, one day, the woman too.

(#1094)(85/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Other notes

  • Video Recap is here. 
  • From Day 20 of the 2023 Australian Advent Calendar 
  • As of the time of this writing in October 2024, JimmyRum’s website is selling RumRum Batch#5

Company Bio (summary)

JimmyRum is a very new distillery, established around 2018 in Dromana, a small community just south of Melbourne by James McPherson, a former marine engineer. In 2015 or so, after some twenty years sailing the high seas as a Chief Engineer, he decided (initially as a joke) to open a distillery dedicated to rum, a first (and the first) in the state of Victoria. His research relating to rum took him on a whirlwind 3-month 70-distillery tour of the world after which he bought the biggest still he could afford from Italy (before he had actually done a lick of distilling himself), installed it and ran it in, arranged for casks, sources of supply, tested the results and started making stock to lay down to age.

Bayou Louisiana XO “Reserve Select Barrel” Rum – Review

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Oct 112024
 

Rums like this, decent as they may be, always strike me as ultimately deceptive: when you delve right in and start to take apart the claims of the advertising they try to sell you on, all you get is emptiness. The pretty label and website blurbs you are generously provided is rather at odds with the grudging paucity of anything resembling actual information, and for us to be running around trying to understand anything about what’s in the rum in this day and age is, quite simply, an affront to rum lovers.

The mild dissatisfaction you might sense in the comment above derives from a tasting of the Bayou white, the XO “Reserve” and the “Mardi Gras” rums that I did side by side back in January of 2024. I wasn’t impressed by the white and this one didn’t do much for me either. Now, just so you know – I taste first and research later, so whatever issues I have with disclosure and labelling and the company’s information provision don’t impact how I feel about the rum as it samples, or how I score.  So let’s just get that out of the way and then I’ll tell you some more about what you’re supposedly drinking

The nose opens with what initially seems an impressive panoply of aromas: caramel, cold wet coffee grounds still in the filter, some toffee, smoke and leather. This is all boilerplate, however, really quiet and light.  After some time one can pick out vanilla, sweet green peas in water, and some faint background notes of stewed apples, flambeed bananas, that burnt fruit kind of thing. If you strain you can get some pastries and stale black tea. Quite sweet, with some licorice and marshmallow notes thrown in at the back end. 

If this had been about five to ten points stronger it would have made a real statement for itself, I believe, but the standard strength undercuts the promises the nose makes. Tasting the rather thinly sweet bourbon-like rum provides a whole lot of nothing in particular: I strain to taste chocolates, cinnamon, unsweetened black tea long since gone cold, licorice, some vanilla and it’s all rather dampened down, with some indeterminate fruits like apples doing a slow dance in the background.  Very little to get enthused about here, very little to get inspired by — at the end, it closes with a lackadaisical indeterminate finish of marshmallows and light fruits one can barely sense before they vanish, and one is left wondering what the point ever was.

So…what is it? According to the website it’s a molasses-based pot still rum, aged for four years or less (the famous words “up to…” are in evidence) in wet ex-bourbon barrels, which implies they couldn’t be bothered to actually try for an actual bourbon but wanted to get the best of both drinking classes enthused with this one drink made on the cheap. The bottle label says it’s a reserve without defining what that is, and the website does nothing better, though it does make a curious comment that suggests that are using a solera system, even if this is mentioned nowhere else on the website or the label itself. On the other hand, we are told this is bottle #003 of 7076, which rather undercuts the special select nature of the release, I would think, but never mind.

“This is a rum for bourbon drinkers” chirps the website — one can only wonder when one reads stuff like that, to what level of bourbon they refer: bottom feeding bathtub-brewed hooch, or something more elevated that’s fallen on hard times, or…what? Me, I’m completely unmoved by it, because it suffers from that most depressing of characteristics, namely, that it has none.  It’s a rum, yes, but bland and completely conventional, without anything to set it apart, a slog through, and not really interesting — I could get more of a buzz shuffling the papers on my desk from the “in” to the “out” tray. 

(#1093)(74/100) ⭐⭐½

Brief company bio (from Review #1053 of the Bayou white )

The company making the rum is called Louisiana Spirits LLC: it was founded in January 2013 by brothers Tim and Trey Litel and their friend Skip Cortes, with Bayou as their flagship brand in January 2013 (the idea had been floated in a duck blind back in 2011). The chosen name was obvious (and survey-tested for its recognition factor, as if this were necessary), and back then the design had a ‘gator on it. By 2018 in a rebranding exercise it had been renamed “White” and the modern design had snapped into focus. The wag in me suggests that maybe more surveys were done but actually that’s when the SPI Group (the owners of Stoli vodka and headquartered in Luxembourg) who had already bought a majority stake in 2016, acquired all the remaining shares and took over. As far as I know, the original founders are no longer much involved in production.

Other notes

Brix Distillers Select Cask Series (Tawny Finish) Australian Rum

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Aug 072024
 

The last time we looked in on the small urban distillery called Brix (located just due south of the Sidney Opera house, a stone’s throw off Flinders Street for those who like their geography straight), they were messing around with their unaged rum called the Urban Cane, which I quite liked. Here now we have a young aged rum, which turns out to be quite a nifty little number.

In the years since they began operations in 2017, Brix have significantly added to their portfolio: now they have a spiced rum, a mango (infused/flavoured) rum, a standard Australian rum, the aforementioned cane spirit, liqueurs, and a series of finished rums called the Select Casks. Plus ready to drink cocktail cans, branded glencairns, hats, t-shirts, tote bags and yes, for those who like going places and giving lousy presents — a t-shirt. Capitalism is alive and well in downtown Sidney.

As I noted with the first review, they had a sort of yuppie inner city vibe that contrasted interestingly with the more down to earth family ethos characteristic of so many of Australia’s current microdistillers (especially those in Queensland and elsewhere).  And I also made that comment because it sure seemed like they built an entire pub / restaurant / bar establishment around their 1800 litre still (“Molly” – don’t you just love how Aussies name their stills?  When was the last time you saw a Caribbean outfit do that?).

Leaving aside all these throwaway details, what we have here is a rum deriving from refinery grade molasses sourced from Bundaberg, fermented using champagne and Caribbean yeasts, the wash from which was then run through the aforementioned hybrid still, then aged three years in 225L French oak Shiraz barriques from Brokenwood Wines , plus another two months in 38 year old 500L Tawny puncheons. The final result was bottled at 48.1%, and the label says 1136 bottles – and for the record, the release won a Gold Medal in the 2022 Australian Distilled Spirits Awards.

Photo (c) Brix Distillers, from their FB Page

Those wine casks must have quite an influence, because I must concede there’s a fair bit to unpack when sampling it.  Nose first: it has a nicely traditional rummy nose with all the bits and trimmings – honey, fruits, caramel, cinnamon, vanilla, light molasses, and red grapes. This is then followed up with sweet raspberry jam and orange peel, and has a pleasant breakfast whiff of syrup over hot, freshly-made pancakes, and butter melting in a steaming bowl of cream of wheat…that kind of thing.

The palate settles down somewhat and isn’t quite on the same level, yet it still presents some pleasant, interesting tastes. Initially we get caramel bonbons, nuts, almonds, unsweetened chocolate, toasted rye bread with salted butter. The wine and port casks bring out the fruits again – somewhat indeterminate to be sure, yet subtly shading the whole, and somehow I am reminded of the delicate watercolours of Turner or Durer versus something more savagely elemental such as the oils of, oh, Caravaggio. And then there are notes of figs, brown sugar, cinnamon, even nutmeg and key lime pie which lead to a gentle, easygoing finish that’s sweet and light and redolent of pastries and soft red grapes.

It’s a nice, pleasant little sipping rum, this one, and the strength is just about right. I genuinely enjoyed it, because it presented us a traditional series of tastes without entirely giving itself over to a standard profile.  There’s a bit of edge here, a slight swerve away from the ordinary, and it speaks really well for the aged rums that we can expect to see from this little distillery in the future. I’m going to enjoy looking out for the next one from Brix.

(#1085)(84/100) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Other notes

  • Video Recap is here. 

Company background

The distillery was founded in 2017 after two years’ worth of planning and setup, by James Christopher, Damien Barrow and Siddharth Soin, three friends who are also partners in a popular local restaurant. They sourced an 1800-litre copper pot still made in Australia (called “Molly”) and forged direct connections with suppliers and growers so as to source local ingredients as far as possible: Australian molasses and organic sugar cane from their supplier, a farm in Woongoolba close by the Rocky Point sugar mill (Southern Queensland, just south of Brisbane), locally-made spices, barrels and everything else they need. Their outturn includes a limited edition white cane juice spirit (“Urban Cane,” issued annually ), a white mixer, a lightly aged gold and a spiced rum, plus some flavoured mixes. There’s more ageing out back, and I’m sure we’ll see that in the years to come, as rum education and rum improvement are part of what Brix is all about as well.

