A User’s Guide To Attending A Rum Festival

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Aug 312022
 

Attending rum festivals is one of the most cost-effective ways of sampling a wide variety of rums you might not otherwise have the chance to encounter, as well as (and perhaps this is just as important), meeting all your friends and other folks you’ve only texted, tweeted or commented with over long periods. It’s not as riotous as a jump-up bottom-house, and not as staid as a formal tasting, but it’s almost guaranteed that over a few days you won’t be bored.  Almost alone among major spirits categories, rum festivals are still modest enough for you to meet not just booth attendants and rum ambassadors, but actual owners and distillers of small startups (and many large concerns) who are happy to go to the nth degree about their rums, and often have something special squirrelled under the counter for those who show a genuine interest.

Since rum festival season is more or less upon us – the second half of the year has more, on balance, than the first half — it’s perhaps a good idea to assess exactly what attending any one of them is likely to provide, and more importantly, what to do once you get there.

Like other spirits expos, rum festivals are usually held on a weekend, and often comprise of three main elements: there are usually pre-and post-show get-togethers at bars around the city (or even in people’s homes, on occasion) that are enthusiast-driven and attended by aficionados of all stripes; then there’s the main event which is held in a large-ish hall where booths are set up for vendors and distributors to tout their wares; and within that event are somewhat more specialised ancillary “classroom” sessions. In the larger festivals there’s also usually a trade day (or half-day) tacked on at either end, where members of the industry – distillers, producers, distributors, buyers, agents, owners, journos and bloggers – get to go in without members of the public around. This is less a matter of elitism as one of practicality – it’s difficult to talk business and do a hard sell when a long line of people are impatiently waiting their turn to take a snootful in front of a small booth with limited space.

The “ancillary sessions” I refer to above are almost always seminars and masterclasses and if you’re wondering, a seminar is an informative get together for anyone who’s interested with maybe a tasting tacked on, while a masterclass is exactly what it describes. This is why when Richard Seale goes into the technical details of the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline it’s a masterclass (and usually leads to a thundering stampede for the exits five minutes in), while a run-through of six agricole rhums by a distributor is closer to a seminar.

All these events can be spread out over a week or, more commonly, two to three days.  The recently concluded London TWE Rum Show was on Friday and Saturday with the Trade session between 12-4 on Friday and the public given access after 5pm, and 11am-6pm on Saturday. The Berlin festival, by contrast, tends to be 12pm-9pm Saturday and Sunday, with professionals or media people being let in an hour before either one. Most follow one or the other format, or, like the Miami Rum Festival, split it up into two half days sessions in two different venues, one for seminars, one for tasting.

The Planning

What these facts point up, however, is the importance by a prospective attendee of at least some planning. Not all rum festivals have the same brands and companies in attendance, so it’s worthwhile checking out what they have to offer. For instance, Brit festivals (TWE, Manchester, UK, etc) would have a stronger representation of British-made rums yet be shy of American ones, while American shows would not have much from the UK and Europe, would probably ignore most agricoles and the Far East, while being stronger on local producers and maybe South America.  Berlin has always had a balanced representation of both as well as Latin America, Reunion and Mauritius; and Paris has been best at cane juice varietals, agricoles, grogues, and obscure small distilleries from Asia. Just about all festivals have their local in-country star boys and major international brands from the Caribbean – El Dorado, Foursquare, St. Lucia Distillers, Bacardi, Mount Gay, Flor de Cana, Hampden, Worthy Park, Appleton, Angostura and so on. Knowing these things helps you chose the rum festival holiday better, I argue, especially if one is not a resident of the city (or the country) in which the rum festival is happening. Fortunately, these days there are loads to chose from.

Secondly, with respect to planning, it’s always useful figure out in advance if any of the seminars or sessions held alongside the main event are worth your time (not least because usually you have to pay to attend, though the prices vary) and address an interest…or not. Booking in advance is recommended because seating is almost always limited, and popular ones sell out fast – any session with Velier or Foursquare or Hampden tends to go quickly, for example, while something more esoteric like “Misunderstandings in the use of language regarding rum” can have you and the presenter having a good dialogue but not much else. I usually stagger the few I attend around both days to divide up the time, and find them particularly useful to provide a break in between very intense tasting sessions, as well as resting my feet.

Thirdly, as noted above, unless you’re okay with simply wandering around, talking to people and randomly stopping wherever it suits you, it is a good idea to know which specific brands and companies are exhibiting. There are several reasons for this. For one it helps you prioritise where to spend your time during a day when it is very likely you will be having more rum in a short period than usual. You may have an interest in Panamanian or Colombian rons, or French Island agricoles, or new American micro-distilleries, so would ensure you know those are represented and which brands are attending. Also, by the end of the day you’ll have a good buzz on and your focus won’t be top notch — so tasting those rums you really want to try and talking to people who really interest you the most is best done while some of your faculties remain. It’s also good to remember that there are always some brands that are more popular than others and will always draw a crowd and it’s difficult to get close enough to talk to anyone, let alone get a decent pour – therefore finding them early before they themselves get tired and irritable at repeating the same schtick for the umpteenth time is a good idea.

The Process

If this is your first rum festival or your fifth, the rules are the same as for all of us more experienced hacks. Don’t drink and drive and ensure you have your transport to home or hotel organised. 

For experienced festival attendees – especially those in Europe who have several good ones in close proximity (Paris, London, Marseille, Manchester, Berlin, etc) that are relatively easy to get to and are really top class – it is no particular problem to get around, and I doubt the rules are different for other parts of the world, from Canada to Australia.  As with all things, get a transport pass, have an Uber, or hang with folks you know who themselves know where they’re going. 

Also, I strongly recommend eating something before you set out.  And take a bottle of water with you – most festivals provide (or sell) water, but why take a chance? Normally a tasting glass is provided at the entrance, and if you can snag a second one, take it. Trust me, it helps. 1. And while this might sound odd, I’d really recommend going with a friend or two, or a small group.  The experience is enhanced when it’s shared.

Once at the festival itself, one of the most important things to always keep in mind is that you will be there for a few hours at the very least (my personal record is seven) and be tasting a lot of rums, very quickly. Palate fatigue is a real thing, and so is intoxication, both of which derail the experience. Therefore, take it easy, take your time, and most of all, take small sips, and nose more than taste. Pace yourself. There are often black spittoons on or by all the booths so you can spit, and while I don’t use them very often, I know their utility and don’t think it makes me look like a rum snob at all. Spend as much time at a booth as you please, and talk to the (usually really friendly) people there, especially if you are interested in their products, because they’ll always be happy to tell you all about their company, how they make their rums, and small anecdotes that make it all interesting.

Drink lots of water, and stop whenever you feel like it to take a breather and have a snack or a palate cleanser (if available).  Keep an eye on the clock in case there’s a master class you forgot about, because that’s really easy to do when you meet up a bunch of rum chums and get to talking, or are standing in a line at the food truck for a sandwich and are focused on that and not the time. I’ve made that mistake a few times and strolled in just as everyone else was leaving, asking me where I had been the whole time.

I say take tiny sips, and I mean that. The objective is not to get drunk, not gun back shots as if you were at a bar – though getting at minimum a good buzz is a near-inevitability – but to be able to taste and enjoy the rums. Look around at the festival officials: girls and guys with lanyards and badges denoting staff, judges, guests, press, or exhibitors — they flit from booth to booth like butterflies but stay relatively sober because (a) they try tasting only what they like and are curious about and (b) they take small sips (if at all) and take their time with it.  With some practise, you can more or less stay reasonably sober and attentive and still taste stuff hours into the rum fest without completely blowing out your nose or palate. 

One other point I should perhaps raise is that of keeping your ears pricked and your eyes peeled, especially at the larger festivals where it’s unlikely that you can try something from every single booth in the time available.  Look for crowds, search for the brands you never heard of, the companies that are obscure (or from obscure places), listen to people talking, try and step back and take an overview to see where the new stars of the show are. There are always one or two new producers who are flying under the radar yet have a quality that should not be missed and which you’ll regret not having tried after it’s all over. Hampden and Worthy Park in 2017 at the German Rum Fest, Liberia’s Sangar a year later, the new Asian rums debuting in Paris in 2018 (Issan, Sampan, Laodi, etc), Lazy Dodo from Mauritius, Toucan from French Guiana), and the new British rum distilleries in the UK festivals – all these had small footprints at the time but were considered bellwethers of rums and trends to come.

Party Time: bars, events, afterparties

One of the best things about being a part of the greater rum community, is the camaraderie and friendship surrounding the participants at non-fest off-the-grid little events. There have been many enthusiastic posts over the years about the Barbados Rum Experience, for example, and various pub crawls at one rum festival or the other, or additional brand-sponsored tastings where one can hear whole dissertations on new releases. When the world agricole rum tour was being organised by Jerry Gitany and Benoit Bail several years ago, Benoit arranged an opening of the 250th Anniversary Saint James agricole rum at the Brandenburg gate in Berlin…at midnight. Aficionados who know each other through social media and commenting and memories of excursions past, sometimes have little parties of their own, or meetups in famed rum bars someplace (Trailer Happiness, Lebensstern, Smuggler’s Cove, Grandma Caner’s apartment, you know the ones), for everyone who feels like it to attend.  These are often more fun than the fests themselves and my strong advice is, unless you have a reason for not doing so, attend as many as you can, and party hearty.

There’s no set rule for any of this and knowing where to go is mostly a matter of paying attention, plugging in, watching what influencers’ websites and social media say about what’s going on – which almost demands being a member of various FB rum clubs or instagrammers who put their professional rum lives out there. Sometimes all it takes is keeping ears open for conversations at popular booths, or knowing somebody who knows somebody else who mentioned that their friends are going to this or that establishment at such and such a time….

These events are rarely, if ever, about tasting rums…though of course that features in all of them.  It’s about hanging out with a bunch of like minded folks, and just talking, laughing, sharing experiences, and making new discoveries (“Man I tasted this rum the other day and it’s fantastic, here, check out the sample!”) that may not have been considered before. I have the greatest memories of listening to Yoshi Takeuchi tell a hilarious story in a bar in Paris about being mugged in Marseille, of meeting Sly Augustin at Trailer Happiness in London (and being enthusiastically hustled behind the bar to meet his Guyanese cook), or of manfully trying to remove the obstinate metal sealing on a bottle of a 1930s Martinique rhum at an afterparty of my own while Jazz and Indy laughed themselves silly (the rhum turned out to be completely oxidised crap), or of Florian showing off a sample of the legendary J. Wray & Nephew 17 YO at Lebensstern (while chasing away a particularly persistent hooker) but then being told “Sniff only!”  You simply can’t make sh*t like this up and the fact that I remember them so clearly says a lot about how much fun they all were.

Summing up

While I’m all for randomising the experience and just pottering aimlessly around a cavernous hall showing off booths in all directions, I honestly do believe that one can have the best and greatest experiences at fests, classes and surrounding events with a little bit of organisation in advance, some forethought on staying sober, and the complete willingness to just have some fun and go wherever the party is happening. Whether official tastings on a stage, or an unofficial get together in a sleepy bar at 2am where the rum is flowing and the conversation is cheerful, it’s an experience to be savoured. 

And if your sleep gets interrupted and you go on short rations of energy and sobriety for a few days, well, isn’t that what it’s really all about at confabs like these? We must all make some sacrifices in the name of creating new and cherished friendships, and memories. I’ve got tons of my own, and that is why I wrote this, because there’s absolutely no reason you can’t too.

Other notes:

  • Click on the link for a listing of as many rum festivals around the world as I could find. (Currently updated, this link now lists the 2024 expos)
  • A US reader on the /r/rumserious subreddit asked me which fest he should attend given his lack of language ability.  That was a question that had not occurred to me in writing the essay, but it is useful to know, so I responded at some length: “You need have no fear […] because English is spoken across Europe [and Asia] as a second or third language. Moreover, booth exhibitors — who are often owners themselves, for smaller outfits — are often to be seen at rum festivals around the world (or at least around Europe and the USA) and almost always speak good English. If there is a language barrier at all, it’s with cashiers, security, cloakroom attendants and the support staff, but even there, there’s usually one person who can be called on to help. I’ve found it particularly helpful in, say, Paris, to simply respond to “Bonjour” with “Hi there, how are you?” and then they know instantly they are speaking to a non-native speaker and adjust. That said, some – but not all – masterclasses and seminars take place in the language of the country where the festival is held, so if you plan to attend any and must pay for the privilege, ensure you check beforehand, especially in the smaller and regional ones (like in eastern Europe).”

 

Opinion – The New Australian Rums

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Aug 172022
 

When it comes to Australia and its rums, it’s likely that only two names immediately jump to mind (assuming you know of any at all and are not from there yourself): Bundaberg and Beenleigh. Both are relatively long-lived companies that predate many better-known producers founded much more recently in other parts of the world, yet it is only recently that awareness of them has climbed. Of course, this is in a large part due to association with or ownership by other major spirits companies with worldwide clout and visibility that can be leveraged, as well as social media trends.

Those two companies aside, however, few western consumers have tasted a wider selection of rums from Down Under. Australian rums don’t make it to rum shows or rum festivals (except in their own region) and pricing problems prohibit easy import or muling of bottles to and from the country, whether by distributors or individuals. But there is a vibrant and dynamic rum culture in Australia, and in the last two decades — paralleling the rum renaissance in the west — a host of small distilleries has cropped up, almost all single- or family-owned enterprises that make small batch pot still production. Because of the lack of any blogger or writer or reviewer in Australia who has a broad-based international readership, little of this has reached the attention of the wider rum world until very recently, when Mr. and Mrs. Rum issued the 2021 Australian Rum Advent Calendar. For the first time a wide variety of rums became available for people to try, and it was my good fortune to get hold of a box.

I systematically wrote the reviews one by one, and while they are now done, the thoughts they engender about Australian distillery culture and the rums they make, are too many to fit easily into a single review. Granted that twenty-plus reviews is hardly a complete sampling of the entire country, yet I feel that the points that occurred to me as the process continued — and at the end when I was summing up — are relevant in a more general context…more, at least, than just an observation on this or that distillery.

The first is evident from the tenor of the reviews: it’s something of a surprise how good the rums were (and are). Few scored below 80 points, and many were eye openers. I’ve tasted some really foul American, Canadian and Japanese rums which are thankfully not widely available, but here, small and local distillers I had never heard of before were making impressive young rums and cane juice spirits that held themselves up well even when rated against Caribbean rums of greater fame and heritage. Some were essays in the craft, to be sure, and in many cases the rough edges remained visible, the rums too young, the style not yet complete; yet I firmly believe that many will only get better as time goes on, and skills and technique get more refined — and hopefully they will get the attention and kudos they deserve.

The operations making these rums are, for the most part, micro-distilleries, and serve a regional market (some are only at a town- or state-level). A few large ones like Beenleigh and Bundaberg export abroad, but this is an exceptional situation. What characterises most of the distilleries that produced these rums is that they are either sole-proprietorships, husband-and-wife teams, or set up by a few friends, and while I don’t know anything about their financial situation, it seems to me that what they do is a personal thing, a labour of love, and their own funds and families and friendship networks are quite invested in the success of what is at end a small business that has some unique restrictions.

For one, they are hampered by the “ageing law”: rum may not be called “rum” until it’s been aged for at least two years in Australia, a law that has been on the books since 1906. Initially enacted to prevent low grade, poorly made, unaged moonshine — which quite literally, could be and often was, lethal — unscrupulously being sold to unknowing patrons, it is not completely a relic of rougher colonial times as I had thought. Alcoholism and abuse by both buyers and sellers is still a problem today and this is one reason why the law remains, and taxes on alcohol remain quite high.

The law’s intention (if not its ultimate effect) was and is to remove unaged full-proof rum from easy distribution to vulnerable segments of the population, though of course it only really affects legally established distilleries, not outback hoocheries beyond the easy reach of regulators, lawmakers or taxmen. But the unintended consequence of this is that one of the potential revenue spinners of new distilleries which need cash flow to recoup their substantial initial capital outlay – the sale of unaged white rum, especially if made from cane juice – is removed, as it cannot be sold as “rum”. 

Inventive and agile distillers have gotten around this issue by releasing such rums as “cane spirit” yet undoubtedly sales are foregone by application of a law which has not kept pace with developments in the wider rumiverse, where such cane spirits are called rums. Elsewhere in the world, they also go by names like charanda, grogue, clairin, aguardiente or agricole and have devoted consumers who prize the authentic nature of the spirits produced in such a fashion. The problem in Australia as elsewhere, is, of course, that those not already into rum won’t make the connection between these varieties and “real” rum, which again impacts sales and hampers recognition.

The two-year rule therefore prioritises and incentivises aged rums and other spirits without such restrictions, and this means that for at least those two years (likely more – James McPherson suggests five) no rum distillery can really make cash flow on rum alone while its stock is maturing. This requires Australian distillers to focus on other money-makers that can provide more immediate revenues: the most common of these is gin, which is why the gin varieties and volumes in Australia are so great. Unaged cane spirit is another. However, unaged bulk sales abroad — where 10,000-litre or greater iso-containers are the norm — are usually not feasible, because volumes of rum which are distilled are relatively small, sometimes as little as a few thousand litres annually.

And it must be conceded that most distillers are in it to make whiskies, not rums, and like the American micro distillers I’ve mentioned before, rums are a sideshow, if not a complete afterthought – there are many more whisky distillers to be found on Google Maps than rum-focused ones, for example. Some distillers make yet other products in addition to gins and whiskies — spiced spirits, vodkas, limoncello, liqueurs, etc. But the consequence of all this diversity is very much the same as it is in America: focus is diluted and expertise is scattershot, and deep experience, while not absent, is thin on the ground and takes longer to develop than in an operation where it’s rum, and only rum that’s the first spirit of make (I’m not criticising distillers’ necessary choices, only mentioning this is an inevitable outgrowth of the rules).

But seen from the outside, clearly there is talent and to spare in Australia and a genuine love of rums. After all, people keep drinking the stuff, and if it’s being bought, it’ll continue getting made. It didn’t matter whether it was a hundred-year-old distillery, or one established less than a decade ago: almost all the rums I tried were of good quality, with some real standouts. The size or age of the distillery had at best a marginal impact on quality — for example, Killik (founded in 2019) had an unaged white rum was way better than the venerable Beenleigh’s 3 Year Old White, and Black Gate’s Dark Overproof (from a company established in 2009) was its equal though aged. 

The key determinants of really good Australian rums seemed to be a combination of their proof points (stronger was mostly better than weaker, though not always) and the ability of their distillers to think a little outside the box, play around and go for something new – they pounced on niche techniques to seek competitive advantage. Since just about all the rums came from a pot still or a hybrid pot/column and had the 2-year age restriction (Hoochery’s Spike’s Reserve aged 7 years and Tin Shed’s Requiem at 6, were the oldest), it was fermentation and source material that helped carry the flag, and high scoring distilleries like Winding Road, Aisling, Tin Shed, Black Gate and Killik had points of uniqueness in their production methodology unrelated to ageing. Some used cane juice or syrup rather than molasses, others went into longer ferments or used dunder and relentlessly experimented to get “Jamaican style” rums out the other end, while still others played around with finishes and odd casks. 

That said, a not unreasonable question is whether they display anything specific to themselves, something uniquely Australian that would allow someone with even a smidgen of experience to stand up straight and immediately identify a rum from Oz.  After all, say what you will about the Bundie, one sniff of that thing and after you stop spilling your guts and recover your sight, you’d instantly know it for what it was, sight unseen. Are the ones I’ve been reviewing anything like that?

In my personal opinion, not really.  In fact, the strongest impression I took away from this admittedly limited sample set — and one which had been tickling me since I tasted the first indie bottlers’ Beenleighs years ago — is how modern and contemporary they tasted, and that’s both a compliment and an observation. While the quality was indisputably there, the tasted profiles often conformed to the formal regional “styles” already popularised by existing countries and their flagship distilleries. To put it another way, it was hard for me to try these rums blind (as I did) and not instinctively see Barbados, Antigua, Trinidad, Panama, or St. Lucia, depending on which it was. They have the same nature – much improved by being fully pot still distillate, to be sure — that makes them fine drinks, but not clearly identifiable as being from Australia. Even the ones that suggested Jamaica were like that (though more Appleton than Hampden or Worthy Park, it must be conceded).  The most distinctive were the unaged agricole-style cane juice rums like Winding Road’s Coastal Cane, or high ester unaged rums like Killik’s Silver Overproof. Those you could tell came from someplace new, someplace damned fine.

Does this matter? Not entirely, because good rums are good rums and people will always gravitate towards tasty spirits that don’t break the bank.  It’s only superdorks, ur-geeks and rabid rum aficionados (did somebody say “Caner!” ?? Hush, ye snickerers) that make these superfine distinctions.  However, for a more globally recognized Australian rum category to truly emerge will to some extent depend on being able to sway rum lovers the world around on not only quality, but uniqueness: because, why would anyone in the US or Europe buy an Australian-made Jamaica-style rum when the real deal from Hampden or WP or Appleton can be had more easily and for less? I honestly hope that a localised, Australia-centric style of rum will slowly come into focus because of such pressures, and a move away from already existing styles will help.

Wrapping up, then: notwithstanding all the remarks above, I loved these rums. Almost without exception, every single one of the samples in the calendar displayed a quality that for distilleries so small and often so young, was nothing short of astounding. They are not yet top-tier, bestest-of-the-restest, but damn, they did come close in places, they were good for what they were, and will only get better. The hard and often unappreciated work — of so many individual distillers, so many obsessive rummies and their patiently eye-rolling spouses, who experiment without rest or reward day in and day out — really has achieved something wonderful in Australia. I hope to lay hands on more in the years to come, or at the very least more advent calendars as they become available. Because good or bad or indifferent or spectacular, it’s worth it to see a new rum region rise up, snap into focus and add new some fruit to the great rum tree. We should all be grateful for that, no matter where we live.

Further reading

 

Opinion – The 2022 Spirits Business Rum & Cachaca Masters

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Mar 062022
 

Introduction

In February 2022 the Sprits Business magazine published a list of the 2022 Rum and Cachaca Masters competition awards (also referred to as the Global Spirits Masters’ Awards), which I would strongly recommend you read (it’s not a long article and the list of awardees is at the bottom).

Normally I pass by spirits competitions without comment (and occasionally with indifference), since I think they have more value as marketing tools; they may possibly alert me to something I might want to check out and review one day, though.  So when first scanning the list of the medal winners for these “Masters” I just sighed and – almost – moved on.

But the more I looked a that medals list, the more I saw how this one awards extravaganza was being repeated and shared online (once by Forbes Magazine, no less) the more I realised that there was far more wrong with the whole business than that brief first read had suggested. 

In brief: here was a competition stratified into 24 different categories into which 222 “rums” were sorted (a list of the categories is given below this article); and evaluated by 15 judges divided into five panels (what the panels were for is unclear), only three names of which I recognized. 

Within these bare-bones facts lurked what I gradually began to see as endemic problems not limited to just this competition but which it exemplified in a fashion more obvious than before. And whether they considered them or not, they have impacts way beyond their ephemeral online life. 

Part 1 – The Big Issues

One of my main concerns here, is the business of using price as a determinant in some categories —  it was used inconsistently, for some but not all entrants, and for the first time in any major competition of recent note (as far as I am aware). This strikes me as a completely spurious subcategory, given the inevitable variation in the cost of a rum around the world (even within the same country and if you are going to use the UK as your base case, don’t call the competition “Global”). Price points are not, of course, accepted by anyone as a rigorous standard, and I certainly would never rank my purchases or ratings according to such a criterion.  It doesn’t stop there either: these pound-denominated values were related to equally problematic categories of “premium”, “super premium” and “ultra premium” categories. I mean, whose wallet is being consulted here, really? One person’s budget may suggest a super premium starts at a fifty quid, not £26, while another’s might be a hundred.  Though, as far as I am concerned, the twenty-six-pound price point is insultingly low for anything boasting the cachet of a “premium” of any sort, and does nothing but cheapen the word.

As if to add insult to injury, it was decided (as had also been the case in the 2021 Competition) that colour could be used as a category marker, when it has been shown for many years that it is useless as a barometer of grouping like with like. I want to repeat this loud and clear:  “Gold” and “Dark” in particular have exactly zero meaning and zero standing as classifiers, and even “White” has its issues, especially in the last five years. But this was evidently not enough, because having now used it and combined colour coding with the equally meaningless “premium” terms, rums were also divided up into age bands … but this was in yet another set of categories, not the coloured, priced or premiumised categories that had already been established.  Clearly then, dark and gold rums that are premium can’t also have ages, and dark or gold rums that are aged can’t be any kind of premium. 

A point of lesser importance to some but of greater value to others (I’m one of the latter), is that unless we know how many rums were in a competition, and within that competition by category, and not just a list of the winners, we can’t gauge its usefulness because we have no basis for comparison. And even looking at the list and the narrative itself, I felt uneasy – because okay, there were 222 entrants…but of these, a staggering 189 of them, more than 85%, were awarded medals (I hesitate to say “won” because that’s just demeaning the word). This really defeats the purpose of a competition, because it is simply getting a medal for showing up.  To be honest, after disbelievingly checking that stat (twice), what I really wanted to know was more about the 33 losers than any of the winners. The value of any medal is conferred by its exclusivity, not by how many others are sharing the podium.  Just think about it…10 silver medals awarded to spiced entrants, and another 12 silvers for flavoured rums? No sir.

I appreciate that by now you may be feeling a little punch drunk.  Sorry.  But it doesn’t end there.

Consider the title of the competition: “Rum & Cachaca Masters” with a category cachacas combined with cane spirits . With that kind of title, you would expect a lot of Brazilian cachacas in the lineup, right?  Loads of cane juice agricole-style rhums? Wrong. Four cachacas copped a score, three hailing from one company.  Excuse me? Even in the wasteland of Toronto or nominally dry states south of 49, one can pick up more than that, and with Brazil having hundreds and thousands of them, is this really the best that could be found to rate? Even if all the other 33 non-winners of the entire competition were cachacas, a total of 37 is not useful as a barometer of the quality that’s out there to judge.

Lastly there are the non-rums or “not-quite-rums” which are the flavoured variants. A spiced rum being part of this kind of mashup is, I suppose, tolerable, even though I personally disagree (because I do not believe spiced rums have any place in this competition as “rums” and should have their own rankings independent of non-adulterated fare). But to then have added categories of “flavoured”, “flavoured overproof”, “spirit drink” and “flavoured spirit drink” just adds categories for the sake of having them, conflates them with real rums, and mangles any kind of understanding people might possibly have of what rum truly is. 

(Lest you think it’s all bad, at least they didn’t confuse unaged agricoles rhums with their conception of white rums and only one rum (the CDI Jamaica Navy Strength) was in more than one category.  I assure you, I am grateful for that).

Part 2 – Origins

To some extent I blame Spirits Business itself for this, though the issue is really about poor award administration, and poorer education and knowledge of the field of rums, as well as preconceptions about them made that really seem to be as unkillable as Voldemort.

I don’t doubt that the editorial staff, organisers and judges had their hearts in the right place, wanted to rank things honestly and by their own lights; and just to get a couple hundred entrants into the room to be judged at all must have taken some doing. I’ve heard the panels were set up to be independent, the tastings were blind, all of which is nice – though it’s sort of a least common denominator for such things.

But I believe that the categorizations – by far my biggest concern – was not chosen or defined by people in the rumworld or by anyone who really knew rum (or cared), because no reputable rum connoisseur, blogger, influencer, or even halfway involved enthusiast would ever chose such stratifications. None. They would have laughed and pointed the organisers to the Cates method, the Gargano system, or any of the other hybrid versions of these that are used by rum festivals around the world for many years (Cates and Gargano are not universally accepted, though they are the best known and among the most popular).

Also, I think the selection of the judges was poor, including SB’s own editorial staff, the magazine’s writers and one person who was into spirits for five years and mostly dealing with gin, not rum. This sounds fine on paper – a balanced set of experts from across the spectrum – but when taken to its logical outcome, it falls down flat.

For some perspective, let me put it this way: everyone knows I am into rum and have been for over a decade.  I do appreciate whiskies and have a smattering of knowledge about wine and gin and vodka and even cocktails – but would you trust me to knowledgeably and appropriately rate and rank and judge any of those drinks in a competition? Of course not — you would be right not to want me there, and I would be wrong to accept. In short, much as the judges were enthusiastic and dedicated and honest about their evaluations, I question the knowledge base when their love is so widely dispersed among other spirits and not really rum at all (except for three of them, who I know from experience focus their attentions there).

And all is done this by a self-professed professional industry publication, Spirits Business, which touts itself as “…the only dedicated international spirits magazine and website in the world” and revels in how its “varied and insightful features and analysis cover a broad range of topics” and boasts of “our team of award-winning journalists”. This is all well and good, and I do appreciate the breadth of knowledge of the team: but alongside that is perhaps an issue of trying too hard, and doing too much with too few (or too many) resources in the running of all these various such competitions for whiskey, gin, vodka etc etc without actually getting people who know their subject intimately doing the set up, judging and awarding.

Part 3 – Recommendations

So, let’s sum up. This competition is too poorly categorised to be taken seriously, the sample set is too small to be meaningful, too few brands and companies were represented to deserve the title “Global” and too many medals are handed out too generously to reflect real quality and value of their award. They may have thought they were promoting rum, showing off the best of what is out there – what they have in fact accomplished is to denigrate the category and confuse the consumers who take this stuff seriously, or who want to. 

But fair is fair, if I bitch and moan about this kind of thing, well, what are my better ideas to fix it, do better? 

Rum is problematic not in that it lacks categorization, but that it has too many variations to be neatly summarised in just a few, and it doesn’t help that no overarching body exists to even set voluntary classification standards. If was up to me I’d do what SB did with whiskies and have a separate competition for cane juice and molasses based rums, another for spiced and flavoured stuff, a category for multi-styled blends, and then stratify within those broad bands. Or, I’d hang my hat on either the Cate or Gargano system and proselytise for that to be accepted and used by others. But no way would I allow mealy-mouthed, wishy-washy, undetermined, undefined and unstandardized nonsense to be used.

Also, a minor point perhaps: I would find a way to dispense with the entry fees as far as possible because this just discourages entrants and reduces the numbers. One of the weaknesses of this and other competitions is that only what gets entered gets judged, and producers have to pay for each item they submit to be evaluated. A quick calculation shows that to bring five rums into this competition (not that many companies bothered) costs a thousand pounds 2. Now, mid-sized to large companies have no issues with that, but it’s hardly likely some small outfit will bother when they can do so much better at rum festivals where consumers actually get to taste, and journos and bloggers pay more attention. Maybe it’s wishful thinking to expect fees to be eliminated but I do argue they discourage candidates, encourage a medal-extravaganza by the organizers so the fees keep flowing, and if they can’t be done away with, at least they should be kept really really low to encourage maximum participation, and be bolstered by a “Contestant of the XYZ Competition” sticker / logo that can be used as a marketing tool if it doesn’t get a “Medal Winner” tag.

Lastly, I’d really try to rope in some judges who are well known and respected in the community from which the drinks originate. Getting a bunch of whisky anoraks, wine experts and spirits lovers, no matter how well-intentioned and broad-based, is not the best way forward here. Ditto for editors and newsies who take the entire field of global spirits as their fief, or those whose expertise is not in rum but in gin, wine, scotch, vodka or what have you.  No doubt they bring good tasting chops to the table, but really, they are hands down losers when they come up against a real rum aficionado who knows what she’s looking for and what to experience.

Part 4 – Implications

So why did I write this piece? Normally I don’t get involved with this kind of thing because aside from others regarding the lists of awardees as useful for their own reasons, it makes me come off like some grumpy and crotchety old fart feigning intellectual pomposity (like Sir Scrotimus always was). The reason I chose to do so on this occasion was because too many things were out to lunch here, and the Forbes repost / reshare – with a headline of “The Wold’s Best Rums According to the Global Spirits Masters” really disturbed me (as did some of the medal winners’ unseemly crowing about how well they did, when they really didn’t).  I was reminded forcibly of a comment I had written on Reddit about a HipLatina faux-journalistic hagiography of Bacardi, where my final observation was “… [it asks]…to be taken seriously as a sort of objective recounter of real history and factual information, and fails at both — and since people will read it and some will believe it, it’s best to get the objections and criticisms right out there, right now.”

That’s it, really.  Not so much that the issues exist, but that knowledgeable folks keep repeating the same old tropes without correction, and that others will not know any better and accept it; that people will believe the veracity and usefulness of the exercise without critical inquiry. They will see the awards as some kind of real arbiter of agreed upon quality using formal standards of evaluation, when neither is the case.  What these carelessly awarded medal-extravaganzas do is confuse and make people continue to dismiss rum as some kind of good-time drink lacking in credibility that still can’t get its act together. “They can’t even get their definitions and categories in order,” you can almost sense a whisky anorak sniff disdainfully as he buries his beak in a Bowmore.

So yes, I feel so strongly about the matter and I doubt I’m alone in this: after all the years of publicly available rum fests, deeply informative master classes, of aficionados writing about distillery tours (given or taken), gallons of digital ink spilled in writing educational pieces, non fiction pieces, reviews, backgrounders and deep dives into the world of rum, all this is so easily undone by a single awards show done on the quick and on the cheap without serious thought.

Awards competitions are taken seriously, and many of those reading about them will presume that the medals gained represent a real cross-section of the rumworld and its best rums. My contention is that this is simply not true in this case and it is allowing misinformation to creep into the minds of the up and coming next generation. Organizers of such competitions should take the responsibilities of what they are doing more seriously  and understand the impact they have on the perceptions and knowledge of their readers. Anything less is an abdication of their duty of care to us as consumers and all those who are now coming into the field.

At least, that’s the way I see it.

Other Notes

  • Some of the comments I make here are also incorporated into a similar post on reasons to beware of lists and not to accept them uncritically.  It’s a good companion piece.
  • The categories were as follows
    1. White Rum – Standard (£0‐£15)
    2. White Rum – Premium (£16‐£20)
    3. White Rum – Ultra Premium (£31+)
    4. White Overproof
    5. Gold Rum – Premium (£0‐£25)
    6. Gold Rum – Super Premium (£26‐£40)
    7. Gold Rum – Ultra Premium (£40+)
    8. Gold Rum – Aged up to 7 years
    9. Gold Rum – Aged 8‐12 years
    10. Dark Rum – Premium (£0‐£25)
    11. Dark Rum – Super Premium (£26‐£40)
    12. Dark Rum – Ultra Premium (£40+)
    13. Dark Rum – Aged up to 7 years
    14. Dark Rum – Aged 7 to 12 years
    15. Dark Rum – Aged over 13 years
    16. Dark Rum – Overproof
    17. Agricole Rhum
    18. Spiced
    19. Cane Spirit/Cachaça
    20. Flavoured Rum
    21. Flavoured Overproof
    22. Spirit Drink (up to 37.5% ABV)
    23. Flavoured Spirit Drink (up to 37.5% ABV)
    24. Rum Liqueurs

 

Opinion – Canny or Crazy? Dark Matter’s Auction Prices

 5 Responses »
Nov 172021
 

What the hell just happened? Did somebody really just pay five figures for a bottle of rum from a new distillery?

No more than a year ago when he took an astonished look at where rum prices were going on Rum Auctioneer, Ian Burrel humorously if rather crudely remarked that you could bottle RS’s piss and still get a buyer and even more of it was Luca’s (and I was told of one rum commentator who would probably thank them both for with tears in his eyes and buy all he could get irrespective). Now, we may have hit a new peak with the just-concluded November 2021 auction.

I saw the numbers, sat back and stared. So much was peculiar, even wrong, about the hammer price of the Dark Matter Physicist #001 “Einstein” Rum. And with good reason, because no two sane persons would bid up a single bottle of a rum to that level, and end up paying £13,000 for it. A Wray and Nephew 17 YO, sure, a Courcelles 1948, yes, a Velier Skeldon, done.  But this…this defied not only logic, but common sense.  Thirteen grand.  Pounds! Either the buyer(s) had more money than sense (a lot more), or there was something else going on behind the scenes of which we are unaware. 

I mean, think about it – this is not a Velier Skeldon 1973, one of which sold for an equally mind boggling, (but perhaps understandable) £20,500 a few months ago.  That one at least had some pedigree, an enormous reservoir of goodwill and positive reviews going back many years, released by a company with a phenomenal track record. That was why the lesser 1998 Versailles 9 YO sold an auction or two back for nearly five thousand quid – the painstakingly built reputation and street cred of the man and the company behind it. Does Dark Matter have that?  No. Not even close. These were named “Inaugural” for a reason, because the distillery has never actually released a “real” rum before now.

Shorn of all the press, and with all due respect to what they have accomplished, let’s be clear: it’s a newish distillery in Scotland, making spiced and infused rums and liqueurs, but nothing like a range of rums which fans can admire and taste and compare. I have no problem with – and can’t mark them down for – not being from the Caribbean, as lots of really good rums are not made in the Caribbean, though it’s generally accepted that most of the well known and best rums come from there. It’s cool that they are Scotland’s first rum-focused distillery in ages, but come on, nothing in the company profile or distillation methodology suggests some sort of ground breaking technique that produces an elixir worth selling a kidney, and eye and piece of your genitalia for.

So, can it be the fact that it’s a single amazing bottle, perhaps, like the near-priceless Caputo 1973, or the 2021-released trio of Foursquare “Sly” bottles, or “The Burrell” rums which fetched a “mere” £6,400 for both together in 2019, or even the better known Appleton 50 year old (which limped in on this same auction for £4000)? 3

Photo (c) Richard Blesgraaf, from Facebook

No. It’s calling itself Cool because it is the Very First, even though the other eight bottles from the line are all from the same cask (and yet other unnamed bottles comprise the rest of the outturn and we don’t know where those are, so far).  So making and naming the first bottle is somewhat less than unique, especially since we are hardly in a position to judge. It’s a marketing gimmick from that perspective.

And the bottle itself is also not a special edition of any kind either. You know the ones that are: they’re the ones that rest on silk pillows, in a gold-embossed, diamond-encrusted box made of polished purpleheart, that are made from hand blown glass designed and fashioned by Lalique, enclosing a fifty+ year old rum whose hand-harvested cane was tenderly drawn by ox-cart from the fields, individually hand-peeled before being manually fed into a crusher and thence the 400 year old copper pot still operated by maestros roneros with three centuries experience among them. Is it that kind of special? Nope, not that either.  Aside from being nine single bottles with cool sounding names (at least one of which, by the way, is copyrighted, so I wonder whether they bothered to check into that), there is literally nothing to mark them out as something exceptional. Six year old rums released for the first time ever are not, I’m afraid, special. Not yet, anyway.

Putting all this together, then, there’s something more than crazy about who paid that price. No bar-owner, connoisseur or dabbler in rum, no American ex-bourbon-fancying Foursquare enthusiast, no global rum nerd, no writer, reviewer, blogger, journo, judge or junkie, none of them, would realistically fork over that kind of gold for that rum. Not ever. Amateur buyers who get carried away with bidding excitement rarely have the money, and the rest of them know what value is, they watch prices like hawks, and are keenly aware of the resale value of anything they bid on. They bid for real value, and I’m sorry, but that kind of value does not arise overnight, even for a first edition – if it does, it’s because the trappings and shine are worth more than the tipple within, or because Luca is bottling his chamberpot or something.

So if we exclude the buyers and the liquid and the bottle then I think, at end, this was something else. No matter what I might theorize, the fact is that somebody out there felt they gained something from this exercise.

Is it the distillery? After all, whoever bought the nine bottles, whether a company or an individual, one person or many, the knock-on effect is the same: an enormous upswell of free publicity for the company. You’ll never be in the dark about Dark Matter Distillery again, because it’s guaranteed that everyone ooh-ing and aah-ing about the coin fetched by those nine bottles, would have checked into the distillery pronto to see what was going on (as I did, for example). Facebook comments are already gathering steam, and this article will lead to the same end. So from the distillery perspective — they were the ones who sold the bottles directly through the RA site —  it’s all good, it’s increasing their visibility by orders of magnitude. Too, if they themselves bought their rums back, it’s a tax write off as publicity expenses; and if other parties did the buying the distillery nets a cool £41,800 less expenses. (Note: yes, I’m being cynical, but I’m honestly showing you where my thinking leads me – and to be clear, I have no evidence of any of this being the case).

The auction site? They have a vested interest in ensuring the highest prices are paid (as did the distillery), and get commissions on a percentage basis of the hammer price from both buyers and sellers, and there gave been scandals on other online auction sites before this – bid rigging is not unheard of. Moreover, the matter of fake bids, bidder authentication and vetting process of RA was seriously called into question in the weeks following this auction (and the subsequent one in December 2021) in a long and passionate FB thread — as well as the comments on a poll that followed it — on the Rum Collectors group.  This pair of posts was all about fake bidders becoming too prevalent and brazenly jacking up prices without any action by the website.

Nowhere was the word ‘collusion’ used and it is probably too harsh to make the accusation – but surely indifference by RA played its part in allowing this to become an issue. But no, at the end I don’t really buy into the supposition of nefarious behavior — Rum Auctioneer’ may have paid little attention to fake bids in the past, or tried to control it, but their own viability as a new going concern depends on privacy, trustworthiness and avoidance of scandal. Rigging is simply too obvious, and more importantly, Rum Auctioneer is a minnow: November 2021 might have been their biggest month with close to 2000 rums on sale, and nearly half a million pounds changing hands…but this is netting them a mere £83,000 or so in fees.  This is dwarfed by the sheer scale of the main site Whisky Auctioneer where a single lot in the October 2021 auction had a value equalled by all of Rum Auctioneer’s November sales, where anywhere between seven to ten thousand items are on offer, five figure prices are common and the money at the end is reckoned in six and seven figures. They hardly need to waste time trying to fiddle around in the rum auctions when so much money is sloshing around elsewhere, and in any case, why risk the visibility of something as stark as this when “bidding up” could be easily hidden elsewhere?  So no.

If we discount either of these, then what we are left with is people who bought the rum(s) for purposes of their own that have little to do with drinking or sharing: collectors or flippers with deep pockets and shallow knowledge bases who think they can recoup their money in a few months by relisting the bottle(s). I think they will be in for a shock at that point. Ten years from now, who knows?  Ten months, however…nah. 

Let’s be fair though. This is an Opinion, a conjecture on my part, caused by my not being in possession of enough facts (the big one being – who the hell bid, and paid, those prices?). I could be completely out to lunch.  Maybe there really are some trust fund babies out there who bid against each other (at the close there were 100 bids on the “Einstein” and they sure weren’t me or anyone I know), some petro-billionaires who got tired of buying paintings like “Salvatore Mundi” and didn’t want to fork out for an entire distillery, some teenage Silicon Valley types who just got vested, or a newly minted tuhao who is now putting together the ultimate spirits collection. For them, this is a rounding error in the petty cash, not the serious money it is for most of us proles.

I just can’t help but wonder. Like Ian, who in that above-mentioned post cautioned buyers about auctions, I’ve been uneasily watching the climb of online prices ever since Rum Auctioneer and Catawiki and other auction sites opened for business over the last few years: at the high end, the real rum lovers no longer stand a chance to buy the good stuff – more and more I get the feeling that it’s collectors, speculators and flippers doing the buying (and reselling), early buyers of favoured rum producers selling their collections because of those same prices and because they need the money, or bids being inflated by people who have no intention of being left holding the bag. Maybe it’s all bottle collection, or a flipper’s long game. I hope not.

Whatever the case, Dark Matter’s final hammer price bore no relation to any objective reality and seems to be a victory of money over sense (or appreciation). It’s often said that in investing, past performance is no real guide to future returns.  The lesson we can draw from this situation is that a nonexistent past performance can now generate major present value, and the future can look after itself.  We should all worry about that.

In closing:

Normally we don’t know if a rum was bought just so it could be turned around and recycled the very next month, but here we actually do: because there’s only one of each of the Nine.  If they pop back up for sale, we’ll know why they were bought.  If not, then we’ll be able to understand that too. Maybe that’s the best we rum aficionados can hope for, that one day the price of the Nazgul will seep back to some semblance of normalcy so we can buy them and decide whether they’re piss or poison…or something that somehow earns that incredible value.  I won’t be holding my breath.

Disclaimer: I want to make it very clear that I am neither accusing nor making slanderous claims about any action taken by the parties mentioned in this post.  This is an opinion piece that wonders what  possibly could have happened, and why, and is a work of speculation.

Opinion – One Year Into /r/RumSerious

 No Responses »
Nov 082021
 

In October of 2020, after some months of thought, I created the new subreddit of /r/rumserious with a few words that explained my reasoning that something smaller and more focused was needed (if only by me).

I felt, then and now, that Reddit permitted a long form narrative flow and user discourse that was and is far superior to brief one liners that permeate too many social media platforms. Their brevity does not encourage subtleties of expression and well-argued thinking – rather the opposite: they promote one-liners, zingers, binary arguments, black and white commentaries that can be expressed without thought or nuance, in a few words. That is not debate, but, as my father would say, “confounded dotishness”.

Moreover, any such comments often disappear like yesterday’s fish. A week from now they are all but forgotten (unless somebody bookmarks them or keeps the threads going). Few FB discussions last for more than a day or two, and almost all that do are negative and furious diatribes in some way. Then they vanish and are never seen again. This not only encourages an extremely dangerous mindset of short-term thinking and equally brief memory, but stifles really thoughtful engagement.

/R/rum itself had issues that were not serious, per se, but continually unaddressed, which detracted from its utility – most related to the generality of its nature. For many years, it was the only subreddit dealing with rum at all (it remains the only real one and more than thirty thousand users attest to its enduring popularity and usefulness), and I posted there with some regularity. The downside over time (at least in my opinion, after many years of observing the patterns of what was put up) was an increasing volume of posts that were well-meaning and enthusiastic, but not really informative or conducive to discussion of any kind.  Another drawback was what I felt to be a lack of interest and meaningful commitment by the mods: some were involved in other subreddits, thereby diluting their focus, or not primarily into rum at all; they did almost nothing to regulate content or discussion (and those haphazard rules that were enforced were too haphazard and inconsistent applied, occasionally driven more by personal animus than rationale or the letter of the regulation); and the look of the site for any new entrant was not helpful – the long outdated and near-useless sidebar of useful rum-sites to visit remains a constant annoyance, if only to me.