Doorly’s Finest Old Barbados 3YO Rum – Review

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Jul 162024
 

Over the years I’ve somewhat revised my initially indifferent stance towards Doorly’s, which at various times I sniffed at as lacking in seriousness, bereft of real character, a relic of a bygone and more innocent era, or various other rather dismissive comments. To me, Doorly’s always seemed to be a genuflection to the mass market instead of something more exactingly made.  The entire line, even with its heritage, paled in taste and significance when rated against the rums that Foursquare became known for: the ECS series, the Velier Collaborations, the pot still aged rums and the occasional Master Distillers releases.

Yet, slowly, quietly, the line got better and began to be more than just a back bar staple that incurious barmen reached for when they needed a cheaper aged Barbados rum. It rose in my estimation over the years. I named the 12YO a key rum of the world, and quite enjoyed the 14YO. But much to my surprise, it was this 3YO which exceeded its expectations so handily that it actually went toe to toe with the 14YO (albeit for different reasons). Now there’s a surprise for you.

Let’s start at the beginning: Doorly’s is the mass market export brand of Foursquare Distillery, which needs no further introduction (and if it does, you’re not really into rum); they had initially acquired the brand in the early 1990s and kept it in place because of its name recognition – it has now grown into one of the most recognizable Barbados brands in the world. The rum is a pot and column still blend, aged three years in ex-Bourbon (older casks), is issued at two strengths, 40% and 47% – this review is based on the stronger one.

Normally a 3YO rum is a cocktail ingredient, and priced to move. Sometimes also called Amber, Gold or Ambre, it’s coloured artificially on occasion, though here, given the pale yellow hue, that’s unlikely and it’s all barrel derived. The initial nose is remarkably crisp, without being sharp or bitchy, which is welcome: it’s buttery, briny and flowery, with coconut shavings and vanilla hogging the scene, accompanied by almonds, coffee grounds, cloves and a touch of black pepper.

On the palate it’s also quite good, firm and well balanced, not at all sharp. It opens with salt butter and Danish cookies, vanilla, hot pastries, licorice, pine tarts, with a gradually discernible background of raisins, citrus, coconut shavings, coffee grounds, charcoal and sour red licorice. It all leads to a decent medium long finish that wraps up the show nicely and sums up the preceding notes without adding new. It’s just…hefty. And quite a tasty dram, let me add.

I would never pick the 40% edition if this was available as an option. The combination of the flavours is all well handled, and there’s a force to it imparted by the higher strength that’s impressive. The other day I tried the Sunshine & Sons Australian rum that was a little over half+- this rum’s age and about the same strength, but had to strain twice as hard to get a fraction of what this rum so effortlessly put out the door without looking like it was even trying. Moreover, it moves between cocktail ingredient and sipper with startling ease – you can use it for either one – and shows that even a 3YO can show flashes of elegance that elevates it over rums years older. This is one hell of a young rum.

(#1081)(84/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Other notes

Sunshine & Sons Maroochy River “Barrel Aged Cane” Australian Cane Juice Rum – Review

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Jul 122024
 

Let’s get back to Australia, and take a look at one of the rums that begins to turn up the proof a little: this is the Barrel Aged Cane from a locality of the Sunshine Coast Region, just north of Brisbane, in Queensland. The torturous title — which when you parse it linguistically, actually makes no sense — is a way to get around the two year rule for calling a rum “rum” Down Under. 

There is not too much information on the distillery available on their website beyond the usual hyperboles and flowery language, so I’ll spare you that and just mention my guess that they were founded around 2019 or so, and that they have two large pot stills – “Sarah” a 2500-litre spirit still 1; and “Maria” a 6,000-litre wash still 2. One interesting thing about this distillery is they are a sister company of a much better known brand – Nil Desperandum, which does special bottlings.

So, about this rum, then. One unusual feature about it is that it is made from locally sourced cane juice, not molasses, with wild fermentation. Although it’s exactly the same as the Sunshine & Sons Premium Spirits Original Cane, it’s slightly younger at 20 months, unsweetened, less strong (49%) and in more limited quantities (two to four 200-litre barrels per year) matured in ex-bourbon oak barrels and intended to play a role as an exception in the Nil Desperandum releases – in this case, however, it was made specially available to this advent calendar.

We don’t see to much cane juice hooch in Australia, so it goes to show the experimental nature of what they do over there. That said, the real question for us is whether it comes anywhere near to lightly aged agricoles with which we are more familiar. Nosing this displays a rum remarkably light and easy for 49%. There are hints – and I use the word carefully – of honey, fruits, lemon zest and dishwashing liquid, raisins and dates. Some ripe Thai mangoes, green grapes, oranges, and some hot pastries in a vaguely sweet but puzzlingly faint overall amalgam. It really takes some effort to pin down those elusive notes, even going back and forth for several hours,

The palate is quite firm, and once again there are tastes that only reveal themselves gradually, even reluctantly, over time: some light fruits, pears, watermelon, papaya, lychees. Nothing overbearing or overly dominant. After a while one can taste a bit of orange marmalade on white toast, vanilla, a touch of brine, some indeterminate citrus peel, wrapping up in a finish that’s short and light and sweet, but ultimately, somewhat banal.

I find this an odd rum.  First of all, there is very little that says agricole here, and channels a profile more akin to a back bar light white mixing rum. It’s vaguely sweet and pretty unaggressive, and rather underwhelming for something positioning itself as a limited edition special. It’s a rum, it’s nice enough, yet it reminds me too much of those milquetoast minis that hotel fridges stock, those mild-mannered Clark Kents which they charge an arm and a leg for. It’s too easy to completely succeed in a neat pour, and yet not anonymous enough for a cocktail, while being too light to satisfy either. Admittedly, it’s better than the alcoholic water that too often passes itself off as amber or mildly aged rums out west these days…I just feel there’s more here that we aren’t being allowed to come to grips with. Hopefully future editions will try to pack a bit more punch into the plonk.

(#1080)(78/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Other notes

Ninefold Distillery “Watson’s Reserve” Aged Rum (Batch #1) – Review

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Jun 172024
 

The question most have when seeing this bottle for the first time, is, not unnaturally, who the hell is Watson? Is it the owner?  An old and crusty master blender, a black sheep member of the family? Some anonymous angel investor from way back? Naah, it’s none of the above – with a cheeky sense of humour that would do the new Australian micros proud, the answer is…the distillery cat; and they named their rarest experimental casks for him.

This might make the distillery seem somewhat of a lark and not all that serious, but take my word for it – it is. Kit Carruthers founded the establishment in 2018 on a converted cattle byre on  the family estate in SW Scotland, just around the time the ink was drying on his PhD, and began distilling in 2019, doing all of the initial work on his own. By 2022 things were going well enough to hire a second employee (or third, if you count Watson – it’s not clear what his legal status in the distillery is; he may just be a feline Baldrick for all we know).

What characterises the distillery and Kit’s work there is not only the minimal environmental footprint, but the quickly expanding range.  There’s a white rum in the lineup, several aged expressions, special editions (of course), a spiced rum and always something a bit out there for the aficionados, or a favoured charity. The “Watson’s Reserve Edition #1” which had its debut in the 2023 TWE Rum Show is a post still product laid to rest in September 2019 in an American oak barrel, then recasked in June 2021 in a 65L Ex-oloroso and ex-Speyside whisky octave before being bottled in November 2022 at 59%…by which time the outturn was a relatively small 30 bottles.

Even if a year after the fact it’s become borderline unavailable, it’s still worth checking out if you can find it. For a youngish rum it sure presses some interesting buttons: for example, the nose is quite pleasant for that strength, richly sweet and borderline thick. It’s initially chewy and meaty to smell, though this fades rather quickly leaving mostly grapes, vanilla, apples and some faintly sour notes of kimchi and a wine that’s on the edge of going off, balanced by some toffee and salted caramel ice cream.

The taste builds (some might say improves) on that, and elevates the experience a bit. It’s crisp and a little sharp, very clean. Mostly it presents butterscotch and caramel, toffee, some weak tannins and vanilla, raisins and prunes. One can’t expect too much complexity for a three year old rum, yet what we have here isn’t half bad, and the finish is vibrant, fresh and quite dry, with more of those faintly bitter woody notes leavened with toffee and vanilla – one wonders what this will be like in a further five years, to be honest.

British rum until recently was relegated to supermarket blends, neutral alcohol dumbed down to living room strength, Bacardi lookalikes or rebottled rum from foreign climes, often the Caribbean. But in the last decade, a bunch of New Brit distilleries have popped up over the last decade – the Islay Rum Company, Outlier, Retribution, J. Gow,  Sugar House and others, have all redefined British rum making in this period (in my opinion at least), with small-batch cask-strength releases, fascinating unaged whites, innovative approaches and a desire to see what some tinkering and an attitude can do. 