Since it was not my place to change the format a very successful, popular and much-liked sub (and indeed, there is much that was, is and remains really good about it), the only alternatives were to walk away, or live with it, or keep bitching…or start another one. I went with the last option, and the new /rumserious/ subreddit was deliberately created to address the specific issues noted above. By starting the new forum, I wanted to focus on reviews, news articles and commentary which really would spark a discussion. A year on, at this stage and by that standard, with less than 300 readers, it’s something of a failure, since engagement is minimal and discussion only occasional. However, the Lilliputian nature of the sub does mean I curate everything and can read each and every comment (of the few that dribble in), which is not always possible on larger ones. Moreover, as a mod who has no commercial affiliations of any kind with the industry, I have the freedom to warn anyone, remove any post, or tone down any conversation that threatens to go off the rails, without worrying who I piss off. 

The sub came in for criticism for that on more than one occasion, as well as a sort of ongoing sneer “when you have some garbage post, put it on there” commentary (which makes one wonder where such content would have gone a year ago, but never mind). Engagement was minimal, as there was never any kind of critical mass after which the growth would be geometric. There wasn’t much of a controversial nature that wasn’t already somewhere else. Most of the initial dissatisfaction about the sub was more about the selection of Matt Pietrek to share mod duties (which he rarely does but its a nice backstop to have if I meet the rum of my dreams and elope). Eventually that died down.

For the most part, though, the sub has remained a minnow, if not quite an amoeba. I could have certainly posted more questions, subjects for discussion, commentary on each and every news item of the day and watched the sparks fly.  But, over the last twelve months I fell into the habit of using it as an aggregator, and reposted reviews, news articles and commentaries that interested me. Others have posted from time to time, and only twice were my rules contravened. The tone has remained civil. So far I’m the main contributor, mostly the aforementioned re-posts, with occasional crossposts from and to /r/rum wherever I felt the subject merited a wider distribution (though the puzzling snark such crossposts received made me cease the practise). 

In June 2021, there was a nice blip, though. In that month, I posted a longform comment about Michael B. Jordan’s misstep of releasing a rum named J’Ouvert, which prompted a user to comment and link to an article he had written about the matter.  Useful and interesting though it was, I thought the article could have been better — it lacked the rigour demanded of a thoughtful opinion piece — and posted a careful dissent.  This prompted another party to remark “If this particular board could be the one where this level of discourse occurs it would be wonderful.”

After eight months of watching and maintaining the sub, then, I had a clearer idea of what I wanted, and more importantly, why I wanted it – it wasn’t just about my personal dissatisfaction with /r/rum’s laissez faire modus operandi and the common “look what I found”, “where can I find…?” or “need help” posts that were the meat and potatoes of the sub. “Where is a good place for such discussion?” that poster asked, perhaps rhetorically, and I responded with what to me sums up the what and the why well enough: 

At the risk of being accused of rank self promotion, the answer for me is “here”, and for the same reasons that Instagram, Twitter or FB are not the right fora for meaningful engagement: their ephemeral here-today-gone-tomorrow nature versus the somewhat greater permanence of a subreddit.

And that’s why I keep it going.  It takes a few hours of my week to find and re-post articles, add a comment if one is needed and reply to those pieces where a more longform response is called for.  I try to stick to the middle road, not being overly aggressive, too partisan, or excessively opiniated one one side or the other. Those few exchanges that go beyond five comments and expand into true longform back and forth debates give me hope that one day this little subreddit  will earn the title of “serious” in its name. So far, the jury is still out on that one.

 

Opinion – Beware of Lists

 5 Responses »
Aug 192021
 

Introduction

Lists are great. I love good lists. I’m a complete list junkie. I collect lists. As a blogger and a writer, I find myself not only perusing them, but making them (lists of lists, so to speak) and have several of my own in my personal faves collection, and somewhere in there I have a list of the ten best lists as well…as well as, no surprise, the ten worst. Even when I despise the nonsense in a list, I can’t help but read it right to the bottom. 

Lists, however, have to be approached with some caution.  From the prevailing comments over some of the “Ten Best…” lists I have seen over the last few years, it’s clear that the misconceptions of what they are, and the understanding of their very real limitations, is not always clearly understood. So today let’s examine the matter in somewhat more detail.  

First of all, what kinds of lists are we talking about?  For the purpose of this opinion I classify them as follows:

  • Magazine Lists
  • Award Winners’ Lists
  • Bloggers Lists
  • Any other lists

We’ll examine each in their turn to see the issues that they have.

Magazine “Best of…” or “…To Try” Lists

These are list pulled together by people who generally have exactly zero standing in the rum community. They do not contribute, do not engage, and are usually unknown (we all know who the real commentators on and contributors to the great discussions of our time are). For the most part they are self-styled, self-annointed and self-appointed “lifestyle” or “food and drink” “ambassadors” who are trying to make a buck, which is fine, but lack much in the way of credibility, which isn’t.

The origin of such lists varies. Some are commissioned. Some arise organically. Few if any can be trusted, as this exchange on FB showed, when asked with a mixture of irritation and pathos, what the ten best rums in the world were.  A list recently went up speaking about countries making the world’s best rum. And to show the utter unkillabitility of the idea of lists, in January 2021 Uproxx.com posted an epically useless list with the grandiose title of “10 Bottles of Rum Actually Worth their $90 price tags,” and Delish, not wanting to be left out, produced an almost equally cringe-worthy exhibit of their own, this one, clearly showing that list makers’ moronic tendencies and sloppy research had not only hit rock bottom but was actively questing for shovels (FB denizens took the two lists apart here and here).  These lists were equalled only by the Gentleman Journal which produced one called “The Best Bottles of Rum to Challenge your Inner Hemmingway” which a merciful netizen had the sense to only post to the FB Spiced Rum Club which is pretty much where it belonged.

One silly list of “ten best rums” I remember from several years back ended up being the writer talking to a bartender on a cruise and regurgitating it wholesale. Another list was heavy on the South American rums – many of which I had never heard of before – and when a deeper check into the background of the author was done, it became clear that he was in fact a resident of those parts, knew little else, but conveniently made no disclaimer or acknowledgement of the list’s limitations – it was just dumped out there. Whether a fest or an institute, a published author or an online blogger or a lifestyle writer, then, the limitations of the list must be included, but rarely are (and this is why one of the few such productions I ever cared for was Tony Sachs’).

The reason such lists are dangerous is because they purport to be educational, but are nothing of the kind. They present their information without context, try to reduce a very complex subject of enormous breadth to clickbait … and thereby pretend to an authority they do not possess, and have certainly not earned. It’s not always clear whether the authors have even tried the rums they hawk, or are merely shills for freely provided marketing copy. But by their very popularity they crowd out better lists that are actually made with some level of thought (like here and here). No wonder rums get no respect, when people masquerading as experts keep churning out trash of this nature….and continue to get read by new entrants to the field who are seeking information and imbibe the misconceptions such lists promote.

The important thing to understand about such lists is that in most of such cases, the currency of the realm is not imparting knowledge, not presenting a slice of a great sample set, not imparting understanding, but selling clicks: expertise is therefore irrelevant. This is why so many of the ones published month in and month out so reliably retain the rich fecal odour of indifferent if not actually negligent research and just about zero knowledge of the field. 

My advice to readers of such lists is to read them, yes (after all, who am I to tell you not to?) but always walk in with your own critical thinking hat on, and come armed with the cynical skepticism of a jaded streetwalker. At best it’s entertainment. At worst it’s a cynical exercise in holding your attention. Just be aware of that.

Award Winner’s Lists

A much better indicator of quality in list-making of rums to try / buy / source / know about is often seen to be lists of medal or award winners. The tradition of such competitions, more than a century old, helps justify purchasing decisions made by consumers, and are plumes in the hats of distilleries that win. Within this band of lists are two variations:

[1] A Winner’s List developed by some kind of institute, society or organization that supposedly represents spirits (or the rum category) as a whole, like the Beverage Tasting Institute, World Rum Awards, ISWC, ISC, ISS or what have you. 

On a purely theoretical basis, these things are great. Industry experts are tapped to lend their expertise in aggregate, coming together to rate rums. Then they spend time doing the tastings blind within the categories and medal winners are selected based on the summing up or averaging out the points received from each judge. What’s not to admire?

I don’t mean to pan the exercise, which I do believe is a useful one. What I do want to emphasize, however, is that they have limitations, and we should be cognizant of – and preferably told – what they are. Exactly what is being won here? By whom, against what, how many, using what criteria? In other words, if the Caputo 1973 wins the Best-In-Class Double-Gold award (which it has), consider these questions, so rarely asked, so rarely provided:

  • What exactly is the Class? What is the definition?
  • If there is a Double Gold there must be a Single.  Who won that?  Is there a Triple?
  • What did it win against?  What were the other rums in contention?  How many?  What did they win? Did all, some, or none win?
  • How many rums were in competition in total? What is the entire sample set by company, country and brand?
  • Did the entrants have to pay to get their rums into competition?
  • Which known and famed brands within the classes did not enter?
  • Over what period of time did the judging take place? Where? Under what conditions?
  • Who were the judges?

Clearly, there are gaps in the knowledge of consumers as to what exactly the medal or award or the ranking represents and how it was arrived at. Unfortunately, in a world where memes, sound bites and snappy McNuggets of phrasing are what passes for news, the only thing people see and digest is “XXX won YYY!!! Huzzah!” when a favourite wins, and and furious or anguished “WTF????!!” when it doesn’t, and they go no further…and if you doubt that, feel free to observe what happens when Foursquare wins something, or doesn’t.

[2] Secondly, there are medal winner lists put out by a rum festival based on its panel tastings

Here, rum festival organizers compile awards lists which are based on actual ranked scores of rums as put together by a tasting panel working in tandem over several days. The intentions are good, and again, I like them, and feel they are useful for laypeople to make more informed decisions.

As before, however, such tasting awards have their limitations, as the questions on organizations’ efforts above make clear.  Many of the issues mentioned above are equally applicable here.

For one, I feel strongly that nobody, no matter how good, can taste the 50+ or so rums per day he needs to, in sessions of say six hours per day, over a two- or three-day period, and maintain any kind of objectivity and sensitivity. It’s simply impossible to avoid palate fatigue, something I know from personal experience. Even assuming all one has to do is spend a minute or two on each and then rank them 1,2,3,4…., is that even fair, given how rum, like any other strong spirit, rewards a rather more painstaking, leisurely examination? (I agree this is a personal opinion, but then, that’s what this whole essay is).

Secondly, in rumfest competitions as for institutes, only rums that enter get judged, and in many festivals, they have to pay to get there (this is often a feature of institutes as well). Since most rum companies — especially the new, small and relatively unknown ones — are on a tight budget, they clearly can’t go to all of the competitions in the world (even if a rumfest organizer keeps entry fees low) and so something will obviously get missed. With 10,000+ rums in the world, of which several thousand are current and made by hundreds of producers all over the globe, I leave it to you to wonder at exactly how many brands and producers have their rums in any competition, and what worth the eventual winners have, when so much must – must! – be excluded. 

This leads straight into the associated question applicable to both rumfest competitions and institutes awards, which is: if something wins, then what was the competition?  What are the other candidates in the class or category?  Clearly if something wins a gold medal in its class, one’s opinion of the win and its importance would vary depending on whether it beat a single other entrant, or ten, or fifty. Yet we are almost never told what the winner beat to rise to the top (let alone how many) – at best, we get the two or three runners-up and also-rans to provide context, which I submit is insufficient.

Lastly, consider that there’s the whole issue of classification and how rums fit into categories.  In spite of the Cate Method and the Gargano System and the various other individualized criteria by which rums are judged, it’s never entirely consistent between and among the various organizations — and that means that the medal results from any two competitions will never be entirely comparable and consistent and if you can’t compare them, what good are they? Richard Seale rather caustically remarked of one rum festival competition several years ago, that the way the classifications were set up meant he could enter a single one of his rums in four separate categories, which nicely summarizes the issue.  

It certainly points to the need to come up with a globally applicable classification system for rum, but the paradox of the matter (from the perspective of judging, awards and rankings) has always been that the better the system, the more categories there have to be…and the fewer entrants for medals there would consequently be in any category. Nobody has ever come up with a way to square that circle.

What this means, then, is that while awards lists have their uses, they operate within certain constraints and ignoring the context of these limitations can skew one’s perception of what the title of “Best In Class “or “Platinum” or “Double Gold” actually means. 

Perhaps a long term project of the industry and its adherents would be to come up with a single rankings mechanism that all institutes and fests adhere to without exception.  Then, not only would all the rankings be equivalent, but so would the categories, and therefore the comparability of all rums which would be rated according to completely consistent criteria. I can dream, I guess (and that’s yet another opinion right there).

Blogger’s Lists

Unsurprisingly perhaps, given that I’m one myself, I much prefer blogger’s lists (and in this broad definition I’m including video blogs and podcasts). These can run the gamut of Best of Year lists such as RumCask solicits every year from the blogosphere, or The Fat Rum Pirate’s annual listing, or stuff that just takes rum knowledge in whole new directions.

What I particularly like is those lists they make which go off on a tangent, or show how the lists should be done. There aren’t too many of these, unfortunately but consider TFRP’s “Worst Ten Rums…So Far” list, or its companion of The Top Ten…So Far and the brilliantly edited Top Ten Best Rums In The World, Ever Ever Part 1 and Part 2 which I regularly reread. The Rum Barrel Blog published a nice piece on Top 10 Value For Money Rums and being a barman, also added his own 7 Favourite Daiquiri White Rums. The vlogger Simon Ruszala of the New World Rum Club posted some neat educational lists like a rundown of the Foursquare ECS range and another of the Hampden marques that are less lists than slices of the rum world taken to detail; and that Grand Old Stalwart of the vlogging whisky scene, Ralfy, has a fair bit on his channel as well. And as if that isn’t enough, Rumcast, the relatively new podcast run by Will Hoekenga and John Gulla, intersperses its deep-dive interviews with occasional ruminations of its own such as Six Underrated Rums, Disappointing Rums, 2020 Year In Review, and Nine Recommended Rum Resources.

Clearly there is an equal number of rum or whisky people doing lists as others from less reputable sources, but why do I prefer them, and what makes them, to my mind, better? 

Well, for one thing, I know many of them, so that gives them instant credibility – their writing or podcasts or videos go back many years and their interactions in the rumisphere are based on real knowledge amassed over long periods – it’s not just some quick google search lacking depth or substance as plagues far too many of the lists discussed in the earlier section. Moreover, money is not the direct motivator for them (as it is for freelance or staff listmakers writing for online magazines), so they are free to not only chose whatever subject they feel like, but to take it in any direction and at any length they please. 

Lastly, they tend to be more honest: they provide context, they explain their choices, and if they sometimes leave out their biases, well, I’ve been following most for extended periods and I am aware of the occasional weaknesses in one direction or another, and why they feel the way they do. I have more information to go on and can form a more educated opinion on the credibility and veracity of whatever list they are putting together. There is, in short, a whole lot less to beware of here and that even goes for a much-panned list like the Howler’s Top 100 of 2017 the reaction against which was so virulent that he retired from Facebook (which I thought was unfair since if you followed his work from 2009 you’d know what he was all about and by that standard his list made sense…but I digress).

Other Lists

The lists described above are pretty much 99% of what is produced.  There are Top Lists,  Slice-of-the-Subject Lists or To-Try lists for the most part, and engender more trust, or less, depending on who is writing. 

Few go further than these, although I’ve tried to do so on my own account by putting out some that have little subjective biases but are reasonably factual all the way through and just interested me personally: among others there is Some Rum Trivia, Movers and Shakers of the Rum World, 12 Interesting Bottle Designs and 21 of The Strongest Rums in the World. I looked around other sites for more examples but didn’t find any that weren’t already covered by the other points above (but feel free to correct me and I’ll amend the section). 

Other Issues About Lists To Watch Out For

The business about the Rum Howler above relates to a point not often considered, which is the impact these lists have — not on the listmakers, but the list readers, and then the list commentators. I don’t particularly like the partisan politics they engender on social media via the chatterati, and the occasional verbal violence they promote when an award goes to a Good Rum Producer versus a Bad One, or vice versa.  This is almost always sparked by the people commenting on those lists, either in support or in dispute, and do the average Joe — who just wants a damned recommendation so he doesn’t waste his money — few favours.

Take these disparate lists that came out in the last year: one was the nine best rums of the ISWC 2020, which was trumpeted by all the usual acolytes and rum fanciers as being a win for the two distilleries who each had three reps on that list (it got even louder in 2021 when one distillery, Foursquare, won five awards).  Do this mental exercise – what would the reaction have been if Plantation had won Instead of Foursquare?

The complete doe-eyed innocent trust (observe the delicate phrasing) which so many otherwise smart and cynical people display when their favourites are on the line is one of the most disturbing trails of detritus that such lists leave in their wake. You can bet your bottom dollar that any list that has a Bumbu, Zacapa, Don Papa or Plantation rum on it can surely be accused of being in the pocket of the list maker, bought or otherwise compromised, or judged by incompetent, paid-for shills who don’t know anything (that last one is always good for a retread).

Yet the same people who make these statements with the such assurance and moral rectitude, cheerfully let their cynicism walk out the door when their favourite distillery is doing the winning. Their boy won, so it’s all good. Let some current pet hate cop a prize, and it’s clearly a deep-state conspiracy by the forces of Mordor using the dark side of the force to sway the gullible to the side of Voldemort. That they themselves are the gullible inhabitants of personal echo chambers where dissent never enters and alternatives are never discussed is a thought too terrible to contemplate, apparently, and the irony floats gently past.  

So all this does is create virulent camps of Them and Us in the rum world, which I argue does rum more harm than good. It spreads from producers to bottlers to writers to pundits to commentators to consumers and back again, and nobody is immune.  Everyone gets involved either in defense of their favourites or slandering their enemies.  When the mud starts flying in this way (for or against a list), the first thing to depart the scene is the understanding that lists by their very nature are subjective or limited (or both): they reflect the tastes of the listmakers or the limited entrants of a competition. I’d much prefer we argue their merits – or lack thereof – seriously and courteously and with facts, than just get involved in rancorous discussions that have no end and do no more than poison the well for all who come after.

Conclusion

Lists, then, even as Top Tens, Bottom Tens, Recommendation or Award Winners, demonstrate complete uselessness at revealing either the best of everything or the winners of anything for the imbibing population at large. The world of rum is too enormous to be encapsulated into a small number, and way too complex for convenient summarization.  The palates and experiences of the consumers are too varied and individualistic to be nailed down with anything as simplistic as a short list. It is amazing that even having considered all the points above, lists continue to exercise as subversive and compulsive an attraction as they do.  

But admittedly, when done right and well, lists of any stripe amuse and educate in equal measure. They point to avenues that may have been overlooked, or highlight an issue not considered.  They are bellwethers and indicators of others’ points of view, and with the ever-increasing homogeneity of social media groups where only agreed to points of view prevail, it’s nice to have a contrary data point pop up now and then. Good lists can inform purchasing decisions, alert one to new choices.  The best ones list a selection of a very tiny slice of the rumworld (like, say, the ten worst lists, ten blackest rums or a mashup of ten rums from a particular country or company) and run with it.

So all the preceding taken into account, just use lists with caution – bearing in mind all the preceding remarks on their limitations. Certainly they provide a sense of the world, and act as general guide or signpost, but none should be taken as gospel; and a clear-eyed understanding of what they are, what they represent and — just as vital — what they exclude, is, to me, the sine qua non of appreciating them best. And that leads to a more informed and critically-aware, thinking readership, whose own experiences and judgement should in the final analysis determine what to buy, or what to put one’s commentary behind.

 

Opinion – The Implications of Superfast Ageing and the Alteration of Rum

 4 Responses »
Feb 172021
 

This is a completely theoretical “what-if?” about the implications for the rum world if the technological process of superfast ageing were ever to be perfected.

Ever since ageing of spirits became a thing, people have been trying to make it faster in a sort of half-assed time-travel wish-fulfilment. They’ve tried the adding of wood chips, smaller barrels, keeping the barrels in motion, dosage, temperature control, music, ultrasound, etc etc – all in an effort to have the taste of a 20 year old rum stuffed inside a spirit made the day before yesterday.

Take Rational Spirits’ Cuban Inspired rum I wrote about recently, and the NYT article on research into the field. That rum was itself based on technology Bryan Davis of Lost Spirits had developed years earlier (he is mentioned in the NYT piece) where he was trying to do exactly that…accelerate the change in taste profile of selected spirits, to mimic that created by many years of ageing.

I’ve never stopped thinking about what such a technology might actually imply – particularly the outcomes. Because I think that the state of modern chemical and physical technology is such that even with all the thousands or millions – or billions – of disparate variables that interact in such complex ways to create the taste of a seriously aged rum, it may possible, just possible — not now, but someday — to get close to a 1975 Port Mourant…and do it in a few days. And what that implies for the industry should be considered.

Here, I won’t go into the methods and processes various companies have developed: what interests me is what the success of such a process might mean, the impacts it would have…if it were a reality. For the purpose of this what-if article, I am taking “the process” to mean not just being able to produce an ersatz aged product in a very short time…but any profile at will (it is part of the same idea, after all, so one inevitably follows the other).

And thinking of that leads down some interesting paths.

Obviously, first and foremost is money.  All input costs gathered post-distillation get reduced with a process that can do “ageing on demand” – most especially the warehousing charges of storing barrels for years or decades. Moreover, if one can produce an aged profile in days, oak barrels would be an unnecessary expense since storage could be in larger, inert vats made of steel or even (heaven forbid) plastic – the profile is already “set” so why bother going further with real barrels? Warehousing overheads would be reduced both for the physical infrastructure and its utilities, and the staffing. 

Too, if any superfast ageing process can happen, then clearly the angel’s share would shrink to nothing, which would leave more available to be sold.  Inevitably, this would have a knock-on negative effect on prices. One of the reasons legends like the the Skeldon 1973 is so expensive is because it was issued at an incredible age which probably left less than 5% of the initial volume available for bottling – can you imagine five thousand bottles of this stuff being available instead of five hundred, and not having to wait 32 years to get it? The four figure prices it commands now would take a nose-dive.

In point of fact, such a process, since it could theoretically be done just about anywhere and replicate any rum’s profile, would instantly render the distinction between tropical and continental ageing nearly irrelevant. The ripple effects of what “pure” rum would mean under such circumstances are huge even beyond that – because if you could not tell the difference between an aged Foursquare produced in situ and a fake that someone else can produce by just dialling in some coordinates on a reactor, the entire business model of premiumization premised on GIs, terroire and island specific profiles is going to be disembowelled. Why pay a hundred bucks for a Hampden Great House when you can get the same thing (or an indistinguishable thing) made down the street for ten?

Tony Sachs, who touched on this topic back in 2015, suggested that it would primarily affect the smaller producers, who would be able to produce a better rum for less money, instead of having capital tied up in ageing inventory and having to sell sub-par young juice to make cash flow.  But he also remarked that larger producers could make better “bottom-shelf” booze as well, and experimentation, being made simpler and faster with this tech, would allow profiles to be tested and produced on a much faster cycle than now. Nobody would be immune from this if they wanted to stay in the running. A lot of the same points were made in two FB conversations around the same time, in the Global Rum Club and La Confrerie du Rhum – and to this date, none of these issues have gone away (or been discussed beyond the superficialities).

Unsurprisingly, the industry commentators so far remain sanguine, relying on brand awareness, their names, the reputation built over decades, even centuries, the skill of their master distillers, blenders and cellar masters. “Old fashioned craft rum,” said one producer when commenting on superfast ageing several years ago, “Will always be there.” He’s probably right but at what level of production, I wonder, when faced with such a disruptor? The impacts I’ve described (or others I haven’t thought of) may not come to pass, but have not really been considered, largely because nobody takes this technology seriously: and with good reason, since so far it has not been shown to work.  Nor, in spite of its application to some rums like Lost Spirits,’ has it succeeded in producing a rum the hype leads us to expect. In other words, the process is not making rums to upend the industry.

A successful technology would, however, force traditional mid-sized rum producers to adapt to a major change in their pricing models and sales strategies. Faced with a technology that would provide real price competition and render their carefully blended aged products less desirable (because a similar product could now be had for less), they would have to up their game by making new and different and (hopefully) even better rums, and to make them in such a way as to hobble any attempts at mimicry by such a process. This would cost them money. 

It’s clear why labelling redesign and better disclosure are going to be required….

They would have to advertise differently, focus on their own premium-ness, the genuine nature of their products as opposed to the ersatz lab rats that are coming on the market. You can see this happening with mid sized “country-level” producers now, as they combat cheap US, Indian or Asian rums on the world market, or mass produced rums made by huge multi-column operations like Florida Distillers or those in Panama and elsewhere.

Distinctions between a “manufactured” rum made by a process of this kind, and a traditionally made one, would take on much greater importance, and that would logically lead to the courts. It is very likely that laws – or at least regulations by industry bodies – would be passed regarding advertising and restricting the labelling of such manufactured rums; they would not be able to pass themselves off as the genuine article. GIs would be amended to exclude fake-aged, or processed rums. Social media personages and little online armies would be mobilized by at-risk producers to wage a war of opinion and words against such upstarts (we have seen this already in other areas of the rum world). 

The word “ageing” itself would have to be more rigorously defined and enshrined in legislation. If I set up my equipment in Bridgetown, buy unaged bulk rum from any of the distilleries and then run it through the process at half the cost, you’d better believe I can call it a NAS Barbados rum under the current rules, and that means post-distillation processes have to be re-specified and redrafted to stop me from undercutting their prices for what they make and taking away their market share. Moreover, some way of trademarking or patenting the taste profile of a rum from one specific still, distillery or country is going to have to be found and distinguished, because the technology would instantly make counterfeiting and copying known brands a huge issue.

Multinational spirits conglomerates are likely to jump on board with this as well.  Since they go after bulk sales of cheap one-for-everyone commercial products whose margins are thinner, anything that reduces costs, or increases quality for the same price, will be looked at and developed. They might even buy the technology from some small tech startup like Mr. Davis and scale it up to industrial proportions, at which point market dominance is a very real possibility and small producers would hit the wall.

Of course, the high end connoisseurship and chatterati would absolutely continue prefer and promote the true-made rum as opposed to any ersatz lab concoction (we see that already with dosed rums).  But the painful truth is that such buyers, influencers, self-styled ambassadors and social media pundits, for all their noise, don’t actually account for much in the way of sales (otherwise Plantation and Flor de Cana would have gone belly-up years ago). The mid range and bottom shelf is where the vast majority of sales to the public lie – there is no significant, high-end premium market in existence (as there is, for example, in mechanical Swiss watches), just a marginal one.  

What this means is that it won’t matter if famed famed distilleries and notables of the industry throw their weight behind artisanal rums – if the cost is low and the quality is good enough, the majority of rum drinkers (who know little and care less about the rum wars others fight on their behalf) will continue to not just go for Bacardi but a low end ersatz Bacardi copy at an even lower price.  We won’t even go into the inevitable scourge of counterfeiting that is sure to start if any profile can be replicated at will.

This leads, then, to the possibility that the industry might for the first time require a global controlling body to set proper standards for production and labelling, national and international enforcement with teeth, and to find room for such a manufactured product that can separate it out and classify it in a way that makes its nature pellucidly clear.  The dog eat dog nature of spirits production, so tied up in national pride and economics, has so far resisted this kind of move, but I submit that under the pressure of a potentially mould-breaking force, it may become inevitable.

Admittedly, I paint a blue-sky picture of massive disruption here, based on a technology that is far from proven and does not currently exist in the form I posit.  So far, none of it has happened, and the earth keeps on spinning as it always has. And as others have pointed out, should such a process or the technology be perfected, it would make the bottom shelf better and the top end cheaper.

In any case, as has been constantly and comfortingly stated, people also do love the genuine article. I have heard no end of statements that people will always prefer the depth and rounded flavour and complexity of a natural, true-aged rum.  And that’s completely true…for rums they can get, and afford.  But what happens to rums that are out of production but desperately sought after? Rums made in limited quantities? That are too expensive? The Saint James 1885 comes to mind, and we won’t even talk about the Harewood House rum from 1780.

The technology’s research and the articles written about it, is currently and mostly aimed at two aspects of the spirits world: one, to provide an aged profile without actually ageing anything (for costs reduction), and two, to recreate old marks that can be sold for high prices (for revenue enhancement). 

Rational Spirits with its Cuban Inspired rum, and Lost Spirits before them with their Navy, Polynesian and Colonial rums, went the route of re-creation. But that created a third additional issue not often articulated, which most commentators (who only focus on the first thing, ageing) never address. And that’s who to sell the recreated dead marks to. 

It’s a reasonable question because consider: so few such “dead” rums remain and so few people exist who could actually describe the taste accurately (let alone write about it or have the nostalgia to get one), that you could just as easily do any old thing and say it was a faithful replica, call it “inspired” and who would gainsay you? At best such a duplicated re-creation owes its sales to marketing, curiosity or nostalgia.  It’s not really geared or guaranteed to provide a long term market or massive sales. A duplicate does not become a sought-after classic. No aged replica could ever have serious street cred – buyers would be unable to say it was genuine and pricing would be a problem.  This thing such companies have, that they want to recreate halo-marks of yesteryear, lost or dead, therefore, strikes me as no more than a marketing game and ultimately a dead end. 

***

What this all in some way leads up to, then is my belief that the real potential of such a process is not in the duplication of past profiles, or even the faux-ageing that nobody will ever take seriously, can’t be proven and can’t be labelled as such. Today’s drinking class don’t give a good goddamn about some Farrell’s Montserrat rum from the 1950s, Trader Vic’s Appleton 17 YO, or even a Caputo 1973 recreation.  

What buyers want is the new Chairman’s Reserve at cask strength for five dollars.  They’re after a Velier-Hampden Great House or HV Port Mourant White for ten bucks, and even more, would like to buy entire Foursquare ECS range available for only a Benjamin. That’s the third, ignored side of what such as-yet unproven technology would really entail, and all these companies doing research on different ways to flash age, re-create, re-do or re-invent are promoting the wrong aspect of their work.  They keep trying to recreate something that doesn’t actually exist any more and bottle their results as an “Inspired” version.  

The true, unspoken, unseen, undiscussed killer-app of any process of spirits alteration is in the recreation of what’s popular now. The proof of the pudding is whether they can recreate current marks which people can buy in the store and know really well, and do it so well that almost no-one —  consumer, taster or expert — can tell the difference…and accepts the made product as indistinguishable from the real one.  If the companies hustling to develop such techniques were ever to succeed at that, then they’d have my (and everyone else’s) serious attention…and upend the industry overnight. 

However, so far that has not seemed to compute, so it’s replication and fast ageing that gets all the attention — and the real market disruptions I once thought Lost Spirits and all the other companies might herald, remain unrealized. For now, anyway. 

And, as an old fashioned kind of rum guy who prefers the genuine article myself, I kind of hope it stays that way.

Opinion – Flipping: Love, Loathe Or Leave It

 5 Responses »
Jan 212021
 

Flipping at is most basic is simply reselling, and mostly seen as akin to scalping tickets. A seller has a bottle of a rum which is sold out of the stores that a buyer wants , and a bargain is struck usually at a markup. It’s a sale. Its specificity arises because of the practice of buying a (usually newly released) rum alight with a buzz and hype: not to enjoy, but to resell at a profit – in other words, introducing yet another intermediary with sticky finger between the distillery of origin and the consumer.

Unsurprisingly, flippers have become a sort of personal pet hate of just about every rum aficionado who wants a bottle of the latest Appleton, Velier, Foursquare, Hot-Sh*t New Distillery or Awesome Estate, and can’t get any because it’s been sold out….only for it to turn up on an auction site or a private sales a week later at a massively inflated price. I remember the rage about the the Tryptich release a few years ago, and the way it disappeared from online stores minutes after being listed; bottles then appeared for sale on nascent auction sites and even on FB within just a few days…not for extortionate prices, precisely, but certainly higher than retail (Foursquare and Velier have been fighting this practice ever since, with varying degrees of success).

The practice continues unabated to this day, and is equally excoriated, as a recent angry FB post and its comments showed – and the general consensus is simply this: to see desired new bottlings turn up for sale on secondary markets and know this resale is why they were bought, instead of for drinking, is outrageous, defeats the efforts of all true rum lovers to get real rums and promote them, and frikkin’ annoying to boot.

I completely understand the disappointed anger of those who missed out and now have to pay more. But really, I do wish people would just calm down about stuff like this. Folks are getting all bent out of shape for a product – a commodity, as one friend drily refers to it – that provides no benefit one can’t get elsewhere, that isn’t needed for survival, that is essentially a form of luxury item for which there are loads of substitutes, the sale and trade of which represents the foundation stone of capitalist world in which they live…and this causes a meltdown?  

Let’s consider some other points and break the matter down for a second. 

The prices are actually not always unreasonable when related to retail and whether they rise in price now or later, the fact is that most of the bottles that are most highly sought after are from favoured distilleries or companies which are always in limited supply; and so, once the initial hoopla and distribution and sales are over, the prices would have inevitably risen, whether through auctions, flipping or resale in some other fashion. Flippers just accelerate the process, though sometimes “sampling out” happens as well (I exclude this latter phenomenon for reasons explained in “Other Notes” below).

Moreover, not every single extra bottle is bought with a view for instant resale at a markup (though of course, it’s a big reason). Many people who collect always buy two or three bottles, one to open and share, the others to keep safe.  Such storing (some call it hoarding) takes retail stocks off the market and that’s no more to your benefit than flipping is – because now, instead of their being at least some at a higher price there are none at any price. Then again, people resell bottles rapidly sometimes, because they just ain’t that good. I can think of a number of more recent rums from one indie or another that people bought with high hopes, then turned right around and sold again because they sure didn’t match the hype – and those prices were not high.

Fans and FOMO are also part of the issue here – they create the noise that enables the hype that stokes the legend that elevates the prices…deservedly or not. It’s a cruel irony (ignored and unacknowledged by most) that those doing the complaining are sometimes the same ones doing the pre-release hyping, and the complaints themselves serve to make the bottle(s) more desirable.  It’s a no-win situation for everyone..

It will come as no surprise anyone following the rum news that Velier (including Hampden, Habitation Velier and the classic Caronis and Demeraras), Foursquare (especially the Private Casks and ECS series), Worthy Park, Rom Deluxe, Rum Artesenal, and any special edition series or collectible series (e.g. the Hamden “yellow box” and “Birds,” or Saint Lucia Distillery’s “Ships”) or three-deacade old Jamaican or uber-old Demerara rums by any independent, create loads of buzz…and much higher subsequent demand than any old rum made by some new company out there. And it’s not just limited to companies, but sometimes whole countries – Reunion, Jamaica, Grenada, Haiti and Barbados are current favourites. I can only imagine what the New Renegade rums are going to do when they start turning up. And that demand hikes prices on the secondary market. 

What flippers are doing is acting as speculators who see the divergence between hype and knowledge, and real value, and jump into the breach. When Luca Gargano, in his book “Nomad Among the Barrels”, referred to the Veliermania and Caronimania in the pre 2012 days, he correctly noted that his initial bottlings sold very slowly because nobody knew what they were – and the initial round of collectors in Italy and France and then Europe became the first rum flippers (I bought the Skeldon 1973 from one of them). The point is, fan-love and online promotion helps drive some of this and one of the reasons it continues is because every one of those fans who buys a couple bottles of the latest new creation and crows about it is helping increase its secondary market value. They would do better to be more cautious with their automatic praises when a Name releases anything, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Maybe we need to step back and rethink what we buy, and use less emotion to steer our purchases. The bubble of enthusiasm about favoured bottles and their makers is fine, but I do believe it excessive at times – and it enables flippers’ margins, not our own satisfaction.  In any case, why not spread the rum purchasing wings a little? The world is not made up of the four or five brands most commonly complained about – there’s tons more out there.  New stuff, old stuff, dependable stuff, cheaper stuff, that just doesn’t have the eldritch lustre and glow of a Magic Name.  

Too often we buy unthinkingly – to be “in”, to round out the collection, to have the latest, the newest, the best (they’ve been selling us phones, cars and computers on that basis for decades). But rum junkies and rum lovers could (and should) check out other brands and countries and worry less about what other fans think of them, or how cool they look with the latest Appleton Hearts bottles on the table hogging the Instagram feed or driving hits to the First Review. Because that just leads to a sort of “me first” and “look what I got that you don’t” that is the reason behind far too many of these proud posts — they’re left for you to admire but not taste, and so what really is the point of getting the bottle aside from bragging rights? The only people really profiting is those who exploit the margins this attitude creates, the resellers.

I completely get and accept that flippers are an element of the commercial rum ecosystem, not substantially different from those people who stockpiled masks and other medical or consumer supplies in the USA (and probably elsewhere) and then coldly resold at appalling markups in a time of pandemic. I despise them all for their lack of empathy for those poor souls who weren’t as quick off the block, who didn’t have their resources, and who such buyers basically shaft in their desire to make a buck for themselves.  But all this wailing and gnashing of teeth won’t help anything, and it certainly won’t stop anything.  No method of restriction of rum sales can stop people from buying multiple bottles, and then reselling them. Not direct distillery-selling to individuals, not single-bottle sales, not selling by lottery, not knowing everyone’s first name, marking bottles, numbering bottles, sealing bottles, nothing. It’s a fact of life. We have to get used to it.

In any case, people can and will and should be able to buy what they can and want if they can afford it, and resell if that’s their desire (in that sense we’re all Flippers-In-Waiting and points to the complexity of the issue – we don’t like Flippers when it’s other people, but we’re okay when it’s us). That you and I don’t like the practice is completely irrelevant. The only value on resale such a product possesses is the value we ourselves place on it by choosing to bid and buy. So, we can occasionally choose to walk away and not buy, and remember that it’s not a life-ending decision and our existence is not predicated on, nor the worth of our lives judged by, somehow missing out on this elixir.  All it means is we can’t boast about having it and our social media won’t show it and no, we won’t be able to show it off to our rum club. What we will have, is more money to spend on other things, maybe even the Next Thing, and come on, tell me honestly, is any of that really so bad?

Other Notes: “Sampling Out”

Originally I had a section on the practice of “sampling out” – buying a bottle to subdivide and sell 3cl or 5cl samples to others – I had thought that the prices when all samples’ prices summed up and averaged, are statistically higher per cl than an auction-flipped bottle and so represented another form of flipping. But I needed proof, as a “feeling” was not enough.

I contacted some acquaintances of mine who indulged in this practice (as either buyers or sellers or both), and this and other online research showed the assumption to be inconsistent at best. Checking around for prices of samples on FB versus retail on European sites showed that it was as likely to be higher as lower and in fact, of late the trend has been one of negligible markups. 

This was not entirely a surprise. People sample out for several reasons: to recoup the price of an expensive bottle; to share but not incur yet more costs; to make space in the cabinet; to reduce a bunch of heels taking up space or to which the SO objects (these are real reasons!); to get cash for the next halo bottle they really want; to get rid of a bottle that has some value – say, because it’s very old – but which they themselves don’t like or which isn’t real famous.  Such sellers tend to be more altruistic and sell at small margins or at cost plus postage.  So not really a flipping scenario at all. 

Then there are those who get a hot bottle and sell samples at a hefty markup. It’s better for those with slim purses who’ll never get the whole thing and could not afford it anyway and the small size of the bottle and its relatively more affordable cost makes it attractive.  It’s flipping in all but name, though.

Some good back and forth on the subject took place on the Scandinavian Rum Academy on FB for those who are interested in others’ points of view.

 

Opinion: Tony Sachs should not be asking…

 4 Responses »
Dec 212020
 

When non-knowledgeable list-makers who pepper the pages of equally clueless online magazines with their silly compendia ask for advice and help, I can tolerate it, but not from this guy, who I read quite a lot of and respect a whole lot more. He should not be asking, in such vague terms, to get for free what he’s paid to write.

On December 8th 2020, spirits writer Tony Sachs posed this question on the Ministry of Rum Forum on FB: “Hey all, picking your collective brain for an article I’m writing about the 21 best rums of the 21st century (so far). Quite a daunting task! I’m trying to go for a balance of delicious and historically significant. Any suggestions are welcome — they don’t have to be currently available, they just have to be great…..As you can tell, I’m just beginning the research!  Of course rhums agricole and clairins are acceptable, so… don’t be shy.” In five hours this thing picked up some 77 responses, few of which were surprising (there were 94 less than two weeks later).

At the risk of sounding like a whining puke who enjoys raining on others’ parades and taking down seemingly innocuous and innocent inquiries just because I can, I think for a famed, widely published and widely read spirits writer to ask this question suggests a problematic lack of knowledge about the very spirit he seeks to be discussing and the language used to request ideas.  There’s just so much wrong with with the question, and the whole mindset behind it. 

Consider the following points and walk with me here:

One: the question is poorly phrased and defined in such vague terms as to lead to any amount of answers.  For example: distilled in 21st century, or released for sale in the 21st century? (this has now been addressed). What does “great” mean? Who defines that? Does the statement “Agricoles and clairins are acceptable” mean that they are not to be taken seriously but can get a sympathy entry? Do spiced rums count?  What about sweetened ones? And that word “delicious” – I mean, seriously? … that opens the door up to such a level of subjectivity as to make the exercise completely pointless, because the amount of candidates will simply overwhelm the number asked for. I expect more from a professional spirits writer with years of experience under his belt.

Two: The 21st century is ⅕ of the way through so it’s unclear what good such a list actually serves when we’re only 20% in (thanks, please hold your messages, I saw the escape clause of “so far”) – perhaps it’s a conflation of “coming of age” at 21 with next year and chosing that number of rums, I don’t know.  But further to that, let me point out that the real increase in both rum knowledge and rum choice has happened in the last ten years, not the last twenty.  This was enabled by the internet and social media (especially Facebook) coupled with the rise and proliferation of bloggers after around 2010 — and what it really means is that very few people have any idea of or about any “historically significant” rum released before that point (let alone a delicious one), unless it’s Velier.

Three: Leaving aside the inherent uselessness of “delicious” given its subjectivity, I doubt very many will know what a truly historically significant rum is, or, for that matter, why it is considered to be so (or should be). In other words, without the context and the statement of why, does any response to this aspect of the question have any meaning, really? Is a rum significant because it is a long time “workhorse” of the bar industry, as Jesse Torres commented? Because it is popular?  Has loads of people saying it is? Made by a favoured distiller? Again, criteria are lacking.

Four: the current social media atmosphere favours some brands above others and they get the lion’s share of the press.  I hardly need mention that these are Velier, Foursquare, Worthy Park, Hampden for the chatterati, and Appleton, St Lucia Distillers and an occasional agricole or rum from east of Greenwich for the balance. (The 77 comments mentioned above make the point: three quarters of all suggestions are from those outfits). This blinkered mindset relegates far too many rums of actual importance and great taste to the margins, unacknowledged, unknown, uncounted — and again points to the weakness of the “ask the crowd for suggestions” mentality. You either know your own subject or you don’t – if you do you shouldn’t be asking, and if you don’t you shouldn’t be writing.

You might think this is a mean-spirited hit piece against a spirits writer against whom I have a personal beef. But that’s reading too closely and far from the truth: this opinion is about far more than just one man’s modus operandi. I’m railing against the entire culture of indolence that seems to have permeated the online world, where, rather than do any kind of work to research a matter for themselves, so very many people – from professionals to amateurs to simple fans – prefer to simply toss out questions for others to answer, and accept those answers from people whose knowledge in the field they have no way of assessing. I have nothing but contempt for ivory tower pontificators who condescendingly offer up dismissals of many bloggers’ selfless, self-funded and enormously dedicated work with remarks like “A great deal of what passes for “Rum History” is the product of, at best, amateurs using google…”4 while producing nothing of value on the subject themselves, but it’s equally poor form to not even check the resources that are available before posing a query of this kind.

At end, from a narrow rum perspective, what this question really is, is a variation of that endearingly innocent “What should I start with?” which abounds in the reddit rum feed.  From a beginner, I can accept it.  From a pro? …well, not so much. Speaking as a writer myself, I don’t know what good crowdsourcing such a question serves, especially for an article one is likely being paid to write in a field where one holds oneself out as knowledgeable.  Is it to get free help? Ideas? Thoughts I couldn’t come up with myself to add to those I can? Save some snooping-around time for work I should be doing, sourcing rum candidates which I, as a spirit writer, couldn’t find the time to research on my own? Sorry, snark or no snark, but I disapprove of this. It smacks of laziness.

And without even looking too hard, I can tell you pretty much what’s going to come out at the other end: Velier, Foursquare, clairins (which is Velier again), the New Jamaicans (Velier repped yet again, with Hampden), Smith & Cross, Rum Fire, maybe Appleton and Savanna, Privateer based on current comments, and a grudging few nods to one or two others. I’d be surprised if anything out of Asia, Australia, Africa or even South America makes the cut. So in the end, it’s pointless. Too much will be excluded no matter what you do and attention will be focused on trends of the day, with not enough light being shone on real long term stars that have stood the test of time over the last twenty years.

Summing up, here’s what I think: you want to write an article like that, create a catchy listicle like that, it’s at best an opinion, so you base it on serious and rigorously defined criteria; on your knowledge and your observation of the field, and your own tastings. You don’t casually farm it out to the crowd.  Because posting that question to the MoR is like wandering into a stadium of Rolling Stones fans and asking “Uhhh…who else should I be listening to?” Completely useless.  Mr. Sachs would do better to do the fieldwork himself, solo.  Then at least the result would be his own honest take, not a crowdsourced smorgasbord based on either the opinions of trend-followers, or the generous input of others who really care about the subject. A subject he should, in any event, know enough about already.

Update February 2021

Some days after I published this editorial, Mr. Sachs contacted me.  He took no offense at what I had written, was a complete gent about the whole thing, and we discussed his article and the potential candidates and pitfalls for several days.

The list he finally made is, I think, one of the best of its kind to have come out in recent years – not because of the rums he chose, exactly (though those are pretty good given the work he had to do to narrow down the field) but because of the narrative accompanying each one, a combination of trivia, facts and background detail, plus some thoughtful commentary. I had no input into what he finally chose, but he was kind enough to give me a hat tip when he shared the post on FB.

Was my post an exercise in snark? Maybe. Would I take it down?  No. Not just because I stand by what I write and take the hit for when I’m wrong, but because the points that were made are relevant and retain a greater applicability than merely to Mr. Sachs.  It’s to his credit that he did such a bang up job in spite of my initial fears.

The El Dorado Rare Collection – Releases I, II & III and Subsequent Developments

 4 Responses »
Jan 282020
 

Photo courtesy of romhatten.dk

The El Dorado Rare Collection made its debut in early 2016 and almost immediately raised howls of protest from rum fans who felt not only that Velier had been hosed by being evicted from their state of privileged access to DDL’s store of aged barrels, but that the prices in comparison to Luca’s wares (many which had just started their inexorable climb to four figures) were out to lunch at best and extortionate at worst. 