Ninefold is one of these and they’re just as eager to show they can make some interesting juice, with or without Watson lending a helping paw.  Based on this rum and others I’ve tried, they have a good chance of doing just that. 

(#1077)(85/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Other notes

New Norfolk Distillery Dormant Star Single Rum (Batch 2)(Tasmania) – Review

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Jun 102024
 

Now here we’re approaching a distillery that moves away somewhat from the east coast of Australia where so many other rum making outfits  are found, and situates itself firmly on the southern island of Tasmania (about which I could tell you plenty historical stuff, but may risk putting you to sleep and so shall desist).

In brief, this distillery, located in New Norfolk (get it?) in the Derwent Valley in southern Tasmania, just NW of Hobart, the capital, is on premises that once housed a hospital and asylum complex. It was established in 2019 by Tarrant Derkson, who decided to make a distillery that focused on rum, after realising there weren’t any such animals around, for reasons rooted in the same history I’ll just touch on here.

Now, from 1839 until 1992, spirit production — primarily whisky, for which there had once been sixteen distilleries — was prohibited in Tasmania, but the ban was eventually repealed. These days there are a few companies making rums, yet, similar to Australia, one gets the impression that in the main they move around gins and whiskies and rum is a sideline. Island Coast, Blackman’s Bay, Deviant Distillery, Knocklofty, Bridport Distilling  are examples, making rum as a reflex nod to rounding out the portfolio rather than a prime focus (I make no judgement on this, it’s just economics and wherewithal, that’s all)

New Norfolk has no time for any of newfangled notions like portfolio diversity and resolutely makes rums, pretty much only rums, and amuse themselves by often using some very intriguing names for them. They currently produce various liqueurs, spiced rums and straightforward rums…but it is the 60% Drone Riot Wild Cane Spirit and the Diablo Robotico 66.6% pure single cask rum which really interest me, quite aside from this one, which is called Dormant Star for reasons that are probably related to it being dormant until released by cracking the bottle and quaffing it (something similar to the way Velier called one line of its rums “Liberation” and gave it the year of bottling not the year of laying it down to age.

Photo (c) New Norfolk Distillery

The website production details are spartan at best but from photos and additional notes of the advent calendar we can infer the following: molasses based with some cane sugar for the ferments, which takes 7-14 days and results in a 12-14% wash which gets run through “Riley” their tame copper pot still, after which it is set to age in American oak for 2+ years.  Now, according to Mrs and Mrs Rum, there is some minor dosage, but I didn’t get a chance to check it and anyway like I said, I tend to reserve judgement on this until I actually try the final product.

The nose is quite interesting: it opens with an initial aroma of dusty drywall, paint, varnish, rubber tyres and new leather upholstery of a car that sat too long in the sun (so maybe there’s an unsupervised house repairman running around the distillery?). This is balanced off by chocolates, nuts, vanilla, cardboard, rye bread, light fruits (papaya, pears, light green grapes, which is pleasant), and treacle over hot fresh pancakes, so there’s quite a bit to parse here.

The taste is a little less complicated. At 47.5% it’s firm and assertive, not particularly sharp, quite soft, a little sweet, and initial flavours are of honey plus fruits – bananas, pears, grapes, and guavas (the white ones), with some green apples providing that slight tart bite to cut the experience. There are also some light caramel and breakfast spices, vanilla and cinnamon, but one has to strain to pick those out and it’s hardly worth trying, as the finish does provide a summary of that as well, and overall it finishes quietly

This is a really nice, easygoing hot weather rum, the sort that’s quite sippable. If I had an issue with it at all it’s that it is too tame, not particularly complex and could showcase a bit more. It’s pleasant without attempting any exceptionalism, and what it succeeds at is not pissing anyone off – there is absolutely nothing wrong with it that a person who likes easier Spanish style rums would find fault with. For those who want something more brawny and uncompromising, this isn’t for you: for everyone else, it’s fine. 

(#1076)(84/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Other notes

  • From the 2023 Australian Advent Calendar Day 16
  • More details may be added later about the distillery background and production process, as I have some outstanding queries to them.
  • I was told there was some light dosage here but have not confirmed this
  • The five minute video recap is here.

Helios Distillery “Teeda” Blended Japanese Rum – Review

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May 142024
 

Although of late I have been unable to source many rums from Japan, one company’s juice does make it over to Calgary, and that’s the Helios Distillery’s “Teeda” brand. So far neither the 5YO nor the white are to be found here (though both have been reviewed in these pages based on their coming out party in Paris a few years ago); however, we have seen the amazing 21 YO, and the rather deceptive, blended “standard strength” rum which we are looking at today.

For the benefit of those who want to know more about Helios, it is arguably the oldest rum making distillery in Japan, having been operational since 1961. Then, it was called Taiyou, and made cheap rum blends from sugar cane, both to sell to the occupying American forces, and to save rice for food and sake production. In the decades since, they’ve branched out — and aside from beers and awamori, for which they are better known in Japan, rums continue to make up a good portion of the portfolio.

The dark-yellow coloured blended rum (it’s just called “Teeda Japanese Rum” on the label) is an interesting piece of work. For one, it doesn’t present as any kind of special, and has no fancy advertising flourishes to hit you over the head with its awesomeness. It’s 40% ABV and doesn’t even bother to tell you how old it is. In the west that would be called indifference: in Japan it’s a marketing strategy. Because the rum is actually an agricole-style rum, made from cane juice. It’s made on a pot still.  It’s aged a minimum of three years in American oak. These are not the sort of stats to excite yawns these days.

Nor should they, because the rum is quietly excellent (and this comes from a guy who’s tried the whole range and liked quite a few). Just look at how it opens when you smell it.  You get tart fleshy fruits — apricots, ripe mangoes, ginnips and soursop — mixing it up with the sourness of a seriously tasty ashlyan-foo, ripe red grapes, and a touch of rotting oranges. Oh and there’s bananas, lychees, and even (get this!) some freshly peeled potatoes and dark rye bread. One may not recognize all the scents that come wafting out of the glass, but there’s no denying there’s quite a bit of originality here.

And it also develops well on the palate. It does this by never straying too far from what we might call a “rummy” profile. It’s slightly sweet and the ex-bourbon barrels in which it was aged provide the requisite backbone of vanilla, leather, and light molasses and tannins. Here the sour notes from the nose have been dialled down, to be replaced with a mildly funky note, some tart fruits (strawberries, orange peel), honey and a nice mild cane sap of the sort you get when you split a stalk of sugar cane with your teeth (and I should know). The finish isn’t all that long lasting or intense, just flavourful and pleasant and channels most of what has been described above – it’s the most forgettable part of the rum

Overall, I think this is one of the most original and interesting young rums I’ve tried in a long while, excluding the unaged white brawlers with which I wrestle quite often. It shows the benefits of a fermentation- and still-based approach to rum making, as opposed to the Spanish style of light-off-the-column-still, barrel-influenced rons. Those are good for what they are and of course have their adherents (especially in their countries of origin) – I just don’t find them quite as interesting, as representative of their lands.

The fact that the Teeda Blended Rum presents so well even with so few years of ageing, builds a head of steam to finish in such style, suggests there is a sweet spot where the rambunctiousness of youth intersects perfectly with a little of the wisdom of age. Neither aspect is completely eliminated here, and with this rum, I would suggest that Helios found a nice middle in which to showcase both. What a lovely, unassuming and understated  rum it is indeed.

(#1071)(85/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Other Notes

  • Accompanying 5-Minute Video Review
  • Both this rum and the 21 YO remain available in Canada. For some reason the White and the 5YO never got imported.
  • The colouring of the rum and the printed-on bottle make the label very hard to take pictures of. The back blurb is just marketing stuff and does not say anything useful about the rum itself. The front is pretty minimal.

Boatrocker Brewers & Distillers Double Barrel Australian Rum (Batch #4) – Review

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May 072024
 

We met this distillery before, last time we had an advent calendar: back then they were presenting Batch #3 of their double barrel rum, and now here we have the next iteration, the Batch #4.

You can read a more extended company bio below this review, so let’s skip right to the rum itself, for which the production process is the same as before. A primary ferment uses a yeast originally from Jamaica; a dunder/muck pit (also not mentioned on the site) provides cultured bacteria, and wild yeast is from the local area, all which is continually evolving as they add fresh dunder at the end of each rum run to boost the ester count. How long the fermentation goes on for is unknown, but once this process is complete, the rum distillation is done using the their 450 litre hybrid pot still (with two ten-plate columns) and engaging just the first column and five plates – the juice comes off the still at around 58% ABV, and set to age for about two years in first-use bourbon barrels imported from the USA, with a further year in high-char (#3) American oak barrels. Bottling is done after dilution to 45% ABV, and there you have it. New rum. Made just like the old rum.

Let’s start with the nose. Some of the same richness of aroma attended the first sniff, though here, instead of leading with the wine profile, what I got was more of a spice forward smell: vanilla, cinnamon, cardamom, a trace of nutmeg. It was also slightly more woody, had some sawdust notes, and gradually showed off warm pastries dusted with icing sugar fresh out of the oven. Cherries in sweet syrup, black grapes, raisins, bitter chocolate, and even a touch of ice cream, finished things off, so on that score, it compared well with B#3..except for one thing: somehow, it was not as richly pungent, or as intense as I recalled.

The taste there is something of the same issue I had had before: it was thinner and, in fact, here it almost seemed snide, a trifle bitchy.  There were fruits, vanilla, chocolate oranges, some crushed almonds, molasses and touch of citrus. But it was all something of a disorganised mishmash – the nose really had more elegance than what the palate was demonstrating. After trying it a few times I noticed cashews, honey and bitter chocolate (again), and the spiced pungency of a German glühwein on a particularly cold winter day in the Weihnachtsmarkt. And lastly, something that would make Mrs. Caner swoon if she sensed it, the aromatic hint of a brand new soft leather purse (the expensive kind). The finish was short and none too demonstrative, being content to repeat these notes – rather fewer of them, in fact – and letting the whole thing expire without fuss or memory.

(c) Boatrocker Distillery, picture from their website

Surprisingly, I was less impressed this go-around than I had been with the previous iteration, although since my other sample remains in Germany I could not compare them directly (but I have extensive files, so…). Very much like before, I enjoyed the nose the most, with a gradually decreasing appreciation for the stages after that. Part of it is simply the integration, the way the components all came together…or didn’t. It seemed there were a lot of interesting pieces on display – fruits, woody tannins, spices, sweet, a touch of sour – but somehow they had a failure to communicate. With Batch #3 I suggested it was something of a work in progress with room for improvement to realise its potential.  The jury remains out on that, especially with respect to this one.

(#1070)(80/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Company notes (from Review #905)

The distillery and brewery called Boatrocker (with what I am sure is representative of a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour shared by many Aussies) is another small family-run outfit located in Melbourne, a mere 50km or so north of JimmyRum. It was officially founded in 2009, and like many other such small enterprises I’ve written about, their genesis is far older: in this case, in the 1980s, when the (then teenaged) founder, Matt Houghton, was enthused by the Michael Jackson (no, not that Michael Jackson) show “The Beer Hunter” – this led to a lifelong love of beer, homebrewing, studies of the subject in University, and even gypsy brewing after graduation, which he and his wife Andrea did while saving pennies for a “real” brewery.  In 2012 they acquired property, plant and equipment (as the bean counters like to say), and established their first barrel room and cellar door, all to do with beer.

They soon gained an enthusiastic following and a good reputation for their beers, but where’s the rum, you ask. Well, that’s where things get a little murky and several sources have to be consulted over and above the company webpage. In short, in 2017 Boatrocker merged with a Western Australian gin-and-vodka distillery called Hippocampus — the investing owner of that distillery had taken a 33% share in Boatrocker in 2015 — uprooted that company’s hybrid still “Kylie” and moved lock stock and barrels to Melbourne.  This is what is making all the distilled spirits in Boatrocker now, though I get the impression that a separate team is involved. They produce gin (several varieties, of course), whiskey, vodka and two rums (one is spiced).  Oddly, there’s no unaged white in the portfolio, but perhaps they made enough money off of existing spirits, so that the need to have a white cane spirit was not seen to be as important. On the other hand, rum may not seem to be the main attraction of the company so perhaps that explains it.

Other notes

  • From the 2023 Australian Advent Calendar, Day 3

Wild River Mountain Distillery 3YO Australian Rum – Review

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Apr 232024
 

That we get as many interesting rums out of Australia as we do is some kind of miracle. A lot of the current crop of micro-distilleries that have emerged in the last decade have to jump through ten different kind of hoops just to get off the ground, obtain the plant and pay their way while stuff is being made, and that almost presupposes that juice has to be made fast and quick.  Some manage to survive the lean early years, almost all diversify, and others try to put something unique on the table. 

A good example of all of this is the Wild River Mountain Distillery, located in the far north of Queensland in the Atherton Tablelands (rum distilleries Devil’s Thumb, Mt. Uncle and Bingil Bay are neighbours). Looking at their portfolio, there are 16 products being made: a vodka, a liqueur, 4 rums, 4 whiskies and 6 gins. Somebody is making sure all the bases are covered, and since there’s a fair amount of medals attending these, one can assume they’re not going out of business any time soon.

That said, the distillery, established in 2017 by the Wes Marks and his wife Amy, clearly is whisky-centric in its approach, and that’s where the enthusiasm lies: many years of experimentation (I like to think of it as taking place in a home-brewing and moonshine-type setup) to make a genuine Australian whisky and a Tennessee style hooch from local maize, predated the establishment of the formal operation. Brewing, yeast, fermentation, still-making and all sorts of other tinkering are part of this distillery’s DNA, and while rums are being made and the ever-present gins are there, it’s more like they are there for sustaining capital and cash flow than a passion in and of themselves.

Picture (c) Wild River Distillery

The rum under review today is a straightforward aged expression, and looking at the stats, it completely straightforward without any frippery: molasses-based using their signature yeast (duration not given), spring water, run through a pot still (size not known) and then set to age in ex-Bourbon barrels for about three years before being bottled at 46% — the strongest rum they currently make. 

The nose is generally workmanlike and doesn’t stray too far from what’s expected. There are traces of vanilla, very ripe, squishy oranges and citrus peel, honey drizzled over nearly burnt toast, the salt of ripe cashews, and some sweet, which is almost – but not quite – like the syrup in the jar after the cherries have been taken out. Plus a banana or two, maybe an unripe apricot for kick. This sounds like a fair bit, but when you have to take the better part of an hour to nail it down, maybe not so much.

The palate, in contrast, is much nicer, with a good mouthfeel that is solid and tawny and honey-like, offset by some tart fruits, unsweetened yoghurt, cinnamon and a touch of coffee grounds. It’s not precisely sweet, but the heaviness of the way it samples gives that impression, which is a good thing; and the finish, while short, does channel and sum up most of what has gone before quite well…without, however, making an emphatic statement for itself.

That last point is key. It’s a rum, it’s decently made, it’s tasty — but somehow finishes as a less than impressive dram. There’s little that’s new, original or exciting here, and reminds me of the straightforward (and sometimes indifferent) American rums I keep running into, where so-so efforts that do the job are made, yet which lack a sense of real passion and verve, the marks of distillers committed to this product line. Oh sure, it’ll liven up and  give the alcohol jolt to a cocktail, but at the end, this is the sort of rum you shrug at, and reflect that it channels about as much real character as parking lot with two cars in it.

(#1068)(75/100) ⭐⭐½

Other notes

  • From the 2023 Australian Advent Calendar, Day 8
  • Irrespective of this middling review, if you look at their instagram feed you’d see that they sure seem to have a lot of fun over there. I can think of worse places to work.

Retribution Distillers 2 YO (So far) Aged Rum – Review

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Mar 292024
 

It’s not often that a rum aged just a few years that remains in development is as good or better than its own unaged white predecessor, but somehow, Retribution from the UK has done a fair dinkum job of it. Their white rum was unpretentious, eager to please and a decent drink that did not try to rearrange your innards (as so many feral whites try to do), and I quite liked it.  Its slightly aged cousin is just a smidgen better, and it still isn’t finished or in open release yet.

Retribution is a small distillery in Frome (a town in Somerset county, in the south west of the  UK) that was started relatively recently in 2019, by a brewer named Richard Lock, who wanted to go beyond the suds he had been making to that point. Something of an auto-didact, he took courses in brewing and distilling at the Herriot-Watt University, and eventually switched over to a distilling operation. He then proceeded to issue a gin as his first product before branching out to whisky and rum. The latter (as of 2024) sports three editions: the white, a spiced and a-still-in-the-barrel aged rum, all made in relatively small quantities for now – it is this last we’re looking at today.

Technical details are the same as for the white rum: the molasses based wash is fermented between one and two weeks using a French sparkling wine yeast; double distillation through the two pot stills — first the one named “Big” (recent acquisition, 1800L) for the stripping run, and then a spirit run through “Little” (400L) — which results in an 80% ABV distillate that was then put to age in ex bourbon barrels in 2021, and diluted down to 44% for a sample exhibit. No additives, or other mucking about, of course, that goes without saying.

Even with the knowledge that this was a work in progress at the time it was tried, I think it was and remains a pretty nifty product. The nose had a nice, crisp citrus-y tang to it, which went well with hot pastries, caramel and vanilla. Oh but it doesn’t stop there: brine, olive oil, steamed cabbages and crisp tom yum soup notes proliferate, before swiftly receding, to be replaced by a more fruity and balanced profile – cherries, mangoes, ripe apples – some 7-up, cloves and greek yoghurt. Not too shabby for something this young and one can only wonder what it would be like were it stronger.