The price issue was annoying — at the time, DDL had no track record with full proof still-specific rums, or possessed anything near the kind of good will for such rums as Velier had built up over the years 2002-2014 in what I called the Age of Velier’s Demeraras; worse yet, given the disclosures about DDL’s practice of additives, to release such rums as pure without addressing the issue of dosage, and at such a high cost, simply entrenched the opinion that DDL was stealing a march on Velier and hustling to make some bucks off the full-proof, stills-as-the-killer-app trend pioneered by Luca Gargano.

It is for all those reasons that the initial rums of Release I — the PM, EHP and VSG marques, corresponding to the 12, 15 and 21 year old blends El Dorado had made famous — were received tepidly at best, though I felt they weren’t failures myself, but very decent products that just lacked Luca’s sure touch. Henrik of Rum Corner didn’t much care for the Port Mourant and discovered 14g/L of additives in the Versailles, the Fat Rum Pirate dismissed the Versailles himself while middling on the PM and loving the Enmore, and Romhatten out of Denmark, the first to review them (here, here, and here), provided an ecstatic shower of points and encomiums (perhaps because they were also selling them). Others were more muted in their praise (or condemnation), perhaps waiting to see the consensus of developing critical opinion before committing themselves.

Release II in 2017 consisted of a further Enmore and a Port Mourant, with the additional of a special Velier 70th Anniversary PM+Diamond blend.  By this time most people had grudgingly resigned themselves to the reality that the Age was over and were at least happy that such Demerara rums were still being issued — and even if they did not bear the imprimatur of the Master, it was self evident that Release II corrected some of the defects of the initial bottlings, got rid of the polarizing Versailles (which takes real skill to bring to its full potential, in my opinion), and the Enmore they made that year turned out to be a spectacular rum, clocking in at 90 points in my estimation.  That said, R1 and R2 didn’t really sell that well, if one judges by their continuing availability online as late as 2019.

Release III was something else again.  Although once more issued without fanfare or advertising (one wonders what DDL’s international brand ambassadors and marketing departments are up to, honestly), the word about R3 spread almost as swiftly as the initial news of the first bottles in 2016. This time there were four bottles – and although almost nothing has been written about the Diamond “twins” except, once again, by Romhatten (here and here), the other two elicited much more positive responses: an Albion (AN), and a Skeldon (SWR).  Neither estate (I’ve been to both) has a distillery onsite any longer, since they were long dismantled and/or destroyed – but the marques are famous in their own right, especially the Skeldon, whose 1973 and 1978 Velier editions remain Grail quests for many.

Speaking for myself, I’d have to say that with the Third Release, DDL has put to rest any doubts as to the legitimacy of the Rare Collection being excellent rums in their own right. They’re damned fine rums, the ones I’ve tried, up to the level of the RII Enmore 1996. I can’t tell whether the R1 series will ever become collector’s prized pieces or sought-after grail quests the way the original Veliers have become – but they’re good and worth finding.  Note that they remain, not just in my opinion, overpriced and this may account for their continuing availability.

It’s almost a movie trope that horror movies first exist as true horror that scare the crap out of everyone, devolve into lesser boo-fests, and end up in sad comedies and unworthy money-grab rip-offs as the franchise passes its sell-by date. I don’t think the Rares will end up this way, because DDL has made it known that they will no longer export bulk rum from the wooden stills, instead holding on to them for their own special releases and blends…so, clearly they are betting on still-specific rum into the future – though perhaps not always at cask strength. The 15 year old wine finished series and its companion 12 year old set, the new Master Distiller’s collection at standard strength which showcase the stills, all point in this direction.

And this is a good thing, as the stills DDL is so fortunate to possess are unique and they make fantastic rums when used right, and with skill.  One can only hope the pricing starts to be more reasonable in the years to come, because right now it’s too early to call them must-haves, and with the cost of them, they might not get the audience that would make them so. They are certainly better than the vastly overpriced 15YO and 12 YO wine-finished rums at standard strength.

Update (2019)

Will the Rares survive? In late 2019, four colour-coded bottles which were specifically not Rare Collection items, began to gather some attention online:

  • PM/Uitvlugt/Diamond 2010 9YO at 49.6% (violet),
  • Port Mourant/Uitvlugt 2010 9YO at 51% (orange),
  • Uitvlugt/Enmore 2008 11YO 47.4% (blue)
  • Diamond/Port Mourant 2010 9YO at 49.1% (teal).

None of these were specific to a still, and each was priced at €179 in the single online shop in online where they are to be found. All were blends (aged as such in the barrel, not mixed post-ageing), and all sported some reasonable tropical years. It is unclear whether they are meant to supplement the single-still ethos of the super-specific Rares, or supplant them. As of this writing I have yet to taste them myself, though I do own them.

Whatever the case, DDL certainly has taken the indie movement seriously and seen the potential of what the Age demonstrated – one can just hope their pricing system starts to show more tolerance for the skinny purses of most of us, otherwise they’ll be shared among aficionados rather than bought for their own sake. And there they’ll remain, on the dusty shelves of small stores, looked at and admired, perhaps, but not often purchased. One can still occasionally see them pop up on Rum Auctioneer or other auction sites.

Update (2023)

By 2023 an interesting new development was clearly visible: DDL had discarded the Rares entirely, and moved away from these colour coded experimentals.  What they did was start issuing special 15 YO and other aged editions, in two specific flavours: one, released at standard strength of 40%, that showcased the famed stills (I think these were mostly like the inauguaral 2006 edition released in 2021); and two, a cask strength aged series — this could be a blend, possibly including a finish or special cask ageing regiment, a special edition of some kind not always tied to an age or a still, or a year-specific one, and sometimes made for large spirits shops (like Wine & Beyond in Calgary). The key point to note is that they have folded this into the regular El Dorado range of rums – same bottle and general label design. This is, in my opinion, a smart move, since it does away with the recognition factor and plays to DDL’s global brand awareness. So far I know of the following releases, none of which I have written about as of this writing:

Type 1 Standard Strength

  • 2006-2021 15 YO 40% Port Mourant (PM)
  • 2006-2021 15 YO 40% Enmore
  • 2006-2021 15 YO 40% Versailles (VSG)
  • 2009-2021 12 YO 40% Port Mourant (PM)
  • 2009-2021 12 YO 40% Versailles (VSG)
  • 2009-2021 12 YO 40% Enmore

Type 2 Cask Strength

  • 1998-2022 24YO 50.3% PM/Enmore “The Last Casks Collection – Black”
  • 1998-2022 24YO 49.1% Diamond “The Last Casks Collection – Red”
  • 2000-2022 22YO 54.4%  Diamond “The Last Casks Collection – Gold”
  • 2003-2018 15YO 62.3% Enmore Sauternes Finish
  • 2005-2021 16 YO 55.3% Blend with White Port Cask Finish
  • 2005-2021 16 YO 55.1% Versailles Madeira Dry Casks
  • 2006-2021 15 YO 57.3% Blend with Madeira Sweet Cask Finish
  • 2006-2022 16 YO 47.1% PM-Savalle Blend, Wine & Beyond Single Barrel (Canada only)
  • 2009-2021 12YO 54.3% Enmore (EHP)
  • 2009-2021 12 YO 56.7% Port Mourant (PM)
  • 2012-2022 10 YO 58.4% PM-Savalle-Diamond Blend, Wine & Beyond Single Barrel (Canada only)

 

The Rare Collection Rums

I have been fortunate enough to buy and review many of the Collection so far, and for those who wish to get into the specifics, the reviews are linked here:

In January 2021, the UK based NW Rum Club did a complete review of the entire Rare Collection (releases I, II and III), and it’s worth a look, very informative, talking about the releases, and the stills. In 2023 Stuart of the Secret Rum Bar, also in the UK, did the same thing.

The El Dorado 15 YO “Wine Finished” Series – Summing Up

 2 Responses »
Aug 032018
 

Photo pilfered with permission (c) Simon Johnson, RumShopBoy.com

Over the years, there has developed a sort of clear understanding of what the El Dorado 15 YO is, deriving from the wooden stills that make up its core profile – that tastes are well known, consistently made and the rum is famed for that specific reason. Therefore, the reasoning for expanding the range in 2016 to include a series of finished versions of the 15YO remains unclear.  DDL may have felt they might capitalize on the fashion to have multiple finishes of beloved rums, or dipping their toes into the waters already colonized by others with double or multiple maturations. On the other hand, maybe they just had a bunch of Portuguese wine barrels kicking around gathering dust and wanted to use them for something more than decorations and carved chairs.

Few people – including us scriveners –  will ever have the opportunity or desire to try the entire Finished line of rums together, unless they are those who attend DDL’s marketing seminars, go to Diamond in Guyana, belong to a rum collective, have deep pockets or see these things at a rum festival.  The price point makes buying them simply unfeasible, and indeed, only two writers have ever taken them apart in toto – the boys in Quebec, and the Rum Shop Boy (their words are an excellent supplement to what I’ve done here).

Here are the results in brief (somewhat more detail is in the linked reviews):

El Dorado 15 YO Red Wine Finish – 78 points

Lightly sweet with licorice, toffee and fruity notes on the nose. Cherries, plums, raisins and watermelon on the palate, all staying quiet and being rather dominated by salt caramel and molasses.

El Dorado 15 YO Ruby Port Finish – 80 points

Opens with acetones and light medicinal aromas, then develops into a dry nose redolent of peanut butter, salt caramel, fruits, raisins, breakfast spices and some brine. The taste was rather watery – pears, watermelons, caramel, toffee, anise and cognac filled chocolates.

El Dorado 15 YO White Port Finish – 76 points

Very mild, light brown sugar nose, some caramel, brine, sweet soya. Taste was similarly quiescent, presenting mostly citrus, coffee, chocolate, bananas, and of course, molasses and caramel toffee.

El Dorado 15 YO Dry Madeira Finish – 80 points

Nice: soft attack of sawdust and dark fruit: plums, pears, raisins, black grapes. Leavened with ripe orange peel, peaches and olives before muskier aromas of toffee and chocolate take over. Citrus disappears on the palate, replaced by salted butter and caramel drizzled over vanilla ice cream.  Also bananas, kiwi fruit, oranges gone off, cinnamon and cloves. Nice, but weak.

El Dorado 15 YO Sweet Madeira Finish – 81 points

Marginally my favourite overall: noses relatively darker and richer and fruitier than just about all the others except the “Dry” – delicate nose of peaches, raisins, cinnamon, cloves, caramel, peanut butter, cherries in syrup, candied oranges, bitter chocolate. Soft palate, quite dry, oak is more forward here, plus raisins, cloves and cinnamon carrying on from the nose, and the fruitiness of peaches in syrup, cherries, plus toffee, salt caramel.

El Dorado 15 YO Sauternes Finish – 78 points

Subtly different from the others. Nose of aromatic tobacco, white almond-stuffed chocolate and nail polish, then retreats to salty caramel, molasses, vanilla, cherries, raisins, lemon peel and oak, quite a bit of oak, all rather sere. Palate retains the  tobacco, then vanilla, chocolate, coffee, molasses and quite a bit more dried dark fruit notes of raisins, plums, dates, and a quick hint of anise. The oak is quite noticeable, and the rum as a whole is quite dry.

Unsurprisingly, there are variations among those who’ve looked at them, and everyone will have favourites and less-liked ones among these rums — I liked the Sweet Madeira the best, while one Facebook commentator loved the Ruby Port, Simon much preferred the White Port Finish and Les Quebecois put their money on the Dry Madeira.  This variation makes it a success, I’d say, because there’s something to please most palates.

The Finished range of rums also make a pleasing counterpoint to the “Basic” El Dorado 15 Year Old…something for everyone.  But taken as a whole, I wonder – my overall impression is that the woodsy, musky, dark profile of the Port Mourant double wooden pot still, which is the dominant element of the ED 15, is affected — but not entirely enhanced — by the addition of sprightly, light wine finishes: the two are disparate enough to make the marriage an uneasy one.  That it works at all is a testament to the master blender’s skill, and some judicious and gentler-than-usual additions to smoothen things out – the Standard ED-15 clocks in at around 20 g/L of additives (caramel or sugar), but these are substantially less. Which is a good thing – it proves, as if it ever needed to be proved at all, that DDL can forego sweetening or caramel additions after the fact, with no concomitant loss of quality or custom (why do I have the feeling they’re watching Foursquare’s double matured Exceptional Cask series like a hawk?).

What the series does make clear is that DDL is both courageous enough to try something new (the finishing concept), while at the same time remaining conservative (or nervous?) enough to maintain the continuing (if minimal) addition of adulterants. DDL of course never told anyone how popular the Finished Series are, or how the sales went, or even if the principle will remain in force for many years.  Perhaps it was successful enough for them, in early 2018, to issue the 12 year old rum with a similar series of finishes.

All the preceding remarks sum up my own appreciation for and problems with the range. None of them eclipse the 15 year old standard model (to me – that is entirely a personal opinion); they coexist, but uneasily. There are too many of them, which confuses – it’s hard to put your money on any one of them when there are six to chose from (“the paradox of choice”, it’s called).  Their exclusivity is not a given since the outturn is unknown. The unnecessary dosage, however minimal, remains. And that price! In what universe do rums that don’t differ that much from their better known brother, and are merely labelled but not proved to be “Limited,” have an asking of price of more than twice as much?  That alone makes them a tough sell. (Note – the 12 year old Finished editions which emerged in 2018 without any real fanfare, also had prices that were simply unconscionable for what they were). The people who buy rums at that kind of price know their countries, estates and stills and don’t muck around with cheap plonk or standard proofed rums. They may have money to burn — but with that comes experience because wasteage of cash on substandard rums is not part of their programme.  They are unlikely to buy these. The people who will fork out for the Finished series (one or all) are those who want a once-in-a-while special purchase… but that doesn’t exactly guarantee a rabid fanbase of Foursquare-level we’ll-buy-them-blind crazies, now, does it?

My personal opinion is that what El Dorado should have done is issue them as a truly limited series of numbered bottles, stated as 16-17 years old instead of the standard 15, and a few proof points higher.  Had they done that, these things might have become true collector’s items, the way the 1997 single still editions have become. In linking the rums to the core 15 year old while making them no stronger, not explosively more special, and at that price, they may have diluted the 15YO brand to no great effect and even limited their sales.  But at least the rums themselves aren’t crash-and-burn failures, and are pretty good in their own way. We have to give them points for that.

The 500th Review

 7 Responses »
Mar 272018
 

Both of my eagle-eyed Constant Readers probably observed that I skipped the 400th review essay last year: I brought the 60+ Rumaniacs reviews into the numbering and so jumped right past it, but in any case, 500 seemed like a better number to be going on with.  Am I happy to reach this milestone? Oh yes. But that I have done so is a testament less to my own efforts, than those of readers, commentators and friends who continually provide encouragement and advice (and lots of corrections and criticisms). Even Mrs. Caner graces my work with an occasional nod of distant approbation in a “don’t let this get to your head, buddy” kind of way (which from her is a raving declaration of love) while suggesting I pass the glass so she can try the latest juice as well. And the 13-going-on-30, far-too-clever, hyper-intelligent Little Caner is now beginning to get curious about the whole thing himself, and tags along where he can, lending his nose if allowed. So that’s kind of cool too.

Still, if I had to do a pitch as to why I started and continue to run a free site, which costs me a lot in terms of both time and money, I’d be hard pressed to give you an answer that isn’t seen as either specious or self-serving bullsh*t. Certainly it provides no income, and I’ve taken a fair bit of flak in social media for some of my opinions, so what’s keeping things going?

Part of it is habit.  It’s a pleasant routine that I’ve fallen into, and I enjoy the writing, the tasting, the constant surprises and informational rabbit holes that any deep interest constantly reveals.  I like the people (on all sides of the divide), the honest curiosity of new entrants to the field. I like the fact that even such a niche interest makes me think and consider my opinions carefully, and enriches my store of knowledge. I like the whole forward-looking nature of the enterprise…it’s like I never get to the bottom of the rum glass, there’s always something new and different and obscure to research or find out or enjoy.

Any plans for the future, over and beyond what’s already being done?  Nothing grandiose. Cachacas are getting a bigger slice of my attention (still quite a few to write about), and I want to spend some time researching and writing about rums from Africa and Asia.  Expanding the Makers lineup continues to be a work in progress, and for sure I intend to acquire and re-taste a number of rums in my mental list of the Key Rums of the World (the effort is not stalled, by the way, just requires samples which are not with me right now).  Some general non-fiction essays are in my mind, informational reference pieces of the sort Matt Pietrek and Josh Miller do better and more often than I do. All this keeps me interested and motivated and eager to go over the next hill and see that odd new distillery on the other side.  Which I’ll continue to do as long as the purse holds out and Mrs. Caner concurs.

Over the years, a few of my friends interested in getting into the writing game told me that when the sheer bulk of work is considered, the established “names” out there who get the lion’s share of the attention, the long term nature of it…well, they’re a little intimidated and it reduces their motivation.  And that’s a fair comment – when I started posting in January 2010 after months of personal writing, the blogging and review landscape was quite small, so the carving out of a personal niche was somewhat easier to do. But I tell them all to not worry about it — just begin. It’s for you, right? You’ve been on FB for four-plus years already, haven’t you? Think what could have been accomplished had you started then. All it needs is one small review at a time, month in and month out, never stop, do it because you like it, be as unkillable as a cockroach and just keep plugging away.  That’s what I did, and still do now, and here we are. At 500.

 

As always, some observations on the state of the rum world…

The Additives Issue

If we think the whole business of additives is going away, we should think again.  Oh sure, it’s been written to death and I think the public awareness is there now, in a way it was not five years back. But any time some new rum aficionado starts talking on FB about how she or he liked the Kraken, Pyrat’s, Don Papa et al, there is no shortage of vociferous responses that take umbrage and it starts all up again.  Personally, I don’t and never will believe undisclosed additives are a good thing (and I’ll say that until they plant me), but I also feel that too often the so-called “dude, let me tell you what you’re *really* drinking” conversation degenerates into a sort of genteel elitist superciliousness that puts the blame in the wrong corner – that of the consumer, not the producers; and ignores the fact that many people (even those who know their rums) sometimes simply prefer a sweet mishmash of sugar laden crap.  

On the other hand, from the producers side, two small label changes give me hope – Pyrat’s stopped calling itself a rum and the Kraken now clearly says it has sugar and is a spiced rum.  Maybe the fierce debates on Facebook have created this awareness on the part of those who make rums, but even with this light through the clouds, Wes’s and Richard’s observations remain on point – it’s not enough, the matter should never be dropped, and people should always be asking the hard questions, whenever they buy and at all the festivals. Producers in particular should have the honesty to declare additives in their rums and Governments should make that a requirement through regulatory enforcement; and if consumers have any responsibility at all, it’s to educate themselves on the matter and vote with their wallets if they feel strongly enough one way or the other.

Websites

Several new sites I now visit on a fairly regular basis popped up over the last couple of years (on top of the old stalwarts). One of the best of these may be Single Cask Rum out of Germany (writing in English), which doesn’t do scoring but tastes flights almost every time to offer comparisons and insights. Another now-not-so-new reviewer I like a lot (he appeared up just after I posted the 300th review update) is RumShopBoy from the UK, and if you have not already gone over to Simon’s site to check out his work, trust me, it’s worth it (I particularly recommend his series on the St. Lucia 1931 rums, the El Dorado 15 YO “fancy finish” rums, and the more recent SMWS bottlings). Other sites that attract my attention are Quebec Rhum and  A la Découverte du Rhum and Le Blog a Roger (all in French), Rumtastic from the UK (he doesn’t assign scores), Rumlocker from the USA (some interesting commentaries and essays) and several other magazine format sites, all of which I‘ve linked to. I’ve also been twigged to a Japanese-language site called Sarichiiii, which somehow managed to compile a tasting roster of over 350 rums without making a ripple and I think it’s worth a look, though Google translate does make reading a chore, and navigation is tedious because of the large photos.

A corresponding (and somewhat depressing) trend over the last couple of years is the drying up of review sites particular to the North American scene (though the absence or slow decline of sites from other parts of the world is just as bad).  In its place I’ve noticed that micro reviews are now springing up, primarily on Facebook and Reddit, and this for me personally, is an incremental contribution to the field, but not one with which I’m particularly satusfied. Facebook posts get buried in a day unless there are comments and constant likes, Reddit isn’t far behind, and neither really create a body of reference work which sites like those of Wes, Steve, Marco, Matt, Josh, Paul, Laurent, Cyril, Henrik, Dave and others, represent. There’s no background info on these micro-posts, no really well deliberated and expressed opinions (except by fleeting here-today-gone-tomorrow commentary by others), no understanding or sense of the evolution over time in the mind of the poster.  Just tasting notes, a score and that’s more or less it. Serge Valentin can get away with that kind of brevity, but not many others can. Few of these posts hold my attention, or are ones I care to return to, the way I do for any of the websites run by the people noted above — because those writers provide information, not just data. So if a person can write a bunch of such mini-reviews, why not start a website? – it’s cheap and sometimes even free to do.

Lastly I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that aside from Tiare (who doesn’t do rum reviews very often, to our detriment) and the Rum Wench out of Australia (now silent since May 2016), and Yuuka Sasaki, the lady who runs the Japanese site remarked on above, there are no female writers in our small club of whom I’m aware (I would like to be corrected on this if someone knows better), and really wish there were. And also, I live in hope that writers located in Africa and Asia begin to contribute to the body of knowledge we all share, since they’re the ones who know what’s going on in their backyard in a way western writers can’t match and don’t often try to.

Greater appreciation of white full proof rums

Remember that post about the 21 Great Whites?  Originally I had intended to stop at ten and thought this would be enough, but the list grew and grew and finally the brakes simply had to be applied before I hit fifty and lost my audience entirely.  But what that list and the response to it showed was that the release of the blanc rhums and clairins are no mere flash in the pan. Leaving aside filtered white mixing rums of no particular interest to me (I’m not a bartender or a cocktail guru, to whom such rums are almost like bread and butter staples), these rip snorting high-test white rums are young and often unaged, powerful tasty and of a quality out of all proportion to their age. Habitation Velier had quite a few of these, the clairins are still coming on strong, the French Islanders always had them, and perhaps now they are simply becoming better known and more appreciated than before.  I look forward to many more in the future.

The longform essay

As a lover of doorstopping histories, multi-kilo books, series in multiplicate and all forms of well-researched knowledge, how could I ignore the more frequent postings of long pieces exploring single topics? I’ve done a few of my own, Wes Burgin opined quite frequently, but for sheer consistency, Matt Pietrek of the Cocktail Wonk is the gold standard (he’s the opposite of WhiskyFun in his own way), together with Paul Senft of RumJourney, Cyril of DuRhum, and of course Josh Miller of Inu-a-Kena, who still doesn’t write enough and whose essay on the history of agricoles was one of my favourites of 2017.  Pieces I particularly liked since #300 are:

Flipping

Perhaps the most acknowledged and admired story in the last couple of years has been the emergence of Foursquare as a rum powerhouse, easily eclipsing Mount Gay, WIRD, El Dorado, Appleton and St Lucia Distilleries as the source of really good fullproof rum, turning what could have been a major impediment to growth (the strictures of Barbadian law regarding purity and additives) into a major selling point.  Intellectually partnering with Luca Gargano didn’t hurt either, of course.