The ABV is more of an issue on the palate, where many rums with good aromas falter. For now, what is tasted is pretty good: the citrus through-line remains, showcasing lemongrass, lime leaves and zest; it is accompanied by unsweetened laban, olive oil, a light briny touch and black rye bread with sour cream and salt (a weird combo, I’ll grant you). Coriander, coconut milk, sour and hot vegetable soup, bitter strong chocolate, toffee, some herbs and soya complete the profile for me, and the finish pretty much sums up everything rather quickly before disappearing.

This is a rum that was brought to the 2023 TWE Rum Show in London for evaluation, and Richard gave me some to try as I was perambulating for two days straight in the most exciting room in the joint.3 I thought it was really quite something, and while it clearly needed some more time to come to a better fruition, even as it was there was little to complain about (Alex Sandhu, in his excellent bio of the company, made a similar point in his review of the still strength sample). The rum will be issued formally in mid 2024 as part of a subscription-based Rum Club release Cask #001, and I hope that it sells well and makes it possible for there to be others of higher and age and even better quality, to come. This one is a really good start.

(#1066)(85/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

 

Other notes

  • The question is, why review something not on the market? Whatever comes out the other end in 2024 will surely be different since it’s had another year (at least) of ageing. But it’s actually not the first time I’ve done this: Helios’s Teeda 21 YO Japanese rum was based on an unreleased sample, and so was Mia’s 2018 rum from Vietnam, and there are a few others. I think there are simply some cases where a little pre-release hype and banging of the drum is justified and that’s especially so for micro-distilleries.
  • The logo of the company references the owner’s maritime background and the ship-in-a-bottle models.

San Juan Artisan Distillers Ron Pepón Añejo Puerto Rican Rum – Review

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Mar 102024
 

The stats by themselves are enough to make a committed rum geek shed a happy tear. It’s from a new distillery in the Caribbean, committed to making artisanal rum from sugar cane it grows itself. It’s pot still distillation: and not just any pot stills, but the charentais cognac stills that Moet Hennesy sold after abandoning their grandiose project to make rums in Trinidad with the aborted Ten Cane brand. Cane juice agricole style rums. Ageing in ex Bourbon casks for between two and three years. 43% ABV, so more than standard proof. No additives. I mean, you read all that, and how can you not be enthused? This is the horse on which French islands and Asian micro-distilleries have ridden to fame and fortune.

And yet, San Juan Artisanal’s Ron Pepón Añejo, Puerto Rico’s first agricole style cane juice rum, is somewhat of a letdown, presenting a lacklustre sort of profile that’s too shy to appeal to the geek squad, not distinctive enough to make it with the cocktail crowd and a hard sell to the majority of drinkers who have quite different ideas as to how both an agricola or a Latin style rum should taste. At best one can say it’s a decent enough starter-kit rum for those who want to dip their toes into cane juice rum (or ron) waters without being challenged by something as off the reservation as, oh, the Sajous. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement

Consider the profile: the nose opens with vanilla, some watery but piquant fruits (pears, watermelon, overripe Thai mangoes), plus unsweetened yoghurt, some salt and pepper. One can discern dates, some figs and a faint metallic iodine and herbal tincture, but let’s be honest, it’s slim pickings to smell. The aromas are faint and very light, lacking some of the crisp assertiveness of an unaged agricole while not being aged enough to get any kind of real boost from the barrels.

This same issue is more noticeable when sipped. There really is not a whole lot going on here, even after one senses vanilla, cinnamon, bitter coffee grounds, mixed in with brine, olives, some iodine, figs and sweet smoky paprika. It’s not that there isn’t something there, it’s just too subtle to make a statement fort itself, and the finish is just disappointing, even if it does lead to a slightly more vegetal, sweet and vanilla lading close. It’s too short and too light, like Bacardis from the old days, which revelled in their anonymity as if it were a badge of honour.

It gives me no real pleasure to mark down a rum made by a bunch of people who work with passion, created a distillery from scratch, and seem to have really tried to come up with something new and interesting (see bio below). And I’m not the only one: a couple of years back LifoAccountant’s observations on the /r/rum subreddit bemoaned several of the same points I do here, and he gave it a rather sub-par 4/10. Almost no other non-marketing reviews exist, so of course there may be others who take the opposite view, that the rum is excellent, and I completely respect that. I just haven’t found any.

Anyway: for now, for me, it’s not good enough to shower it with encomiums. If it’s any consolation, I think any small new distillery that has such interesting equipment and source material and desire to go places, can’t help but succeed in the long term…and so I would chalk this one up to them still finding their rum legs. Because I don’t think they’ll stay in the kiddie pool for long — there’s too much going for them, for me to define or dismiss the entire brand because of one lone rum in their stable for which I didn’t care overmuch. 

(#1062)(78/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Company Bio

San Juan Artisan Distillers is one of the new wave of Puerto Rican companies that seeks to muscle in on the long held territory of the mastodons of that island’s rum scene: Bacardi and Serralles. And while others have mostly gone from rum drinking to starting a distillery, a far more economic rationale was the inception of Pepe Álvarez’s project – his landscape and grass business went belly up when the recession of 2008 hit, coupled with US tax incentives for establishing businesses in PR expiring.

Since he was clearly too young to retire, Álvarez looked around and realized that his experience with grass and a 14 acre farm that had been acquired in 1991 which had grown to about 70 acres by now, offered an opportunity to bootstrap both into something unique to the island: rum made directly from sugar cane juice, not molasses. Starting the new company around 2012. he managed to find an investment from the Puerto Rican government, which paid for the irrigation system, tilling equipment, sugarcane seeds and the purchase of the mill. In so doing Alvarez sourced a German made Arnold Holstein pot still, and when the two charentais pot stills from Trinidad became available after Moet Hennessy pulled out of the Ten Cane project, he snapped those up too, and to back them up, he started his own cane fields, since commercial sugar cane growing in the island was a discontinued industry. 

And this wasn’t all: his son Jose joined the company after getting his civil engineering degree, and Luis Planas the former master blender of Bacardi (now working for Ron de Barrellito) was asked to consult. As if that kind of horsepower was not enough, Frank Ward (ex-Managing Director at Mount Gay) provided advice on consult.

Initially the idea was to produce an agricola-style series of rums, to be released around 2017, at which point Hurricane Maria decided to derail that plan, demolished all the cane fields and left the island without power for almost a year. Undeterred, Alvarez used stocks he sourced from the Dominican Republic to make a series of fruit-infused rums with the brand name of “Tresclavos” (which, for those with memories of 1423’s unfortunately named sub-brand is not a combination of “Tres” and “esclavos” but “tres clavos” — ‘three nails’). These were well received and have become island staples, which allowed the fledgling company to weather the destruction of the fields so well that small batches of the new Ron Pepon were ready to go by 2018 with other stocks being laid down to age. 

The global pandemic impacted the company as much as any other but has managed to come out the other side, and in 2022 had both an unaged white rum and a 30-month or so aged variant to present, which started selling stateside and appearing in Europe. So far the brand is not a huge seller or a famed name, but its reputation is starting to be known. 

The place is experiencing growth — they now employ a staff of about six, built a visitor’s centre, have those amazing pot stills, still make only cane juice rum and various personages give them visibility (my friends from the Rumcast interviewed them in October 2022 as part of their Puerto Rican distillery roundup); and there have been several new stories abut them. It’s just a matter of time before they attain greater visibility and greater fame, and expand that series of rums they make. It’ll be worth waiting for, I think.

Other notes

  • “Pepón” stands for “Old Pepe” and is a nod to Alvarez’s father, also named Pepe.
  • My thanks to Jazz and Indy Anand of Skylark in London, in whose convivial company I tried this rum after filching it from their stocks. I don’t have “crash and pass out under the sink” privileges in Indy’s place: however, free access to the shelves of rum in every room more than makes up for that. Thanks and kudos as always, guys.

Lord Byron Distillery 2020 3YO Pure Single Rum (Australia) – Review

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Feb 092024
 

We’ve met this distillery before, a mere hundred reviews or so ago. Founded by the husband and wife team of Brian and Helen Restall in 2016, they have slowly built quite a repertoire of spirits (he likes dark ones, she prefers light so maybe there’s some kind of Jack Sprat vibe going on here) – standard rums, white ones, spiced ones, the 2021 release of the 2-3 YO 55.5% Pure Single Rum I enjoyed and a brutal 63% “fire cane” I really want to try, plus gin, falernum, limoncello and vodka, which covers the bases nicely.

So here they are again, with a somewhat offbeat take on the Pure Single Rum, if not as strong. Because the background of the company is covered in that original review, I won’t rehash it here, except to note that the columnar still I mentioned then – 380L and six plates — has a name: Alba, which was the initial name of Lord Byron’s illegitimate daughter before he renamed her Allegra. I enjoy these little winks that distillers make to some interesting aspect of their past or something that interests them, in the naming of their still, truly.

Photo (c) Lord Byron Distillery website

Anyway, about the rum: molasses based, using distiller’s yeast on a wash left for seven days in closed stainless vessels, then run through the two copper alembics (it’s double distilled), then matured a minimum of three years in ex-bourbon barrels sourced from Woodford Reserve – which if shy they can call it rum, and not a cane spirit. Of course, bearing in mind the sustainable, ecologically-friendly, zero-waste nature of their operation and commitment to making pure rums, it’s not chill filtered and additive free. 

This is a rum that channels one of the more peculiar olfactory profiles I’ve yet come across- it reminds me something of some Japanese rums, especially kokuto shochus. It opens with an odd sort of earthy, mouldy, damp cellar aroma, and of wet, much-worn leather boots. Brine, olives and a vegetable soup with “plenty obstacles” and a fiery pimento for kick. There’s a sense of wet paint slapped onto decaying drywall, the bitter tang of roasting chestnuts (which I never cared for myself), plastic sheeting, and only at the end when all seems over and done with, do the shy tangy notes of ripe fruit emerge, some green apples, grapes, pears, that kind of thing.  It’s an unusual nose and I’m unsure how well it would work at a heftier proof point, though I would have liked to see that one a bit more, I think – a lot of subtlety gets missed out on that, say, 43% or 46% might have shown off better.

This observation is apropos for the palate as well, which is quite crisp: and while not exactly clear or clean, is close enough not to offend while still being rather too mild for everything it apparently stuffs in its jock. It channels a hot, almost sour and spicy Thai Tom Yum soup with no shortage of lemongrass, salted butter melting in a pan, with olive oil and toasted rye bread coming behind that. Again the fruits take something of a back seat and only start becoming noticeable after the rum opens up, and even then there’s not a whole lot that one can easily pick out: lemon peel, fresh peaches, pears, some watermelon, more or less. But it does meld nicely into the whole, some of the dirty notes from the nose are absent, and the finish concludes things well: short, sharp, reasonably flavourful, all of it fading fast and acting like it just wants to bail.

Strictly speaking this is not my dram of grog. I’m not won over by the loamy and earthy notes at the beginning (the official site entry refers to “bourbon corn” as a tasting note) and aspects of the nose in  particular don’t work for me; plus, as always, I have my issues with standard strength – it makes everything too mild which even a few additional points of proof might have showcased more effectively. Yet I can’t fault it for that, only admire the courage it must have taken to release the rum as it is, knowing it is something at right angles to more established profiles. So to conclude, Lord Byron’s rum showcases rather more potential than the sort of intense quality sported by the 55% 2018 Pure Single Rum they did before, and would seem to be aimed at the more easy going supermarket crowd who prefer more demure fare. The furious taste profile attendant on something stronger is missing, and the tastes will not be in everyone’s comfort zone: yet underneath all that, we see a much better rum is waiting to be appreciated, and now, having written my opinion, I think I’ll go back and try my sample a few more times. Let’s see if, after a few more hours, it delivers more concretely on what it promises.

Have a good weekend!

(#1056)(78/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Other Notes

  • From the 2023 Australian Advent Calendar, Day 13

Cabarita Spirits “Oro” Barrel Aged Cane Spirit (Batch #2)(Australia) – Review

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Feb 012024
 

Cabarita Spirits is the Australian equivalent of Nine Leaves, or so I like telling myself, and Keri Algar, the Spanish-born New Zealander  who is the owner, may live in one of the prettiest places on earth, close to Cabarita Beach in the Tweed Shire of New South Wales (Husk Distillers are also in the neighbourhood). Like Yoshi-san in Japan before he did a runner on us, she is also chief cook and bottle washer, to say nothing of the entire procurement department, sales force, accounting section, maintenance manager, head distiller, bottling line and managing director all rolled into one. No, really.

Photo (c) Cabarita Spirits, from the webpage

All kidding aside, Cabarita is a small distillery, conceived in 2019 after Keri was feeling glumpish about doing soulless work for The Man in perpetuity. “I was wondering…how to be able to live on a Pacific Island in the possession of a small beachside rum bar without spending the next twenty years behind a desk, when it occurred to me that I might make rum, and that could be a means to my tropical dreams.” Starting with a rinky dink 25-litre still and a 25-litre fermenter and a lot of ideas led to two years of relentless self-education, distillery visits, sourcing equipment, and incredibly hard work and experimentation. Finally she ended up with a 230-litre copper pot still (handmade in Western Australia by HHH Distill), which she named Felix after her Spanish grandfather, who had worked as chemist in a sugar factory back in the day, and started commercial production with the usual unaged cane spirit (but oddly, no gin — “I never cared for it” she sniffs). While the official name of the distillery is Cabarita Spirits, she chose a different name — “Soltera” — for its associations with being carefree and unbound, though she does admit that these days she’s actually never been less carefree or unbound, what with all the effort of holding down all these jobs and only getting paid for one. But there are no regrets.

The “Oro” (“gold”) rum barrel aged cane spirit which formed part of the 2023 advent calendar is her second edition of a slightly aged product. Released in that year, it derives from molasses (sourced from Condong Sugar Mill in northern NSW for the curious), has a 3-4 week open fermentation time using commercial yeast, run through Felix and then aged for eight months in an ex-bourbon barrique that was re-coopered to ~120L and charred with a medium burn. What comes out the other end is an almost-but-not-quite colourless 40% rum that really isn’t half bad. All that hard work and playing around, methinks, sure paid off.

Let’s start with how it smells: sweet, light and citrusy, channelling the sunshine of a spring morning where the slight nip of departing winter still lingers and the grass is wet with dew. There are notes of key lime pie (including a warm pastry), light florals, pineapples, bananas and kiwi fruit, old paper, and a sort of potpourri air freshener. Also the faintest hint of vanilla and caramel, damp earth and cashews, but held way back. Air freshener, potpourri. I like the youthful freshness of it, the delicacy backed up by a solid backbone of aged and varied aromas, and call me a romantic, but I see the owner in this one in a way I rarely do with others.

What I want to remark on as well, is the way the palate opens up over time. Initially it doesn’t taste like there’s too much going on (“too faint” I grumbled in my initial notes before crossing it out…twice) – laundry drying on the line, ginger, yoghurt, olive oil, caramel, citrus and pineapples (again). It takes effort to tease these notes out. Yet after five minutes, then ten, then half an hour, it turns bright and sparkling, and what in a lesser rum might be faint and wispy anonymous notes of zero distinction is transmuted somehow to a taste that’s really quite lovely. By the time I’m done, I’m scribbling about citrus, mangoes, laundry detergent and pastries and pouring another glass for Mrs. Caner to try and admiring the finish, which is longer and more crisp and tart than any standard strength rum has a right to be,

Admittedly I’m fonder of higher proof rums, so freely concede that, sure, yes, there could be more strength here (and my score reflects that): yet somehow the whole thing works well and it deserves its plaudits. Consider also the difference between what this is and what the disappointing Bayou White from last week was. There we had a sort of indifferent lowest-common-denominator commercial product made to sell and not to taste: it had about as much character as a sheet of saran wrap. Keri has not made a world beater here, no – I’d be lying if I said that – but she’s made a tasty rum with passion and drive and her own character stamped all over it. It’s a lovely little number, and a win in all the ways that matter.

(#1054)(83/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Other Notes

  • From the 2023 Australian Advent Calendar, Day 5

Black Gate Distillery Australian Dark Rum (Shiraz Cask) – Review

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Jan 232024
 

Black Gate distillery is an outfit to keep an eye on. The husband and wife team of Genise and Brian Hollingsworth made waves (to me, at any rate) with their 52% Dark Overproof back in 2021 and in 2023 they have come close yet again with this lovely Shiraz-cask-aged number – which doesn’t reimagine the rumiverse so much as take lots of what’s good with it and re-engineer it into a taste that’s uniquely their own. 

Let’s just refresh our memories: located in central New South Wales, Black Gate was founded in 2009 in the small rural town of Mendooran. The husband and wife team splits the duties: Genise Holingsworth does the good stuff and makes the Lord’s favoured spirit, while her husband Brian dutifully makes that other obscure drink and handles the maintenance aspects (he’s a fitter machinist and auto mechanic by trade). They sourced two pot stills – relatively small at 630 litres and 300 litres capacity – and work with food grade molasses, commercial yeast and water, to make their various rum expressions. All are small batch (the rum output of Black Gate is only about 2000 litres per annum, and that includes the other thing). The distillery makes various Dark Rums with different finishes or cask maturations, and aside from whiskies, no cash flow stalwarts such as gins or “cane spirit” seem to be on the menu. 

Photo (c) Black Gate Distillery FB page

Rums are aged in Port or Sherry casks, or both, for a minimum of two years — to be able to be classified as “rum” under Australian law, if you recall. With respect to this one, the source was from the aforementioned molasses, and fermented for around two weeks, then run through the direct-fire pot still, aged about 3-4 years in a 225-litre Huntington Estate Shiraz cask from Mudgee, then left to rest for two months before bottling. As with the overproof, labels are all the same for all these dark rums no matter when made: the specifications are, in a clever bit of economising, white printed stick-ons. The strength of the sample from the 2023 advent calendar was 45.6%, and I note there’s a newer version for sale on their website at 47.2%, so be aware of and on the lookout for some batch variation.