But an unanticipated side effect of this success has been the explosion of flippers — speculators who buy as much of a new release as they can and then turn around and sell it on secondary markets (which are now a real feature on Facebook as well as eBay).  We first noted this when all of the 2006 10 Year Old disappeared from online shelves five minutes after becoming available and then turning up on eBay a day later at highly inflated prices.  So bad did this become that Richard Seale, in an impressive and direct effort at damage control, arranged for personal couriers all over the world to deliver bottles at standard prices to those who were fortunate enough to get one. To say I was astounded at a major primary producer taking on what must have been incredible personal inconvenience, would be to understate the matter.

The whole business of flippers strikes rum lovers as distasteful, since they do not regard rums as an investment but as something to treasure and enjoy, a social lubricant, a matter for scoring brownie points with friends when measuring their collections — and most buy rums for the sheer love of the spirit (believe me, they share generously too).  So to have them disappear and require sourcing at twice the price is seen as extortionate. This however obscures the fact that flippers have existed for years – I bought the Skeldon 1973 from one of them – and they will remain a fixture of the landscape, so unless marketing and sales distribution rules change, we may just have to suck it up if we can’t get the juice through regular channels.  That’s capitalism for you.

A further unanticipated – and perhaps more welcome – development following right along, is what I call micro flipping – the sale of samples online (so far I’ve only seen this on Facebook).  I believe this will likely become a major source of samples for curious people who are interested in checking out new rums, but not entirely willing to part with major money for all rums bottled for an entire line.  So certainly I see this as a better  situation than whole-bottle flipping, like that post about some joker buying six Principias the other day which had Steve James go practically nuclear. But perhaps it’s too early to see if this is a temporary thing, or something that will cause online and other stores to reconsider their marketing strategy.

Minor Statistics

Here are some stats for those who, like me, are into their numbers:

  • This site represents over five thousand man-hours utilized in buying, sourcing, talking, tasting, noting, writing, thinking, attending rumfests and other tastings, as well as paying attention to the larger rumworld on FB and website postings by others, responding to comments and emails. For a comparison, note that a working year (52 weeks of five 8-hour days and no vacation) is about 2000 hours annually.
  • An expense bill that’s long past five figures. That includes not only rum purchases, but books, postage, travel time and entrance fees. Because Mrs. Caner is probably reading this, you’ll forgive me if I don’t give you the precise number.
  • Almost half a million words when all essays, musings and meanderings are added to the reviews themselves.  For a numerical (but not literary quality) comparison, War and Peace has around 600,000, Gone with the Wind has a shade over 410,000
  • Post with the lifetime highest hits: the Velier biography beat out the previous #1, the Bacardi 151 (which slipped to #4) probably due to an updated reposting last year; #2 and #3 remain equally consistent and surprising – the Stroh 80 from Austria (not really a rum)  and the Cuban La Occidental Guayabita del Pinar (also a somewhat debatable spirit). The least read rum review ever remains the Canadian Momento, a mere handful of views after many years of being available. I have honestly given up wondering what drives a review to be popular.  Is it a hot-snot new bottle review, is it quality of language, rarity, age, style, FB caches not reporting visitors? Who knows? Maybe it’s just dumb luck.
  • Fastest climbing post ever was the divisive and somewhat controversial selection of the Diplomatico Reserva Exclusiva as one of the key rums of the world, followed by 9 Bajans and 21 Great whites and a biography of Renegade Rums. If nothing else, it shows that the interest in the diversity of rum and its background is in no danger of diminishing.

My list of rum discoveries and appreciated rums in between #300 and #500.  So as to keep this short I’ve just linked to the reviews and provided a small blurb for each. Not all are high scoring rums, but my appreciation for what they tried to do and accomplished remains undiminished, and the remain in my memory long after I wrote the review and moved on (which may be the perfect criterion to determine a good rum). In no order:

  • Rum Nation Small Batch Port Mourant 1995 21 Year Old
    • Yes, I like Port Mourant.  They’re all so rich, fruity, pungent, dark and all-round delicious. This one takes it up a level or two and is a worthy successor to the various twenty something year old Demeraras Rum Nation used to issue and which I also liked back in the day. This one is better, and not just because of its cask strength.
  • Foursquare (Velier) 2006 10 Year Old Barbados Rum
    • A simply amazing rum from Barbados. Absolutely gorgeous. I haven’t tasted the Principia or the newer Exceptionals, but they’ve got to be really damned good to beat what this rum does so casually, as if it was no bodderation at all.

 

  • L’Esprit Guadeloupe 1998 12 Year Old Rhum
    • L’Esprit is the little engine that could and may be one of the future collectors’ grails, if they continue this way.  This rhum from Bellevue operates on several levels at once, just about all of them firm and tasty.

 

  • Savanna HERR Millésime 2006 10 Year Old Rum
    • Brutal, sharp, ripe with bags of fruits and esters and happy to show every single one of them off at the same time. It takes some time to come to grips with it and identify all the stuff going on under the hood.

 

  • Savanna Lontan Grand Arôme Vieux 2004 12 Year Old
    • The HERR was a smorgasbord of everything Savanna could throw into a rhum: this one was softer, more muted, but no less complex. And I argue it’s even better because it just wants to showcase a proportion of its potential really well, rather than everything at once and dilute your focus

 

  • Bristol Spirits Jamaica 1974 30 Year Old Rum
    • Not as much funkiness as one might expect from a Jamaican.  It’s just dark, deep and rich, thick with mouth watering flavours, in spite of what at first sight might seem like a doubtful 43% ABV. A wonderful rum from Ago.

 

  • Velier Courcelles 1972 31 Year Old Rhum Vieux
    • The original Courcelles was magnificent, and this one is just as good.  Flavours come and go, and the complexity and overall balance were as good as what I remembered. Hard to get a hold of, of course – most of the older Veliers are, nowadays – but if you can, absolutely worth it.

 

 

 

  • Rum Nation Small Batch Jamaica 1986 30 Year Old
    • It’s probably been dosed, but this is one of those cases where the results still rise above that: this is one lovely Jamaican, bottled at a warm 48.7%, three special years’ rums from Longpond.

 

 

 

 

  • Toucan No. 4 Rum
    • A new rhum from French Guiana.  Simple, straightforward, mild at 40%, really well put together.  Does itself proud by not trying to be too much, or all things to all people.

 

  • Rum Fire “Velevet” Jamaican White Rum
    • Fierce, uncompromising, full-proof white rum bursting with esters and power from every pore. Flavourful and searing, and may be best for mixing, but trying it on its own is also quite an experience

 

  • Whisper Antigua Gold Rum
    • Just a sweet, humble little rumlet.  Doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, and is a nice starter spirit that does everything right in a low-key, unassuming manner. In fact, it’s grown in my estimation and tasting memories since I first tried it

 

Honourable mention has to go to the following who could just as easily have made this list

 

So, there we have it, a roundup of the rumworld and one reviewer’s place in it as best as I can summarize the situation. Most likely there’ll be another one at #750, if I last that long.  Probably, since I don’t see the exercise ceasing any time soon.  After all, it’s still fun, right?

In passing this personal milestone, I’d like to thank all the rum-loving people who come by here and read, whether agreeing with my assessments, writing style, opinions, verbosity, or not.  Gratitude also goes out to the many correspondents and commentators who engage in thoughtful, heated and passionate discourse on the many Big Questions, or even just one small one. And, of course, a big hat tip the producers – primary or independent – who keep upping the ante in terms of what they make and the way in which they make it, and provide a rich lode of material for us writers to mine and discuss with like-minded folks. It takes all of us together to make up the rumiverse.

All the best

The Lone Caner

A Short & Personal Essay About Agricole Rums

 No Responses »
Jul 292017
 

In July 2017 the French rum wesbsite Coeur de Chauffe, as part of the Agricole 2017 world tour, issued a two part post where members of the rum and blogging community were invited to submit some brief words regarding their experiences with the French Island agricoles.  Well, most people wrote a couple of generally positive sentences, waved goodbye and moved on, but I felt that perhaps more could be said — and wrote, as is my wont, a complete essay where I tried to summarize my feelings about and experiences with this fascinating subset of the rumworld.

The French language Agricole Tour 2017 Part 1 can be found here, and the essays by myself and Sascha Junkert in Part 2, is here.  The paragraphs below represent the original English language version of my section.

Sooner or later, every rum lover comes to agricoles the way every film fan eventually arrives at Ozu. Although better known and always appreciated by the French due to their originating on the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, these quietly amazing rums have only started to become more widely available, and more praised, in the last ten years or so.

Partly this situation arose because of the domination of molasses based rums over the centuries.  Those rums were and are made more easily and more cheaply, have a quality of their own, and have commanded the attention of the rumiverse up until now.  Agricoles are made different, taste different and are priced different…but are also among the best rums currently being made, and can take their place at the forefront of any top-end lineup, not just because of their intriguing and tasty flavours, but because they have escaped the opprobrium of misleading labels, convenient number statements and adulteration which is the stain on far too many traditional rums.  They have always been pure, unmessed-with, traditionally-made rums and are appreciated for precisely that reason.

Others have written in greater depth about these unique rums – the Cocktail Wonk’s deep dive is a case in  point – so I won’t go into the details here beyond some basic facts.  Agricole rums – or rhums, as they are termed – are made from freshly pressed cane juice which goes to the still within 48 hours of harvesting the cane.  They are made in column stills and have a light, herbal, almost grassy flavour that often comes as a shock to those more used to, and comfortable with, the relatively darker, fruitier profiles of the Jamaicans, Bajans, Guyanese and other English-speaking islands; and they are clearer and crisper than the light and floral Spanish rons like those from Cuba or Latin America. 

Agricoles are commonly associated with the French islands in the Caribbean, but what the name describes is more a method of production than a geographical point of origin, and by that standard, no discussion of the type can be complete without noting the Brazilian cachacas, which are a subset of the genre, distinguished by their being aged in local woods (e.g. Balsamo, Jequitiba or Umburana), which give them a distinct (and occasionally off-putting) taste profile that many non-Brazilians have difficulty coming to grips with. One should also note that makers from around the world are increasingly making rums from freshly pressed cane juice – Laodi from Vietnam is a case in point, Madeira is another, and there is also Ron Aldea from the Canary islands, and several US micro distillers, among others.

Like traditional rums made from molasses, agricoles are aged, in various kinds of barrels – white oak, ex-bourbon, Limousin oak, cognac casks, the Brazilians as noted and so on – but unlike most of the molasses brigade, they have a very high quality even when made as “white”.  Such colourless rhums are, however, not usually filtered – as is the case with various bland mixing agents like the Bacardi Superior or the Prichard’s Crystal – and mostly unaged and issued directly off the still.  Haiti is the poster boy for such rhums, which are called clairins there and they are pungent, fierce and joyously off the reservation.  Lovers of softer fare shy away from such rhums, but connoisseurs have been snapping them up in increasing volumes for years now, ever since Velier came out with the three clairins from Sajous, Vaval and Casimir back in 2014.

My own experience with agricoles began in 2010 when one of the first rums I bought was the Clement Tres Vieux from Martinique, just about the top of their line;  I wasn’t entirely sold on it, yet it had an aroma and taste that was surprisingly evocative, even if I did not feel it dethroned the other rums I liked more to that point in my education. Over time I managed to try two Barbancourts from Haiti, a couple of Karukeras from Guadeloupe, and a Rum Nation and Renegade independent production.  My opinion began to change.  I appreciated their flavours more, enjoyed the lightness and complexity of the assembly, saw that they pointed to a different style of rhum to what I had been used to, one that was off the main road, yes, but with treasures heretofore unimagined.

I became a true agricolista in 2012, when an amazing 37 year old rhum from Guadeloupe was presented to me for a sampling in Berlin’s famed Rum Depot.  The Courcelles 1972 was a rhum simply off the scale (and even if there were reasons to believe it was not a true agricole, I persist in thinking of it as one), and it led to other discoveries in the years that followed – the clairins from Haiti, the Liberation series from Capovilla (the 2012 Integrale might be among the very best five year old rums ever made, by anyone, anywhere). Getting more impressed – or should that be obsessed? — with each new rhum I tried, I began actively seeking rhums from those distilleries from Martinique and Guadeloupe which have become more widely known and appreciated in the last years – J.M., HSE, Trois Rivieres, St. James, Depaz, Dillon, Bellevue, Damoiseau, J. Bally, Longueteau, Neisson are a few, the independent bottlers are gearing up big time, and I’m just getting started.

In short, from a sort of passing interest, agricoles have now taken their place — and not just in my estimation — among the best rums in the world.  There is variety and failure here, sure, just as they are in traditional (or industrial) rums, and perhaps it is not surprising that my journey mirrored that of the fans worldwide as well.  Nothing shows this more clearly than the popularity of the agricoles in the various European and other rum festivals, where they are commanding increasing attention and appreciation by the public.  It is no accident that the agricole world tour organized by Jerry Gitany and Benoit Bail – a sort of combination of masterclasses and grand exposition of many agricoles which toured the festival circuit in 2016 and now in 2017 – drew large crowds and many positive comments from the online community.

Agricoles are not a fashionable current trend, nor are they only now emerging from the shadows of obscurity: they have always been there, quietly and exactingly made.  What has changed is that over the last decade the explosion of social media and committed bloggers have brought them to a new, wider audience.  For the foreseeable future traditional molasses-based rums will continue to command the heights (and the wallets of the global purchasing public) – based on price and availability and all-round quality that’s unavoidable.  But just as any list of the classics of the film world would never be complete without Besson, Ozu, or Bergman (to name just three), no serious connoisseur or simple lover of rum would ever consider their journey to be complete without, at some point, sampling, appreciating and understanding the variety which agricoles add to the sum total of the universe of rum.

***

Opinion: Why Negative Reviews Matter

 6 Responses »
Jun 202017
 

Two comments I came across in my reading last week stuck in my mind and dovetailed into conversations I’ve had with others over many years.  The first was from a reviewing website which stated (paraphrased) that they don’t review what they have nothing good to say about.  The other, from a high-end watch-review site called Hodinkee, quoted a journalism professor as saying “If you’re going to write about something bad, it needs to be bad in an important way. Just being bad isn’t enough.”

Which got me thinking.  Why write negative reviews at all?  They’re often depressing experiences, however easily the words flow, and I always wonder when I have to write one, how some companies who claim to love the juice can make such bad swill at all.

Now, some sites I visit regularly rarely write serious (let alone scathing) criticisms of poor quality rums.  A few adhere to the above policy of if there’s nothing good to say, then not saying anything at all.  Serge Valentin, who scored one rum I liked 20 points wasn’t particularly negative in his review, just mentioned he didn’t like it (probably because he’s a true gentleman in such cases, and I’m not).  Others use temperate language that skates over any kind of negativity, and their disdain is muted.  Against such easy-going writers, others write clearly and angrily why they don’t like a particular rum (or aspects of it), as The Rum Howler did with the Appleton 30, for example, or Henrik of RumCorner did with the Don Papa rums, and for sure Wes of the Fat Rum Pirate has done the language of snark proud on many an occasion and caused me to nod in appreciation more than once, because his reasoning and preferences were clearly laid out (even if I disagreed).

Looking through all the reviews of rums I’ve written in the last seven-plus years, I note that I’ve published a few very savage critiques of rums that I felt were sub-par, many in the first few years. These days I pick more carefully and dogs rarely piss in my glass, so that may be part of why there are now less negative reviews than formerly. Still, while age has mellowed me, it’s not been by that much, and I still think the opinions expressed back then, and the ones I write now for stuff I don’t like, are relevant.  And there are many reasons for that, and why I wrote, and continued to write, as I did, and why I feel it’s necessary, even important, that we do so.

Firstly, it must be stated that I disagree with the quoted professor as applied to the subject of rums, because this is money being spent by me.  I’m not saying I’m a Ralph Nader style consumer advocate, but I do write for consumers, not for producers.  Having written a few hundred reviews, my concept of the site has tilted slightly away from merely writing a blog about rums I tried and enjoyed – though this aspect remains and always will — to writing about every rum I can lay hands on, as part of a desire to share the experience with those who share my passion. There are actually people who read these meandering essays, and importantly, some base buying decisions on the opinions I express. It implies an obligation on my part to write well and clearly where disappointments occur. Too, since this is my time and my money being expended (a lot of both, trust me), then if I find something that wastes either, I’m going to say so. The language may be tempered or furious, and I basically do it so you don’t have to.

Secondly, I believe that by not writing about mediocre or badly made products – and thereby assuming or hoping somebody else will – I’m essentially giving substandard table-tipple a free pass.  That’s a cop-out, and I am firmly opposed to this philosophy. We are bombarded every day with hysterically positive targeted mass-marketing, meant to entice us to buy the latest new “premium” juice, and without a skeptical and jaded eye, it all fades into a dronish mass of boring sameness, without anyone trusted enough to pay attention to writing a dissent.  Ignoring bad stuff is therefore not the solution. It has to be confronted, whether it is bad in a big or small way, and not just in commented Facebook posts that disappear in a week.  This is especially important when new rum drinkers are entering the fold and are casting around for more than the Diplomaticos, Bacardis, Don Papas or Krakens to which they are accustomed. As writers and opinion shapers, there is a duty of care upon knowledeable bloggers to say when a product doesn’t come up to snuff, and why. Our websites are not facebook pages, but repositories of information and opinion going back many years and are consulted regularly – so why shouldn’t we call out crap when it exists? It detracts from our street cred if we don’t, is what I’m thinking.

Thirdly, there’s the matter of comparability.  When there is a large data set of products about which nothing but good things are written, then there is no balance.  People have to know what is disliked (and why) so they can evaluate the stuff a writer does appreciate (and why).  In other words, an understanding by the reader of the writer’s preferences – it’s not enough to ignore or leave out the stuff one don’t like and expecting the reader to understand why, and where else will one gain that comprehension except by reading a negative review?  This is not to say that I think anyone who disagrees with me is a fool (as Sir Scrotimus evidently does about anyone who disses his pet favourites) – I’m just pointing out that agreements and disagreements over any writer’s opinions exist, and given the wide and varying spread of preferences in the rumworld, one should take encomiums, even my own, with a pinch of salt, with the criticisms as a useful counterweight.  Far too many buyers do no boots-on-the-ground, rum-in-the-glass research of their own and simply go with somebody else’s opinion5…and if that’s the case, that opinion had better be one that has at least a modicum of credibility.

Does a negative review have to be “bad in an important way”?  Not at all.  A bad rum is a bad rum, people pay money for it, whether five bucks or five hundred, and if we as writers don’t say so, the consumer is left with marketing hoopla, vague word of mouth, brief social media comments, and the click bait of ill-informed online journalists who know little about the subject they are writing about. One good example was the Downslope Distilling’s wine aged rum, where, when I did my research, I was appalled to find writers rhapsodizing about how it compared so well with top end Martinique rhums. I can only wonder how many bought the rum on that basis, and how many switched off rums immediately afterwards. Robert Parker, in his essay on “The Role of a Wine critic” stated that as far as he was concerned, good wines should be singled out for praise, and bad ones made to account for their mediocrity.  I feel the same way about rums, whether made by old and proud houses which have been in existence for centuries, or by new outfits who’re trying to break into the business with small batch production. That’s why I wrote a negative about Doorley’s XO and a positive about the Foursquare 2006, and can stand by each.

Also, who defines what “bad in a big way” is?  What is important and big to me is less important and much smaller to Joe Harilall down the street, or even a different reviewer.  Is it taste, additives, design, mouthfeel, price, availability, overinflated marketing? For instance, some love the Millonario XO for the very same sweetness others so passionately hate, so what one considers a catastrophe may to others (or me), be inconsequential.  To attempt to stratify negativity into stuff that matters and stuff that doesn’t is to attempt to rate what’s important to the larger public; and I lack that kind of omniscience, or arrogance.  Better to lay it all out in the open, present the facts, justify the opinion, express the annoyance, and let the inquiring reader or buyer or taster make up their own minds.  To me, that goes as much for a cheap ten dollar spiced rum as it does to a thirty year old rum costing two hundred.

The argument was made to me some years back that I should not embarrass or shoot down small producers who are now starting out, who need good word of mouth and positive feedback in order to grow and improve over time.  They are, after all, employing people, paying taxes and “doing their best, while you, buddy, what the hell are you doing?” (A 2019 article on The Ringer referenced a similar point) We should support them by buying their rums and providing cash flow which they will use to create better products over time. This line of reasoning is fallacious on several levels.  One, it’s my damned money, sweated for, hard earned; purchasing and then giving a pass mark to a substandard product is encouraging the maker to continue making the same product, since it’s clear nothing is wrong with it – so where exactly is the incentive to change coming from? Second, it’s a straightforward conflict of interest, because then I would be supporting not the consumer (on whose behalf I write, given I’m one myself), but the producer with what amounts to free and fake advertising. Thirdly, people aren’t fools and never more so than now where social media allows them to communicate dissatisfaction faster than ever before – my credibility would be shot to hell were I to say, for example, that Don Papa is one of the best rums ever made. Lastly, I think every producer has an obligation of their own not to rest on their laurels or produce low level crap that passes muster among the less-knowledgeable, but to go for the brass ring: if they tart up a neutral spirit with additives up to the rafters and try to sell it as a premium product for a high price, why on earth would I want to be a party to that? Or if they are really a small outfit and are making a poor-quality rum, why would I want to be less than honest and tell them where they are failing, when that’s the very impetus that might make them try harder, do better, push the envelope?

So, for laser-focused sites concentrating on a very small portion of their market like Hodinkee does, their editorial policy of writing only about good stuff can perhaps be justified.  From mine, where all rums in the world are the reviewing base (though they’ll never all be tried, alas), it’s simply untenable because I do my best to try everything that crosses my path.  I write about any and all of them.  And that means taking the good with the bad, the high end and the low end — in fact, I actively search out the younger and cheaper stuff (which is not always the same thing as “bad”) just to ensure I don’t get too caught up with the old and pricey stuff (which is not always the same thing as “good”).

It’s a personal belief of mine that the past decade of amazing, thoughtful writing by so many bloggers has engendered a relationship between the Writers and the Readers based on some level of trust. Therefore I contend that writing a negative review of a rum on which I spend my money, and one day, you might spend yours, is not lazy journalism or a fun way to let off some steam and bile with witty and eviscerating language, but an important aspect of the overall business of critical thinking and writing abut rums — and maintaining that trust.  My own feeling about duty of care towards the audience for which I write may be in a minority, but that feeling is rooted in a desire to provide the best information and opinion possible to an increasingly educated and curious public.  As such, I honestly don’t think that a negative review, in any form, if supported by the weight of evidence and clearly-expressed thought, should ever be considered as something to avoid.

Note: In this opinion piece I am merely expressing my reasoning in support of the thesis that published takedowns of poor quality product serve a useful purpose.  No negative connotation towards any of my fellow rum bloggers is meant or implied.

 

A Conversation with Luca: Velier, DDL and the Rare Collection

 1 Response »
Jan 272016
 
LUCA-900x411

Photo (c) 2013 congresodelron.com

Luca sounds tired.  The boss of Velier has just returned from Cape Verde off the coast of Senegal, where he was investigating small rum producers like in Haiti, has been caught up in the online discussions of the “Rare” issues, gave an interview to DuRhum (in French), and is now on his way to Morocco to attend some business and help shoot a documentary, before heading off to Cape Verde again.  I catch him in the back of a taxi, but he’s willing to talk a little.  Truthfully, when it comes to rums, the man is always ready to talk, and it’s never just a little.  Maybe that’s one reason he and I get along.

We discuss his interview with Cyril, but my own interest is much more focused, and gradually we get to what I want to talk about — DDL’s new Velier replacements, called the “Rare Collection” and I had opined that premature news of their introduction could have been handled better. Commercial considerations had prevented Luca from going on record before this, but apparently DDL have now given him their blessing, and he knows I want facts rather than speculations.

“I honestly wanted to tell you back in December, when your “Wasted Potential” article came out,” he says. “But we (DDL and myself) had agreed nothing would be said about the Rare Collection until the time for official press releases and introductions came around.  So I had to be quiet.”

“It happens,” I shrug, stifling my rush of petty irritation, since, like most people, I hate being wrong. “Why don’t you step me through the sequence of events regarding the issue?”

He settles into what I call his ‘presentation’ voice and talks nonstop for several minutes. Much to my surprise, the conception of these three rums goes back to January 2015, a full year ago.  Following the retirement of Yesu Persaud, the new CEO of DDL (Komal Samaroo) met with Luca and told him they were going to make ‘Gargano-style’ rums themselves following the full-proof, single-still, limited-edition principles, and as such the ability of Velier to bottle from DDL’s stocks would cease. “But I have to be clear,” Luca said. “Aside from the Skeldon, I never ever just walked into the warehouse and sampled at random and said I wanted this barrel or that barrel – I always and only got shown a limited selection by DDL and chose from them. And the vintages were getting younger all the time – I was hardly ever seeing stuff younger than the early 2000s any more.”

He’s admitted it before, and confirmed that initially the situation made him sad – it was something like seeing your own child grow up and move out of the house – but proud as well.  It showed that there was real potential by a major distiller to go in this direction, and that the full-proof concept was a viable commercial proposition. And it made sense for DDL to fold these rums into the larger el Dorado brand.

“Which would in any case always be associated with you,” I cut in. “For the foreseeable future, DDL’s full proofs will live in your shadow.”

“That’s not important,” he says earnestly. “It’s not about ego for me.  It’s about rum: authentic, honest, tropical aged, full proof rum. If DDL makes them, the rumworld is just as well served, because good rums are being made and sold.”

“One could argue that DDL let you take the risk and open the market and then moved in to capitalize on your success,” I point out.  I’m not on anyone’s side on this matter and I know business is business (it’s not personal, right?).  DDL didn’t get to be what it was without some very sharp people at the top, and while I am surprised it took this long for them to get in on the action, they are finally doing something.

I can almost see him shaking his head. “No. Because it’s their rum. I always insisted that DDL was mentioned on our labels – because I never felt it was ‘mine’…the name of Velier was only ever in the fine print at the back. I found a few diamonds, sure, but never pretended to own the mine, you know?  And I did the same for the Clairins.”  I think he’s being just a bit disingenuous here, personally, because one does not become a successful businessman without at least a little talent, aggro and braggadocio, and I suspect he knows perfectly well how synonymous his name has become with full proof rums in general, and Demeraras in particular.  But I let it pass, and he continues.

rare-mads-1

Photo (c) Mads Heitmann, Romhatten

“So by November of 2015 a lot of the work was done – the selection of the vintages, the label mockups.  Some samples went out to Europe –“

“Hang on,” I interrupt. “Exactly how much were you involved in all this?”

“Not at all.”

“Seriously?”

“No.  I did not select the barrels, I did not choose the vintages, I had nothing to do with advertising or label design. All I knew was that there would be an Enmore, a PM and a Versailles. By the time I received samples in December, it was all complete, and my only involvement was as the distributor for Italy.”

“Why are they only being sold only Europe?”

He hesitates a moment and I can sense him choosing his words with some care. “DDL is a Guyanese company,” he says at last. “And I think their information gathering and knowledge relate and are geared more to the North American market than the European one.   In North America it’s always been difficult to introduce new spirits into their states-segmented markets; and there has never been a really strong movement or tradition or knowledge of craft full-proofs.  It was only lately — with Samaroli and a few others becoming available, with online media like Facebook, with the reviews of English language rum bloggers — that the profile of such rums has increased and the potential more fully understood. But in Europe full-proofs have always sold well and been widely appreciated – indeed that has always been my primary market. So it made sense to start there.”

“With the potential to cross the Atlantic in the future?”

He shrugs.  “That’s for DDL to decide.  I hope so.”

“So we’re in December now. My own article on the missed opportunities of DDL came out around that time.”

“Yes, and a lot of people read it.  And I wanted to contact you to advise you that there were indeed new single-still rums coming out.  But my arrangement with DDL forbade that, so…”

I’m still a little miffed about the matter, but it’s water under the bridge and there’s nothing I can do except admit I got it wrong and move on.

“Why do you think DDL never responded to my article, or contacted me?”

“I have no idea.”

“Because it strikes me as strange that a major new bottling is being issued to the market, and there was no advance knowledge, no teasers or sly hints or even massive advertising to stimulate interest.”

“Well, they did send some samples to one of the Rumfests late in the year – I believe to Belgium – “

“And it received almost no publicity at all.”

“It was just for evaluation purposes, I think, not an advertising campaign to kick off the release. That was supposed to come in this year.”

Well, DDL is run by some smart people, and I suppose they have reasons for what they do and how they do it.  However,  I also believe they are underestimating the force-multiplying power of social media in a big way and maybe my mind just works differently since I’m a consumer as well as a writer, not a company marketing guru.

It occurs to me that with respect to communication, the premature release of information on the Rares must have caught everyone off guard. “So now we come to 2016,” I say, following that thought. “Your company somehow issued a webpage link to show these rums as becoming available, on January 13th.  Then it disappeared.  What happened?”

His embarrassment is palpable over the long distance telephone line. “That was a mistake,” he says ruefully.  “My graphics people worked so fast that the mockup and catalogue update were all done ahead of time.  They didn’t bother to check with me before posting it up, because they didn’t see anything special about a new item on the catalogue…we do, after all, add stuff constantly. I was in Cape Verde then, away from communications, and as soon as I came out and realized what had happened, I pulled the link immediately.  By then the news was all over the place.”

rare-mads-2

Photo (c) Mads Heitmann, Romhatten.

“And then?”

He lets out a deep breath. “The story went viral in the online rum community.  You know this, you followed it.”

Indeed I had. The story flashed around the world in less than a day. Wes at the FatRumPirate pushed out an article on the three rums on the 15th; a Danish blogger, Mads Heitmann, was able to get a complete set of the three bottles and reviewed the PM 1999 ln the 19th. And on top of that, he posted prices on his site and on Facebook, which went viral as fast as the original post from Velier’s site, and changed the entire direction of the story. The news was well and truly out there and could not be called back, which demonstrates what I mean about the power of Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and all the rest.

“But none of it had any more to do with me,” Luca argues. “I made my sincere apologies to DDL, explained to them that the initial, unpriced, posting was an error I tried to correct and not a leak of any kind.  I was waiting for a green light from them to make a public announcement and start publicizing.”

I suppose I can accept that, since all my notes and private discussions support it. “The story now started to get bigger than just you, because aside from the annoyance of the rum community about the releases just popping out of nowhere, which is a minor matter, they now had to contend with the pricing.  And that was no small thing – it was deemed exorbitant.”

“Your article didn’t help,” he says, half laughing, half accusing, referring to the essay I then wrote on January 20th, where I both complained about the introduction and expressed my hopes for their quality.

The conversation seems to have come around to the point where I’m the one answering questions instead of him; still, the point is valid. “I wasn’t trying to. At the time I was pretty put out. DDL should have read the tea leaves and done damage control immediately, gotten ahead of this story.  Back then, I solicited their input without response.  Okay, I’m small fry, a small blogger in a wide world of them, and it was an opinion piece, and yet I don’t think I was wrong; and this was now an issue affecting consumers all over the map – somebody should have stood up, posted online, gotten involved, calmed the waters.”

“I can’t speak to that,” he responds, with a note of finality.

The cost per bottle is of interest to us as consumers, so I persist. “What can you tell me about the price, on the record?”

PM 1999 Romhatten

Picture crop (c) Romhatten.dk

“I think the Danish numbers are high,” he admits. Privately, I had thought so too, and the KR6500+ (~€870) initially quoted on January 19th for all three bottles together has in fact been reduced in some online shops in Denmark.  Factor in the very high alcohol taxes in that country, and the base shop prices (before markups) to consumers are probably closer to expectations.  Still high, but relatively more affordable.

“The price in Italy will likely be around the level of equivalent Veliers, plus maybe 10-15%.  But I can’t say that for sure across Europe, because I sell only in Italy, to shops, not to individuals, and taxes and markups vary.  But they are not as expensive as you made out to be.”

Since I’ve argued that price is a function of brand awareness and exclusivity as well as production costs, I ask the question that’s been bugging me all this time.  “What’s the outturn of the range?”

“About 3,000 bottles for each expression is my guess. I’m not entirely sure of the exact numbers”

“And future issues?”

“I can’t say: I’m hearing that maybe an annual release of two bottlings, with about the same quantity as these.”  Which gives us all hope, I think.  Two is not as good as four or five, yet I don’t know that many full-proof rum lovers who would complain too much. At least they’re getting something.

The answers are getting shorter, and I sense we may be coming to the end of this conversation.  I only have one more. “You’re distributing the rums in Italy, and have had a long association with DDL.  You’re hardly a disinterested party. But as a simple lover of rum, putting aside any bias as much as you can, what do you think of the Rare Collection?”

There’s a smile in his voice as he notes the care of my phrasing. Or maybe he’s just thinking of these rums, his now-grown children, with fondness, and delights at an opportunity to speak of them. “I received samples in December 2015, and Daniele (Biondi) and I tried them together with five or six other Enmores, Port Mourants and Versailles rums we had from previous years.  And I am telling you, these are every bit as good.  They lost nothing, and preserve everything in my principles – tropically aged, no additives, single-still, cask strength.  The taste is amazingly good, and I think they are great additions to the full proof Demerara lineup.  It may be too early to tell, but if they continue to issue such rums in the future, these first editions may one day be worth quite a bit, the same way my first bottlings appreciated on the secondary markets.”

His tone has that evangelical fervor, the ring of utter personal conviction, that always characterizes his public presentations, and I gotta admit, the enthusiasm is infectious. He may or not be right, and others may disagree with his assessment in the months and years to come – but there’s no doubt he really believes they’re that good.  I’ve heard him speak that way about his other rums and rhums as well, and we know Velier’s track record, so perhaps we should just take it at face value.  Until shops actually start selling them and we start seeing reviews out there, not much more to be said.  I think we’re just about done here.

I scratch my head, look at my notes and questions, and realize an hour has gone by. Luca is now buying organic apples for his pretty wife through the taxi window, waiting to see if there’s anything else, but he’s covered it all for me, filled in most of the blanks.  What little information I have from DDL confirms most of this. So I give him my regards and thanks, we exchange notes on our movements around the world in 2016 and agree to see if we can meet up somewhere, have a relaxed session and maybe drink a sample or ten.  And, of course, as always, to talk rums.

***

Other notes

This was not a formal interview.  It was a discussion between the two of us, which is why I wrote it the way I did. From his perspective, it was to some extent also publicity, even damage control.  It’s no coincidence that this and Cyril’s more formal interview came out so close together.  Had I not written the two other essays about DDL already, I would not have bothered, but this wraps things up and substitutes such opinions and guesses as I have expressed, with more factual information.

The formal release of these rums for sale with all the marketing blitz, brass bands and bunting is supposed to be the end of January / early February  2016.

 

 

Opinion – The Flawed Intro of DDL’s “Rare Collection”

 No Responses »
Jan 202016
 

Rare Collection

“I hope for them that the rums are good,” muttered Cyril darkly, as a bunch of us exchanged comments on the newest DDL offerings.  We should have been happy, but we weren’t, not really.  Few of us rum watchers were.

Back in December 2015, I read the tea leaves spectacularly wrong and suggested that DDL would not be issuing single-still Velier-style full proofs any time soon.  A month later they did: an Enmore 1993, Versailles 2002 and PM 1999.  I’m actually kinda surprised nobody ragged my tail about my utter inability to forecast what might even have been a foregone conclusion after the age of Velier’s Demeraras abruptly ended. So yeah, I munching a big crow sandwich right now.

Still: if you’re not deep into rums, perhaps the way the blogosphere erupted at the news of DDL’s full-proof “Rare Collection” might have taken you aback. A link to an article on Velier’s site went viral almost immediately on the FB pages of la Confrere, Global Rum Club, Ministry of Rum; even some blogs made mention of it. People who loved Velier’s Demeraras, and who snapped up indie bottlings of Guyanese rums for ages, were happy as a Caner who fell into the vat, that DDL had finally started to “tek front.”

But as time went on, it became clear that there were several issues with the three bottlings named above, and all of them pointed to what I maintain are deficiencies in DDL’s strategic (or marketing) arm.  They misread the public sentiment and displayed no real current knowledge of what drives purchases of upscale “super-premium” rums.  They came at the wrong time, at the wrong price, with too little information and with the wrong fanfare.

Consider:

There was absolutely no forewarning at all (see footnote 1).  The picture and a brief notation in Italian went up on the Velier website (it has now disappeared) and that was it. And not even in time to make the Christmas season, where traditionally liquor sales peak.  As of this writing (January 20th) they are still not represented on El Dorado’s own website (although the deceased Mr. Robinson remains as a valued member of the team). DDL’s Facebook page has nothing, and questions I raised in private messages to them went unanswered.  Wow. Who on earth is in charge of getting the message out over there?

Along with the lack of warning, there was no mention of three key points that anyone selling a rum about which there is great anticipation should reasonably consider:

    1. Where were these to be distributed/sold?
    2. What would the price be?
    3. How many bottles were issued?

So essentially, until the Danes at Romhatten got their hands on a set and started writing about them (the PM received a 96 rating), few people knew where they could be had.  Most online stores still don’t carry them. It was later established they would not be sold in North America. And when it was understood that they averaged out at €290 a bottle in Denmark and Germany, whereas most independent bottlings of the same ages cost between a €100-200 on the primary market, the grumbles got louder.

Leaving out production costs and taxes, two things drive a bottle’s price way up – age (to some extent, though I have paid an arm and a leg for a seven year old from 1980), and more than that, rarity.  The two together create monsters like the Appleton 50 year old ($4500/bottle) for example.  One of the reasons a Velier Skeldon 1978 pushes prices past the thousand euro mark on the secondary market, is because there are so few out there.

However, DDL has not marketed the rums with indie-bottler-level pricing to titillate the market and grab initial market share and establish their own reputation for great full proof rums, separate from that of Velier; they gave no hint of how many bottles were issued; they advertised not at all, and to add insult to injury, are staying mum on the fora where they can engage their fans and the general public. All of this suggests that we are being asked to pay very high prices for an unproven product of uncertain commonality. If a hundred bottles had been issued that would be one thing….ten thousand would be quite another matter.

Consider this key point also – Luca was the recipient of a decade of goodwill for his full proof lines, aided and abetted by issuing rums that were very very good.  The man had an enviable track record, made almost no dogs, and had no dishonour or disrepute attached to his product (like DDL got when hydrometer tests began to show the inclusion of unreported sugar to their standard aged rums), and as a result, people were willing to buy his products blind, almost at any price, knowing they would get something that had a good chance of being an excellent drink and a worthwhile investment. And to his credit, Luca provided all the info up front, and never priced his rums to the point where this kind of essay became necessary.

DDL maybe felt that “if we issue it they will come.”  Given the explosion of interest in the new line, they were certainly correct there, and they themselves have many decades of goodwill of their own to tap into, deriving from the El Dorado line of rums (if not the Single Barrel expressions).  So I’m not saying DDL makes bad rums (quite the opposite in fact).  And believe me, I’m not pissy because I read the future wrong.  In fact, I have already bitten the bullet, put my money where my mouth is, and bought all three of these releases at those crazy prices.  I look forward — keenly — to reviewing them.  

What I am is annoyed with the stumbles of a company for which I have great regard, and which should know better. You don’t issue expensive rums after the holiday season, when purses are scrawny and credit card bills are due. The pricing and the lack of information are sure to piss off more serious rum lovers (and writers) who make purchasing decisions carefully.  One spends twenty bucks on a whim…not three hundred. And think about this also: when bloggers to whose opinions people attend say they will not buy these rums because they are too pricey or difficult to get (as several have already told me), their audience gets turned off too, and sales will inevitably diminish. If this happens and DDL believes there’s no market for full proofs, well, then, what do you think they will do? Cancel the entire line, maybe?

So yeah, I’m a little miffed with DDL’s new rums, much as I applaud the fact that they’re issued at all.  Only time will tell whether the price they’ve set is justified.  In the meantime, they’d better start providing us consumers with more information, not less.  And those rums had better be damned good. 

Notes

  1. Inadvertently, I’m sure, the Guyanese daily Stabroek News actually mentioned these three rums…back in November 4th, 2015. It is clearly stated in that article that they would only be sold in Europe.
  2. In January 2019, I wrote a recap of my opinions on the the Rares to that point, Releases I, II and III.

Opinion – The Wasted Potential of DDL’s Single Barrel Rums

 8 Responses »
Dec 152015
 

Single_Barrels

Introduction

In 2015 it became widely known that DDL was severing its relationship with Velier, and Luca Gargano would no longer have access to their warehouses. With that simple statement, the Age of Velier’s Demerara Rums appeared to have come to an end. In October of that same year, I reviewed the three single barrel expressions DDL issued back in 2007, and the notes in that write up were so voluminous that I split them apart to form the basis of this essay.

My thinking went like this: when you think of all the advantages DDL enjoys in the international marketplace – brand visibility and recognition, market penetration, and the great stills like PM and EHP, to name just three – you begin to realize just how curious those three rums actually are. And how much they say about the ethos and thrust of the company’s rum strategy (or lack thereof).

Velier showed that there was a real market for such full proof, limited edition rums.  You’d think that with the Scots and the Italians’ decades-long love affair with issuing PMs and Enmores and what have you, that this largely untapped market would be aggressively exploited by the company supplying the actual rum, but no, DDL has let Moon Imports, Samaroli, Velier, Rum Nation, Secret Treasures, Silver Seal, Duncan Taylor, and many others, garner the accolades and the money while they concentrate on the core El Dorado range.

Background

The ICBU, EHP and PM expressions remain the only still-specific rums DDL have ever created since the el Dorado line burst on the scene in 1992. DDL, as you would recall, have a number of pot and columnar stills – some of wood, some very old, all producing interesting variations of taste; the El Dorado line blends various proportions of output from these stills.  Craft bottlers who have bought barrels made from the stills have long issued limited expressions like PM, EHP, ICBU,  LBI, Blairmont, Versailles, Skeldon (Velier remains the acknowledged champion in this regard), and the speed at which they sell and the high prices they command on the secondary market demonstrates the enormous cachet they have.  

Yet DDL has, as of this writing (December 2015), refused to go further with developing this gaping omission in its lineup. They told me a few months ago that I should wait for great things coming out later in 2015, and then issued the “new” 15 year old rums with various finishes.  An evolutionary stopgap, I thought (then and now) — not a radical departure, not a revolution, not great, and not particularly new.  They still don’t have millesimes or annual releases or special stills’ rums of any consequence. The three amigos referenced above are also not marketed worth a damn to exhibit their singular nature, or to take advantage of their remarkable provenance or their accessible proof point. They are priced quite high for rums that don’t have an age statement – together, they cost me north of US$300, and not many people are going to buy such relatively pricey rums unless they are really into the subculture.  So here are some initial problems DDL created for themselves: the age, the year, the outturn, none of this is on the label. Why is the year of distillation and age and bottle count not shouted from the rooftops?  Age confers cachet in any spirit; single stills’, single years’ output even more so.  What’s the holdup with DDL providing such elementary information? Actually, what’s the holdup in creating an entire line of such remarkable rums?

Independent bottlers are the leaders in this field, and there’s enormous interest for these expressions. That single post of mine about the three rums clocked a reach of 400 on FB, and 20 likes on the site, in less than an hour (trust me, that’s fast and furious going for a niche audience such as we writers have).  So knowing that limited release rums sell fast to the cognoscenti, knowing the power of social media, and using my experience as a sort of quasi baseline, I ask again…what’s stopping DDL?

Problems

The very specificity of these rums may be their undoing in the wider rum world, because it is connoisseurs and avid fans and rabid collectors who are most likely to buy them, appreciate them, and understand the divergent/unusual taste profiles, which are quite different from the more commonly available (and best-selling) El Dorados like the 5, 8, 12, 15, 21 and 25 year old. To illustrate further, how many casual rum drinkers even know there are multiple stills at Diamond, and can can name more than the PM or EHP?  One could taste the three single barrel rums, and immediately realize that they certainly aren’t standard sippers or the usual cocktail fodder — which is something of  double edged sword for rum makers, who like to be different….but not too different.

Too, it’s possible that seeing the niche interest these expressions developed over the years which Velier then expanded into a worldwide phenomenon, that the boys on the Top Floor were scared dickless and shut that sucker down fast, lest it bite into profits of more dependable rums….rather than seeing it as an opportunity. I have a feeling relative margins of various products were and are involved here.

Then there’s hard consumer cash: such DDL-made single barrel expressions are by their very nature more expensive and get more so as we climb the age ladder, but there’s another reason they cost so much – DDL never made more, or issued them in great quantity (it’s unknown what the year of the batch is, and I’m not even sure how many were made, let alone whether DDL ever issued more beyond that 2007 year, or ever will again).  

Another reason to scratch my head wondering what they’re thinking.  Are they ignoring the signs of rums’ expanding popularity and the increasing sophistication of the drinking classes, so evident all around them? Or are they simply oblivious? 

General economic musings

Now I know something about how products in a manufacturing environment are priced.  There’s all the input costs of raw materials, plus labour charges, storage costs, prep costs and marketing and distribution and shipping (using various bases of allocation for overheads), to come up with a unit production cost (i.e., what it cost to make each individual bottle).  Depending on the sophistication of the accounting / costing system and the methodology employed, the profit margin is fixed and the rum is released to the market. The brokers, intermediaries, governments, bulk buyers and stores will add fees and markups and taxes to the base selling price, and the result is the €80 to €100 (give or take) which the consumer pays for a middle aged, single barrel expression with 1000 bottles or so issued by an independent bottler. So perhaps this is a lot easier for an independent operation which buys rums from brokers, than it is for a vertically integrated multinational like DDL which has canefields, sugar factories, distillation apparatus, a huge labour force and a supply chain network that is large and far-flung.   

Now, that means the entire revenue stream from such a specific, limited rum is likely to be €100,000 or less…does anyone believe that it “only” costs that amount to shepherd a rum for ten years through all its stages for a company that is as vertically integrated from cane to cork, as DDL?  Not a chance.  Smaller bottlers have it easier since they buy one small set of already-aged barrels at a time, low infrastructure costs, and have a skeleton staff; and this is both their advantage and disadvantage because they lose economies of scale while having a limited output in a barrel that may not succeed after ageing (and lose a lot to the angels in the process), while at the same time being able to pick exactly the barrels they want.

But DDL doesn’t have this issue – they have the infrastructure to age much more than just a few barrels at a time, and there are opportunities for a millesime approach, yearly issues, and yes, single-still aged output from multiple barrels, totalling many thousands of bottles.  The economics favour DDL’s daring to go in this direction, I think, especially at higher levels of output of which they are clearly capable. (Even some limited test marketing would make sense, I think…to the USA, I would suggest, because you wouldn’t believe the volume of wistful emails I get from that country, asking me where I got mine and how can they get some?)