More is not needed so let’s get right into it. Nose first – this starts off interesting right away: rubber, funk, rotten oranges, flowers, tart yoghurt, wet leather and the sour hotness of kimchi, ashlyan-foo and turkish peppers. Underneath this rather startling mash up lurks a musky odour of damp loam, a kind of freshly watered potter’s mix which doesn’t sound appetising, but which I assure you, kind of is. Coiling around all that are fainter notes of acetones, ginger, vegetable soup, and pickled russian cabbage (not sauerkraut). The nose as a whole is not unpleasant, just goes off at something of a tangent and it’s probably a good idea to to let this one stand for a bit and come back to it a few times to get the full impact.

What I like about the taste is that it provides the tangy fruit that are not as clearly evident on the nose. Slightly sweet, it presents chocolate oranges, some caramel, leather, smoke, with vanilla and darker fruit (prunes, ripe raspberries, plums) coming through off the shiraz cask and the ageing. Ginnips, fresh cashews, grapes and green apples with a touch of licorice and that damp earth, apricots and overripe Thai mangoes, accompanied by a solid spicy heat all the way down culminating in a really nice low key but long lasting finish redolent of honey, brandy, coffee and fruitiness.

That’s really quite a bit for any rum to be sporting, and is one of the reasons I kept it on the go for longer than usual (two days)…just to see how it would develop. What may surprise casual drinkers is that even with all those sometimes off-kilter tastes coming through (and I must be honest – the assembly is a bit off and some will not like everything they taste here), the rum feels really accessible, even to the less exacting drinker. It gives a lot and the strength is right – more power and intensity might have shredded it – and so it doesn’t so much so much rock the boat as gently move it around a few times.

Speaking for myself, tasting this thing was a pleasure – because with their playful experimentation, careful distillation and shiraz ageing, Black Gate have produced a young rum that is a touch off the rails, sure, but also a decent and intriguing sipping experience. Perhaps it’s no accident that That Boutique-y Rum Company picked it as one of their ‘Return to Oz’ series recently. If I was their buyer, I would likely have given it a shot too.

(#1052)(84/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Other notes

  • The exact age is unknown. 3-4 years goes the blurb
  • Outturn is also unclear – because of the small scale of the distillery and the notation that it is one barrel (#BG-140), one must assume it’s less than 350 bottles.
  • From the 2023 Australian Advent Calendar, Day 17

Romero Distilling Co. Sherry Finished Amber Rum (Canada) – Review

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Jan 192024
 

Although I tried all three standard expressions of the Romero Distilling Co. at the Rocky Mountain Food and Drink show in Calgary in 2023, I had already bought all of them before, and this came in useful when double checking my quickly scribbled notes on the “Amber.” That was the one which I had almost bypassed in favour of the “Dark” and the extraordinary full proof Sherry Cask edition — which I still think is one of the best Canadian rums I’ve had to date.

A quick recap: the Calgary-based Romero Distilling Company was founded in 2018 by Diego Romero, an engineer who opened the distillery with his son Tomas (it was the latter who was running the booth that day), with a 2000-litre hybrid copper still and three 2000-litre fermenters; they use Crosby molasses from Guatemala (by way of New Brunswick) as its base, together with a commercial yeast. The company only makes rum, and remain very little known outside Alberta…which I’m hoping will change.

This rum derives from molasses, then, and is dialled in from a pot still configuration. We have no information on the duration of the distillation date, fermentation process, or the exact age of the resulting distillate. As far as I know, it’s a couple of years old (aged in ex bourbon Woodford Reserve barrels), with a relatively short time in the ex-Oloroso sherry barrels…a few months, perhaps – neither data point is provided. I am at a loss why such information is not placed front and centre on the label or the web page, since it would seem to be an obvious selling point, but Romero has stated that they want to de-emphasize the number-counting people do when considering ageing as a factor, and focus on the blend as a whole. As before, I think this is not the right course of action in today’s more open world. But that’s Romero, so let’s move on to what it’s actually like.

The nose starts off by being rather thin and uninviting, which is not unusual for a 40% rum, and it does present as somewhat alcohol forward without much that’s redeeming…until it starts to build up a head of steam. Then we get some plastic, plasticine, iodine and licorice, which is nice, and toffee, caramel, vanilla and brown sugar, which is better. As it opens up there are additional hints of new leather shoes, some spicy notes (cinnamon, maybe, and cardamom), and a peculiar, faint combination of fresh sawdust and peaches in syrup, all very delicate.

Much of this comes back on the palate when tasted. There’s some slightly sweet alcohol, glue, fly paper (I swear!), cardboard, hay and a milk-soaked long-standing bowl of weetabix. With some effort — the rum remains faint throughout and one really has to pay attention — there are also red olives and raspberries, but not a whole lot more.  The finish, no surprise, is short and thin, but very clean and a little sweet. Not too bad.

Eschewing spices — supposedly it didn’t have any — and going for the sherry finish was probably a good idea, because really, the rum would be thin gruel without it. That finish saves it from being some kind of light 1970s throwback of the kind I’ve learned to endure (but not particularly like), and there’s enough going overall on for those with more sensitive snoots than mine to be able to sip it without undue issues. 

For my money, however, the rum is too weak and it’s too faint, and that’s in spite of the sherry finish that provides such an intriguing but hard-to-sense counterpoint to the familiar vanilla and butterscotch notes coming from the ex-bourbon barrels. There’s potential here, and one can sense a better, stronger and more assertive rum waiting to emerge. It’s just not enough, and if we really wanted to see this thing cranked up, well, I guess then we’d call it the full proof edition, wouldn’t we, and it’s already established that that is the better rum. So for those who want to play it safe, save fifteen bucks and have a decent drink, this is the rum that will do the trick. For everyone else, it’ll be slim pickings.

(#1051)(75/100) ⭐⭐½

Island Coast Spirits “Island Coast” Tasmanian Rum – Review

 1 Response »
Jan 152024
 

Once again we start the new year off with a series of rums from the Australian Advent Calendar, 2023 Edition.  First issued by the Australian rum-loving couple Mr. & Mrs. Rum in 2021, not in 2022 and now again for 2023, it answers what we out west have been wondering about for years (well…at least I have) – what’s going on with the rums being made in Australia over and beyond Bundaberg, which everyone cheerfully loathes and Beenleigh which everyone likes? Twenty four rums in the calendar, a whole raft of new and old distilleries strutting their stuff, and let me tell you, to get them to Canada was a ripping yarn in itself…not entirely unlike Butch’s father’s watch, you could say.

We begin the series out of order, with a rum from the island of Tasmania, made by a little outfit called Island Coast Spirits, located just south of Hobart, the state capital (Tasmania is an island state of Australia). It is, it should be noted, not a distillery itself since it has no equipment. The owner, Kirk Pinner, runs over to the Observatory Hill Winery (about half an hour to the NE on the other side of Hobart) which (a) is run by a friend (b) makes rum (and brandy, gin, schnapps and wine) and (c) has a still. He rents that still and makes his own rum, so not quite a contract operation like we saw with Mandakini a few weeks ago, yet not entirely a true producer or an indie either. The website is rather scanty on details, so Kirk very kindly answered an email of mine providing some of this info, and a brief company bio is provided below.

For the purposes of this review, what we need to know is the following: the rum is made on a pot still, using a combination of fermented raw cane juice and molasses…so a hybrid rum if there ever was one. Once off the still it is aged in ex-Bourbon barrels with a light char, for something just under three years and bottled at living room strength of 40%.

“[My desire was…] to produce the spirits I wanted,” Kirk wrote to me, and clearly he had something easygoing in mind. Not some backyard snarling ester-sporting beefcake that stomped all over one’s glottis, just a rum that was easy and accessible. The nose confirmed that he did fairly okay with that: it smelled of delicate icing sugar, vanilla, pastries hot from the oven, as well as more standard caramel, swiss bon-bons and a light touch of molasses and brown sugar. Also some cinnamon, eggnog, ice cream, a relatively sweetish aroma, and all over soft and straightforward and simple. 

The 40% ABV made for a clean and unaggressive entry; it tasted pleasantly warm and a little sweet and came completely without aggro. Vanilla and caramel and toffee carried over from the nose. A few sweetish fruit – peaches, pears – nothing too acidic or tart. Molasses, a hot caramel macchiato, flambeed bananas, icing sugar on a cake fresh out of the oven, leading serenely to a short, finish that summed up the preceding without adding much that was new. 

Picture (c) Island Cost Spirits FB Page

It’s a nice little rumlet without undue pretensions, but that same easy going nature is something of a weak point for those who like their rums more assertive. There are amber Bacardis with more going on than we see here, and I had similar remarks (and reservations) about Killik’s Gold, where I noted that such low ABV hamstrings a rum that could be better a few points higher. But that said, it will work for some, because it’s simply not trying hard to be a game changer…just a soft breezy rum for easy sipping. On that level it succeeds, and the awards it’s racked up in its brief life – a silver medal at the 2022 Australian Rum Awards in Queensland, and another silver at the World Rum Awards in London in 2023 (pot still NAS category) – suggests that others certainly seem to like what the company is offering, my own reservations notwithstanding.

(#1050)(77/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Other notes

  • Fermentation time, barrel size, ratio of sugar cane juice to molasses, outturn, are all unknown
  • From the 2023 Australian Advent Calendar, Day 4

Brief Historical bio

Island Coast Spirits is, as noted, a Tasmanian spirits maker (not a distillery). It was founded in October 2021 and has adhered to the principle of making their spirits on a third party’s distillation apparatus — a pot still — from the beginning. This was a conscious decision made at the inception: Kirk Pinner knew when he began planning, that he did not want the significant overheads and costs/debt associated with setting up his own distillery. He wanted the flexibility to not have all that headache but to be able to concentrate on his own desires and strengths: namely to have the ability to take on projects/new spirits on a whim without worrying about the infrastructure; and to focus more on the business relationships, ingredients, selection of barrels, blending and back end work. To that end he turned to those with some expertise (like Observatory Hill Winery) and used their skills to make his spirits.

In the three years since he began, the company now makes seven different products: Vodka, Rum, Gin and Whisky, and three flavoured vodkas. So far there is just one rum in the portfolio – this one – with another very interesting one in the pipeline waiting to be released sometime in 2024.  In the meantime, the distribution within Tasmania and on the mainland is good, and Kirk is building on his success (and awards) to take his juice on the road to various F&B trade expos in Asia to promote the island, the brand and the rum. 

 

Don Q “Cristal” Puerto Rican Rum (1980s/1990s)

 1 Response »
Nov 252023
 

Rumaniacs Review R-160 | #1041

Few rum aficionados need me to elaborate either on Don Q, the “other” major distillery on the island of Puerto Rico which makes it, Puerto Rico itself and it’s peculiar status vis-a-vis the USA, or indeed, this rum. Any one of them is an essay in itself and can lead to any number of rabbit holes,

Let’s just stick to the basics, then. In brief: like Bacardi, Destilería Serrallés was founded by a Catalan emigre in the 1860s (the sugar plantation the Serrallés family first bought goes back three decades before that), though they lacked the global ambitions of the larger company’s operations and have stayed within Puerto Rico.  Don Q, named after Sancho Panza’s elderly sidekick, is the flagship brand of Destilería Serrallés with several expressions dating back to 1932 when it was launched to compete with Bacardi: however, let’s be clear – the Cristal was first released in 1978, when it was specifically designed to compete with the rising popularity of vodka. Before that, I think white rums were just called “Don Q” and had a distinguishing white label (my assumption), since I can’t find any reference to a specific one predating the Cristal.

The Cristal itself is a white rum, adhering to the Latin style of light ‘n’ easy rum making, and is the result of distillation on a multi-column still, aged in ex-bourbon barrels for between one and five years, filtered to colourlessness, blended, and then bottled at standard strength (40%). The review of the modern equivalent gives you some more details of the version you’re likely to find on store shelves these days – this one, as far as I can  tell, is from the mid to late 1980s, perhaps the 1990s (the label has undergone several revisions over the years and for different countries, so dating is imprecise at best).

Colour – white

Strength – 40%

Nose – Has a sort of light and creamy aroma, like custard drizzled with vanilla syrup.  Acetones and nail polish. Slightly sweet, somewhat warm. A few faint fruity notes – nothing really identifiable leaps out – which are just trembling on the edge of a flat cream soda.

Palate – Sharpish, mostly pineapple, vanilla and flavoured yoghurt, iodine. Not a whole lot going on here and while not really unpleasant, there are too many discernible medicinal and ethanol notes to make to a drink worth having.

Finish – Decently long, sweet vanilla milkshake and an apricot slice or two. Unremarkable, but at least there’s something here, which is already better than most of these bland, anonymous filtered blancos from the era.

Thoughts – My remarks about when it was issued and why, is the key to unlocking why the profile is what it is: inoffensive, bland, easy, vodka-like…and by today’s standards, rather uninteresting.  It remains what it has always been, a cheap bar mixer, without much of an edge to wake up a mixed drink. Older versions like this one seem even blander than the modern ones, and so my recommendation is to get one if you like to drink some rums from Ago, but don’t expect too much, and keep mixing your mojito with what’s on the shelves today.

(73/100) ⭐⭐½

Romero Distilling Co. 4YO Sherry Finish Cask Strength Rum (Canada) – Review

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Oct 212023
 

In the last review we looked at a product from Romero Distilling, a small and relatively new-ish distillery in Calgary which has the distinction of focusing almost exclusively on making rums (of all kinds). At first blush it seems to conform to the standards of many occasionally unfocused local distillers who are still playing around trying to find the perfect groove: their “Dark” rum left me somewhat dissatisfied and mostly indifferent (spiced rums not being my thing for reasons I went into some detail in that review), and while I didn’t mention it, the “Amber” — which I own, opened and tried at home — hasn’t turned my crank much either.

The Sherry Finish Cask Strength Rum, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal, and an order of magnitude better than either of those — it quite literally left me looking happily at my glass, wondering whence this thing had sprung, and completely unwilling to stop trying it. Now, it’s a pot-still 1200-bottle limited edition 57% ABV rum without any spices, colourants or additives, so right away it has a better starting point than the other two; it’s aged for two years or so in ex-Woodford Reserve barrels and then another two-plus in newly emptied ex-Oloroso sherry barrels brought over from Spain – that to my mind makes it a double aged (not a finished) rum, but whatever…the important thing is, what comes out the other end is to my mind, really impressive.

First of all there’s the way the nose opens. Compared to the low strength and rather thin aromas of its spiced sibling, this packs a solid punch: it presents some woody and tannic notes, with solid sweet caramel, chewing gum, toffee, molasses and a delicate hint of a cinnamon-flavoured unsweetened mocha. Not too much fruitiness here – more dates and coconut shavings – but a fair amount of cereals, rye bread, cardboard and crushed almonds. Really great smells, and one that’s worth keeping around for more than just the time it takes to have a sip or three and move on.

When tasted, it continues well: hot fresh pastries like pine tarts or pecan pie start the show, and here some fruit start to make themselves noticeable: ripe and heavier ones like sapodilla, plums, prunes and some apricots, with flashes of molasses and honey (love that). There’s even the slight trace of a good brie, some olive oil, rotten lemons, and something savoury lurking in the background, as if it is trying to channel a raw clairin, or a tequila. The finish is also quite good, lasting a long time and wrapping things up with salt caramel, coffee, some brininess and those fresh baked pastries.

To say I was “merely pleased” is understating matters. I was damned impressed. The rum seemed so good on the first try that not only did I keep the glass going for the next two hours, but as soon as I got home, went straight out and bought a bottle online (I’m told that the rum has just gone into general release in Alberta). What’s also really interesting is that for 57% ABV, double the ageing and no spicing it up, it only costs C$7 more than the C$75 Dark with which I had previously been relatively unenthused.

So, in the final analysis, although I have many more rums from north of 49 to try, so far this is one of the best Canadians I’ve yet come across, the highest scoring to date. It’s not a copy of some Caribbean profile, doesn’t seek to emulate noble sires from hotter climes, but is completely, calmly, resolutely, itself. It adheres to the profile of rum while providing just enough kinks and twists to show that the makers knew exactly what they were doing when they made it.  It shows how something better than the dronish herd of mass produced tipple can be made here, and hopefully sell, and while I’m sure over time other rums will inevitably eclipse it…for now, it remains a high point of the Canadian rum scene and deserves serious attention.

(#1034)(86/100) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Other Notes

  • The rum was awarded “Best in Class” at the 2023 Alberta Beverage awards (in a three way tie).  Given the judges’ primary expertise, what it was rated against, and what else was on the list of candidates and winners, this is not an award to be taken completely seriously, and the scores were, shall we say, somewhat excessively enthusiastic. But it had to be mentioned.
  • Company details can be found in the review of the Romero Dark
  • The rum is a blend of several barrels and an outturn of 2000 bottles.
  • A hydrometer test comes out at 56.8% ABV, so it’s clean from that perspective (and tastes that way, but I checked anyway)
  • The company runs tour, tasting and blending sessions at its facility in Calgary, which I’ve heard from friends of mine who went, are quite good.
  • There’s a fair bit of marketing copy on the website and other promotional materials, about rum running in Canada during Alberta’s own Prohibition era, but this is local colour and has no bearing on Romero directly.
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