Still, more subjective matters do start to come into play.  For new products without a purchasing history behind them and issued in limited quantities, it’s a risk, a big one, to invest a decade or more in ageing, take the hit from the angels and losses on barrels that don’t work after all that…then bottle perhaps 15% of the original volume, price high and hope sales will follow. Distributors and shops will also not want to give shelf space or prominence to stuff they are unsure will move in volume. Also, new products can cut into the sales of the old dependables upon which all cash flow is based (and which may subsidize loss leaders like the single barrels, which can be uneconomical at first).

But it is my contention that DDL doesn’t need to do this: the path has already been blazed by the independent bottlers; and DDL / El Dorado (and the famed stills) is one of the more recognized, widely sold brands in the rum universe.  Velier has shown the model can succeed. We know for a fact that a ten year old Demerara rum from a single still (at any strength between 45-65%) can reasonably sell for €100 / US$120 and maybe even more.  And the prices escalate with both age and exclusivity, using existing distribution channels and marketing strategies already in place. DDL has spent decades building up its brand and distribution, so these are sunk costs that work to the advantage of selling more, rather than less, of the single-still expressions, even if issued 40% and not cask strength. 

el_dorado_bottlerange

Photo copyright lovedrinks.com

What’s on DDL’s strategic mind?

What this leaves us with is a number (depressing) conjectures about DDL’s short and medium term strategy.

  1. The cash cows of the aged rums which blend the stills’ outputs will continue
  2. Experiments with different cask finishes will gather some steam, concentrating, in my opinion, on the El Dorados 12, 15 and 21 years old (I doubt the 25 year old will be tampered with unless it is to make it stronger).
  3. Yes, spiced rums will continue, maybe even be expanded.  They sell briskly, much to the annoyance of many purists.
  4. The single barrel, still-specific rums may be re-started, but most of the wooden-still outputs will continue to be favoured for producing the 8, 12, 15, 21 and 25 year old blends, and not for anything more specialized.
  5. DDL will make no sudden moves into new (rum) product lines.  The company simply does not seem to be structured to allow experimental development.  That’s why agile little companies like Compagnie des Indies can survive and even make money….using DDL’s rums.

In other words, we can expect the status quo to continue for quite some time. They shut Velier out, but gave us nothing to replace it.

Of course, this is all me being pissy.  I know some of the guys over there, spent many years in Guyana, love the place, like their rums.  It annoys me no end that they almost never respond to emails, provide little beyond marketing materials when they do, have on their website a man gone to the rumshop in the sky many moons ago, and just continue doing the same old thing year after year: as I said, the new finishes on the 15 year old do not really impress me, though I do want to try them (I’m a reviewer after all). 

I think this indifference to smaller market segments is a mistake, however. Because three major trends are gathering a serious head of steam in our world:

  1. Aged scotch is rising in price faster than people can keep up; and as the industry frantically tries to sell NAS whisky to make up for the shortfall of suitably aged reserves, malt-lovers will move more and more to craft rums, especially where profiles are similar. Increasing sales of craft rums and the emergence of more and more small rum-producing companies suggests this trend is well underway, so where is DDL’s response? (Observe the farsightedness of Richard Seale partnering up with Velier in the 2015 release season, a position DDL could have had for the asking given their past association with Luca Gargano)
  2. In about five years, as rum penetrates a critical mass of drinkers who demand unadulterated, cask strength, limited edition, well made products, DDL will likely have revisit the decision to divert its stock to more craft-based offerings and reduce the blends (either that or increase output across the board, and with sugar’s woes in Guyana, that might be problematic…or another opportunity) .  Whether they have sufficient aged rums available at that point to both satisfy the blended-aged market, and something more exclusive, only they can know.  But sooner or later, they will have to start.
  3. The USA cannot keep on subsidizing Bacardi and their ilk forever.  Too many US citizens are already squawking all over social media about how the best rums are never to be found in their location and when they are, the price differential is too great between those and the subsidized rums.  Once they start agitating for reform of subsidies and tax breaks, other countries take the matter to the WTO, and fairer tax regimens and tariffs are passed – and sooner or later this will happen – then craft rums will become more competitive, and the US market will explode.  DDL had better be ready to increase its market share there when this happens. If all they have is the same old menu and live off past glories, then they will fall behind other, nimbler, smarter companies with a more diversified (or focussed) portfolio.

Summing up.

The three single barrel expressions of DDL’s impressive stable point to more serious structural deficiencies of their medium term planning with respect to rums.  They are too weak, too few, and marketed too poorly in a time of an increasingly educated, knowledgeable drinking class. I’m not saying independent bottlers’ craft expressions are the wave of the future – but I do contend that they will get a larger and larger slice of the market in the years to come, and it seems that DDL is poorly positioned to take advantage of this.  If I was on their team, the first thing I’d do is stop selling bulk rum from the wooden stills to anyone, hoard it all, and start issuing high proof, low volume, carefully selected, suitably aged rums in very limited, exclusive markets. 

But nothing I’ve read and heard and seen suggests this is on DDL’s planning horizon. There is a subtle sense of complacency involved here, along the lines of “We have the stills, we have the sugar cane, we have the storage space, and tons of old rums.  We can adapt whenever we chose.”

Maybe.  It will probably be neither so easy or quite so quick.  A small outfit dealing in a few barrels at a time, sure.  A monolith like DDL?  One can only wonder.  And, in the case of me and my rum-chum friends, hope a little.

Update January 2016

This article was overtaken by events, of course.  In January 2016, DDL announced that they would indeed issue three cask-strength expressions, an Enmore, a PM and a Versailles.  No word on issue volumes.  The youngest would be about ten years old and for the moment sold only in Europe.  So the timing of my essay, as well as my conclusions, really sucked…too bad.  Still, I’d rather be wrong and get some good rums to buy, rather and be right and get none. I hope this is a forerunner of many aged rums to come from DDL, and that they live up to the high standard Luca set.

Opinion: In Defense of Rum Bloggers

 8 Responses »
Aug 252015
 

Bloggers 1

Bloggers 2

 

“I don’t read a lot of blogs because, well, most of them are written by people who aren’t qualified to piss in the ocean,” remarked Ed Hamilton on his blog The Ministry of Rum on July 7th 2015.  To say I was surprised at such a blanket indictment of the majority of the rum blogging community would be an understatement.  He’s not the only one to make such a statement in the recent past: when I wrote a five part series on how to start reviewing rums earlier this year, in an effort to provide some advice on new bloggers who often cease operation after a short while, I got a snarling response from another writer, who suggested that there are too many incompetents writing as it is (myself among them) and more should not be encouraged.

I simply don’t understand this attitude.  It originates from persons who themselves write a lot, opiniate even more, and have a large body of words on their sites (which obviously pass muster by their own definitions of “qualified”), yet they seem to feel that almost all other websites, discussions, opinions and reviews, are a waste of internet space.  I can sort of understand Sir Scrotimus Maximus in Retirement Land, since he despises everyone (and spews a vomitus of condescending and negative opinions just about every day), but Mr. Hamilton, for whom I have a great deal of respect, is a more puzzling enigma.  Especially given his well-known dedication to rum, and the oft expressed moan abut rum not having enough visibility and fighting an uphill battle against other more established tipples.

To make my own position clear: I myself have nothing but distaste for short, ignorant, non-knowledgable click-bait written by writers for online spirits magazines (see here, here, here, here and here for some examples).  Too often they display an abysmal ignorance of rums in general, and make lists of rums that would be amusing if they weren’t so uninspiring.  But I don’t think this is what Sir Scrotimus or Mr. Hamilton were referring to.  Nor do I believe that they are talking about news stories.  Or cocktail sites and writers for them. No, when they refer to monkey mutterings and blogs, they are talking about reviewers.  And since I’m one of them, I think I’ll take up cudgels on behalf of myself and others in my field.

To begin with, who qualifies as a “good” writer?  For my money, this would be someone who writes with prose that engages the reader; who has a good understanding of the industry; who crafts decent tasting notes on the rums that are tried; expresses an informed opinion; has a body of rums to refer to, and self-evidently is involved in not only increasing his own knowledge but that of his readers.

Are there truly none of such writers around? Sure there are.  Henrik from Denmark keeps getting better all the time and that’s in his second language; Marco Freyr from Barrel Aged Mind in Germany is a historian par excellence with enormously detailed articles on the rums he tries; Josh Miller of Inuakena writes well, tastes well and goes far afield whenever it pleases him; Cyril from duRhum fills in with great reviews of more obscure fare, especially agricoles; Steve James of Rum Diaries writes great reviews in depth; The Fat Rum Pirate writes accessible notes for the common man with lots of opinions and off-hand facts, primarily for the UK crowd, and lovingly tends to the low-end and mid-range.  I enjoy Laurent’s work on Les Rhums de l’homme à la Poussette. Dave Russell of the Rum Gallery is a long running stalwart, and while Chip and I happily trade emails back and forth about our differences in opinion, the man does put out a welter of rum reviews that North Americans in particular take seriously.

Why do we need more of such people?

Because, dear reader, there still aren’t enough. Not really.  Excluding cocktail blogs which speak to rum as a secondary enterprise, there are less than twenty focused rum reviewing sites in the whole world. I can’t think of many which are run on a commercial basis.  And yet we constantly complain about rum taking second place to whisky in the minds of the tippling class, not having exposure, people not “getting” the variety it represents.  Well, having more writers who raise the profile would therefore be a good thing, wouldn’t it?

It is online writers like Johnny, Cyril, Dave and Wes who are spearheading the fight against improper labeling, undisclosed sugar and additives and outright deceptive marketing practices. Would less reviewers have the same effect? Not at all.  Because then we’d just be left with the polarizing negativisms of Sir Scrotimus.

We also need more writers because they are the ones who call attention to the rums of the world in a time of declining advertising budgets and quality magazine writing about rums. Yes there’s the RumPorter, and yes there’s Got Rum…but there are scores of such publications on whisky or wine, so we’re supposed to be happy with a mere handful  on our tipple of choice? Hell no.  We need dozens, not just a couple. Reviewers, bloggers and online writers fill this void. You can disagree with what they write, but at least they’re out there providing information. Why would having fewer somehow be seen as better?

Even assuming the statements of these two gentlemen were correct (and I dispute that) they both ignore the obvious question: where are the “qualified writers,” if the ones I mentioned above aren’t representative? No please, educate me.  Who are they?  For whom do they write?  What are their blogs?  Are they active and engaged in the rumworld? Are they the few book authors who exist? To toss out generalized comments about the chattering underclass who supposedly don’t know what they’re doing seems grossly unfair to me, without listing them and their opposite numbers who are worth reading.  If you are going to use your platform to diss someone, by all means provide a list of those who do fit your personal criteria.  More than two, please, and in the same post as your takedown, not elsewhere on your site. Negatives are one thing, but if you have no positives to contribute then your argument lacks substance. More, there’s a puritan ethos of understated censorship wafting through those two comments I find disturbing…y’know, Write what I like, or you’re an idiot.

I think that part of the issue is that such qualified reviewers are somehow expected to spring to life overnight like Athena from Zeus’s brow, and wow us with their Kiplingesque prose, incredible depth of knowledge and scintillating wit, right out of the gate.  But in a world where nobody (well, almost nobody) gets paid for writing about rum  – and to my mind the greater proportion of rum writers write for love, not money – I think it says a lot for the dedication  and devotion of rum aficionados who are also reviewers that they do as much as they do for free.  This is somehow a bad thing?

So it’s my considered opinion that the two comments above do the writing community a disservice.  Yes there is an unmet need for more writers who provide their own perspective and writing style and knowledge. Yes we could use some more professional authors who do more than just blog about cocktails and the tiki culture.  We could have more reference materials and other information out there that raises the bar for the expected knowledge of a rum blogger. We need that kind of talent for those who write about rums specifically, not as an afterthought or a sideshow.  And the reviewers and bloggers that are so casually dismissed, are the ones that provide, as best they can, this level of commitment and growing expertise.  Because nobody else is.

In summary, it’s a shame that opinion makers and commentators like these two, instead of trying to raise the bar with mentorship and good advice for the new blood and existing writers, resort to such unfortunate takedowns.  But you know, Mr. Hamilton called it right: he doesn’t read those he doesn’t like.  Maybe there’s a word of wisdom for us all in that.

How to Start Reviewing Rums – Part 5

 2 Responses »
Mar 062015
 

Part 5

Part 5 – Keeping things going

So let’s sum up the preceding four parts.[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4]

  1. Understand what you’re getting into, and why you’re doing it
  2. Go with a comfortable writing style that suits you
  3. Design a nice look to your site
  4. Know how to taste, score, note and write (and practice a lot)
  5. Know your rums and the larger world around them
  6. Sample around extensively (safely!!! I am not advocating rampant boozing)
  7. Be courteous
  8. Be consistent

If you’ve made it to fifty or more reviews, passed a year of writing, then it’s reasonable to assume this is no longer a mere hobby, but something a shade more serious.  Still, as time and rums pass by, interest flags and it’s perhaps no longer as much fun as it used to be…more like work. God, do I have to do another one of these? Been dere, dun dat.

The most common comments I hear from other bloggers, and often experienced myself, are these:

(a)    Site hits are too few and too fickle, showing massive variations

The more you write and the more you are active online, the more hits come your way.  Of course, this presupposes some level of quality in your work, and a network of contacts who recommend your site and people who share taste, and your way of expressing it. The CocktailWonk suggested finding one’s niche in an increasingly crowded writers’ market, which is a good idea – writing in a way, and about subjects, which no-one else is.

However, never underestimate the power of online “boosting” either. Now, if your perspective is one of “If I build it they will come” and you’re writing to speak of your experiences, your journey, without reference to how many others see what you’ve done…then letting your site sit there, idling gently, building word of mouth, is just as good as any other.

Online promotion is for people who can’t wait, are impatient to get visibility, and understand the hits multiplier that social networks enable. When you put something up, distribute and share on twitter, G+, post on the Rum forum on reddit, use Facebook to like and share, post to StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Tumblr…these things can – in the short term at least – double and triple your site hits. The flip side is some people will inevitably see it as crass, whatever that means given the reputation of the drink we’re discussing.

(b)   Comments are few and far apart

Really, this is irrelevant. People comment when they feel like. You can certainly try to be controversial, write opinion pieces seeking engagement, create a forum for comments like the Ministry of Rum or the RumProject, be active on the FB fora, but here again, it simply takes time to get the volume.

(c)    The damn thing is too expensive

Good point.  It is pricey.  Go cheaper and build “review volume”, and remember this – you will never be able to taste them all, and there will always be an old monster you really wanted that will never be yours. At the forefront, keep in mind why you are here – if your goals have changed and this is not worth the cash, shutter the house and walk away. As a balm, I also refer you to my rather humorous take on affording your favourite tipple, which I name the “El Dorado Problem”, here.

(d)   It takes too much of my time

It can be done if you ration your time appropriately. And of course, if your commitment and persistence is there. Just for the record: I have a full time job in a foreign country; a family that has demands on my time; other interests and hobbies; a social life (such as it is); I’m studying for a professional accreditation; I’m learning another language.  I balance all this with my writing. If a lazy sod like me can do all this, there should be no reason why you can’t.

(e)   Bottles or samples acquisition sucks.  I’ve cleaned out all locals shops and bars

Create a sample-exchange network if you can (this suggests you have something someone wants and local postage laws permit it); interface with distilleries or brand reps; buy abroad and ship to yourself. Aggressive industry solicitation (“I’d like to review your products on my site…”) will work, and for sure, good relations with store owners is enormously useful – they often allow you to try heels for nothing, (like Dirk Becker’s store in Berlin, and Andrew Ferguson in Calgary always did for me, bless ‘em.)

(f)     People cannot be made to have an interest in rum no matter the effort

This is your job to fix. Consider yourself a rum ambassador.  Spread the gospel.  Those that don’t like rums are sadly misguided lambs in need of a shepherd to lead them to the cool green grass of the True Faith.

But all that aside, there are many ways to keep your interest from fading, and some of the things you can do at various times are:

1. Attend as many tastings or festivals as you can, and then write about them. Hell, run your own. At the very least you will meet people and get tasting notes for expensive rums you might not otherwise be able to afford or find.

2. Read the blogs from around the world; European ones often speak to rare and very old craft rums about which we can only dream.  Google translate does a decent job for those who are not multi-lingual, which is most of us.

3. Comment on others’ blogs (but really, do this if you have something to say, not just because you want to generate hits for yourself), join the Facebook page, start your own…make friends, even if only online.

4. Send and/or share samples on your own cognizance, of rums which you have that others might not. I’ve given away more than half of the Skeldon 1973, for example, and my PM 1980 is long gone down the gullets of the Liquorature Collective, including (to my utter delight) the Rum-despising Maltmonster and his Hippie acolyte.

5. Start a rum club of your own with like minded souls.

I’ve been doing this since 2009, and my interest is maintained by new rums, new friends, correspondents, festivals, and being part of something I feel is of worth.  I find that staying in touch generates reciprocal goodwill and increases my engagement with the larger community. And the writing, of course, keeps me busy too.  At the end, it comes down to you and what you are prepared  to do, and how seriously, or long term, you view the activity. Like any long term endeavour, you should love what you do, know what you’re about, take pride in it, and be professional.  Have a sense of humour about it all, and keep the wheels turning.   It can, with some effort, be a pastime or vocation that stretches into decades.

Hopefully these comments will give a sense of what it takes to remain that way.

***

Thanks and a big hat tip for helping me out with parts of, and background to, this essay go to:

  • Henrik Kristoffersen of RumCorner for massive investment of time and effort to comment and make this better. I stole some of his remarks.
  • TheFatRumPirate for portions of his starter-rum list
  • Josh Miller of Inuakena for a read through and encouragement.
  • All the online rum writers who over the years have candidly discussed their experiences with running a blog.
  • The Little ‘Caner, nine-year-old scion of Clan ‘Caner, who helped me with the cartoons, lent me his pencils (“Colour inside the lines, Dad!”); and the beautiful, long-suffering  Mrs. Caner, who loves me still, even if I spend too many evenings writing stuff like this.

 

 

 

How to Start Reviewing Rums – Part 4

 No Responses »
Mar 052015
 

 

Part 4

 

Part 4 – Which rums to start with

In conceptual and generalized terms, this series has so far covered the startup philosophy, the website and postings, and added pointers on sampling and reviewing.  Today I move into more familiar territory.

I have a feeling quite a few people were waiting for this post.  Alas, no, this isn’t entirely what you thought it would be, because making such a list is a tricky, even controversial, subject to opinions varying as widely as the Pacific.

I’d suggest that you begin with what’s available to you easily and at a relatively low cost – those that open a new site not unnaturally tend to begin with what’s already in the cabinet, for example, and it seems that one really great rum is usually what kickstarts the inspiration process.  Now yes, this will relegate you to reviewing the old standby rums everyone knows about and which have been written on by many before you…but it also provides you with a solid base from which to start, good writing experience, and a sense of the their relative characteristics, one to the other. More, if you begin from the low end then you’ll appreciate better, older rums more as and when they cross your path – you have a good basis for comparison.  And you can calibrate better – by seeing what others have written on the same rum, you see what you may have missed (or what they have), and gain additional perspective and confidence. It helps even more with rare or limited editions that have no precedent: try finding reviews of the SMWS rum bottlings, for example…what on earth can they reasonably be compared to, if you have ‘em right off the bat?

What this is about then, is getting a firm grounding in the core rums of the world and what they taste like, and how they differ: El Dorado, Flor de Cana, Appleton, Mount Gay, FourSquare, Havana Club, Bacardi (yes, Bacardi), Clemente, Abuelo, Goslings, Diplomatico, Barbancourt, St. James, as well as standard mixers like Lamb’s, Meyer’s, Trader Vic’s, and so on (this listing is merely illustrative).  It also introduces you to the various styles upon which some place enormous emphasis – Demerara, Jamaican, Latin/Spanish/Cuban, Bajan, Agricoles and what have you (the FatRumPirate has a good section on his website devoted to this kind of stratification). If the subject and the act of reviewing is at all important to you, you kinda have to know this stuff. Rum 101, folks. You cannot be a reviewer with street cred, demanding respect, if you don’t have the basics down.

I thought long and hard before deciding against providing  detailed list of rums one could begin with because no matter how extensive, I’ll either leave something out, or include one that others disagree with; and have compromised by providing a list of companies making rums that are well known, mostly available, reasonably well-regarded (at least they’re not hated) and fairly representative.  It’s up to you to decide what your palate and your wallet can stand, and which ones in the value chain to get.

So, the rums made by the companies below are not a listing of rums with which to start your reviewing life, or a rum bar – although you could do worse –  simply ones that gives a reasonably broad base of styles and makes.  They therefore comprise a key component of a reviewer’s mental arsenal for evaluating rums. (Note I am deliberately leaving out specific rums from the eastern hemisphere, and independent bottlers. This is not to imply that they are somehow less, however.)

  • Bacardi (no matter what you think of them, they make decent rums)
  • Angostura (Trinidad)
  • El Dorado (Guyana)
  • Appleton (Jamaica)
  • Flor de Caña (Nicaragua)
  • Mount Gay (Barbados)
  • R.L.Seale / 4-Square (Barbados)
  • Havana Club (Cuba)
  • Matusalem (Dominican Republic)
  • Diplomatico (Venezuela)
  • Brugal, Barcelo and Bermudez (Dominican Republic)
  • Travellers (Belize)
  • Goslings (Bermuda)
  • Cockspur (Barbados)
  • Pusser’s (BVI)
  • Abuelo (Panama)
  • Agricoles – Barbancourt, St James, Neisson, HSE, Karukera, J. Bally, Clemente, Karukera, are examples…there are many others
  • Soleras like Zafra, Dictador, Zacapa, Santa Teresa
  • Spiced Rums like Captain Morgan, Sailor Jerry’s, Kraken and so on
  • Overpoofs like the various 151 rums made by Appleton, Bacardi, Lemon Hart et al
  • Non Caribbean rums from anywhere (Australia, Thailand, India, Phillipines, Fiji, etc), even if they may not strictly be rums according to general accepted convention. The constant arguments of what constitutes a “true” rum is unlikely to be solved anytime soon, so you should also understand why the Phillipine Tanduay, Czech Tuzemak or Thai Mekhong raise the blood pressure of the puritans.

I tell all people asking me about what to begin with, to start the journey with one or two fantastic examples to show what rum can be, but then concentrate on writing initially about the low end of the market and work up. And I would strongly advise the prospective reviewer against going for, and writing about, the top end, oldest, most prestigious and/or most expensive rums right away, or those from independent bottlers who make rums that are often off the scale.  Even if you can afford them or your friends press them upon you, put them away for analysis and review later.  I know this sounds totally bat-bleep-crazy, but until you get your basics down and understand the rank and file of commercially available commonality, know your own tastes and how good sub-ten-year-olds can be, you will not be able to properly rate, appreciate or score a premium (or conversely, you may score it too enthusiastically).

Worse, it will colour all your perceptions of the good and commonly available rums forever, and this will be reflected in your writing. Buying top-end aged rums from their makers, or sourcing quality hooch from outfits like Rum Nation, Cadenhead, AD Rattray, Samaroli, Silver Seal or Velier and skipping entry-level grog altogether, is something of a one-way bridge; in comparison, more affordable and younger offerings will seem less, when in fact they really aren’t, just different, and are often good markers of their styles. From my own experience, I can freely admit that I should never have bought the Appleton 30 so quickly; or, much as I have always loved it, the English Harbour 1981.

Tomorrow – Keeping things going, and a wrap up

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