Goslings Family Reserve Old Rum (Rye Cask)(Bermuda) – Review

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Oct 012025
 

The Family Reserve Old Rum released by Gosling’s is, aside from the single barrel “Papa Seal” edition, probably their top end, limited edition, premium rum, and depending on where you are, costs around CAN$80-100. I’m not sure how regularly they come out, since this is not mentioned on the bottle labels or the website, but based on secondary sources, I think it’s an annual thing. The original release, which was first seen in the early 2000s and is not a seriously limited anything, is the most commonly seen.

But in 2024, Gosling’s decided to put out something a bit different: the same Old FR Rum… aged for a further three years in Rye casks. That at least showed they were thinking a little outside the box and wanted to explore different variations of the standard line, though for my money I think they could have beefed it up a bit and not just stuck with the same old standard strength: after all, if you are releasing something more upscale, the people who have the coin to afford it are likely to have more experience with spirits that are of a higher proof anyway, so what’s the issue?

Be that as it may, beyond the secondary maturation, the rum conforms to all the markers of the original: 40% ABV, a molasses-based blend, ex-bourbon ageing for the first 16-19 years, probably a pot-column still mashup. I’ve already commented on this lack of disclosure regarding production details, so won’t rehash my remarks here yet again.

So, what’s it like? Well, all in all, not bad. The extra ageing makes itself felt on the nose with some light sweetness, nougat, almonds, unsweetened chocolate and coffee grounds, with a nice touch of dried prunes and raisins. There’s a vague mint and briny note here that’s probably the rye cask influence, plus vanilla and caramel and even an overripe apple or two to mix things up. 

It’s as warm and and easy on the palate as the nose – there is no aggressiveness here. That’s both a good and a bad thing, depending on your preferences, but I will say it’s really pleasant. The tastes hearken to light citrus (tangerines, ruby grapefruit), with additional notes of bubble gum, black pepper, vanilla, cinnamon, toffee, honey, oak, wet coffee grounds. The finish is consistent with the Original FR edition, which is to say, nothing special, repeating all the notes we’ve already seen on the nose and the palate – dried fruits, honey, pepper, slight citrus, vanilla and some sweet..

Some online reviews remark on the impact that the rye ageing imparts – I don’t get much of that myself, however, and the improvement of the profile it displays could just as easily come from better barrel management and additional ageing as the whisky influence. Overall, it’s a good rum for those who swim in the shallow waters of living room strength and a little extra complexity, without venturing out past the reef into the deeper trenches of shark territory. 

I was not an enthusiastic fan of the “straight” Family Reserve – I might have been, earlier in my rum journey – here, this one succeeds in a way that the Original doesn’t. It displays, for want of a better word, just a shade more character. It tastes pretty good and noses well, it showcases some more zip and pep which is welcome, and if it fails on the counts of disclosure and on proof point, well, I can’t say I didn’t have a good time drinking it without guardrails or a life vest… or a shark cage. 

Maybe that’s a recommendation after all.

(#1131)(83/100) ⭐⭐⭐½

Company background (from Review #1129)

Gosling’s hails from Bermuda, which is a British Overseas Territory, Britain’s oldest: the company is closely identified with the island and is, aside from tourism and some manufacturing, a mainstay of Bermuda’s non-financial-services economy. 

The Gosling enterprise has been in business on Bermuda since 1806, when the ship’s charter for business in the USA expired while on the high seas. So instead of landing in Virginia, James Gosling, the son of a wine and spirits merchant in England, went ashore in St. George’s instead, and set up shop there with his brother, trading in spirits he had brought with him. Rum blending from imported distillates began in 1860, with the Old Rum brand launching three years later. The company’s rums were originally sold directly from barrels to customers who brought their own bottles, a practise that continued until the Great War; however, Goslings’ rums’ popularity and sales took off when they began salvaging used champagne bottles from the British navy’s officer’s mess, filling those with rum and sealing them with black wax.

The Old Rum was renamed the Black Seal, with the now-famous seal logo designed and coming into use in 1948: the champagne bottles are rarer now, used only for the Family Reserve line, but the logo has remained in use ever since. It is the company’s flagship brand and goes hand in glove with their signature cocktail “The Dark ‘n’ Stormy, which was developed in the mid 1960s and trademarked in 1980 (and rigorously enforced).

Other notes

  • Video recap link
  • The bottle number is 11595/24 – my conjecture is that the last two digits represent the year of release.
  • Even though the rum is titled as having a Rye “finish”, my personal opinion is that any secondary ageing exceeding one year is no longer a finish but a secondary maturation.

 

Goslings Family Reserve Old Rum (Bermuda) – Review

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Sep 292025
 

In the current lineup from Goslings, the Bermuda-based blenders and bottlers (as far as I know they are not distilling rums), there are four different quasi-premium products: the “Spirited Seas” 44% ABV rum which is partially matured on the high seas, the “Papa Seal” single barrel aged rum at 41.5%, and two variations of the “Family Reserve Old Rum” at 40%, one of which we will look at today.

In the last century or before it may really have been the practise for estates and distilleries – many owned privately – to hold back some exceptional barrels to bottle for the lords of the manor and their families, or members of the upper management.  Such “reserved” stocks, often older than the norm, were gradually commercialized, and released with titles like Chairman’s Reserve, Family Reserve, Private Stock, President’s Choice, or whatever, meant to capitalize on their unique, limited, elevated nature. They are, of course, meant to be premium rums, and priced accordingly, and if we proles could afford a bottle, then we could sip – vicariously, to be sure – at the tables of the upper crust and consider ourselves grateful (or so the theory goes).

The Gosling’s Family Reserve Old Rum, first brought to market in the very early 2000s (I’ve heard 2003, or 2005), is one of these. Subject to my opinion below, let’s accept (for now) that it’s a molasses-based pot-column blend, aged for sixteen to nineteen years, released at 40% and costing around Can$70-100, when it can be found. 

Considering the nose showcases some of its weaknesses to a modern audiences: it’s thin, it’s weak and takes far too long to open up. After about ten minutes in a covered glass, there’s little to mark it as being premium anything: we get some wet grass, dark cherries, cinnamon, caramel, toffee, a touch of white chocolate, and some dried raisins. With effort, one might make out some overripe oranges, bananas and walnuts, but that’s reaching.

The palate is similarly unprepossessing. It is soft and easy to sip, of course – the strength and the ageing have sanded off any rough edges – with notes of leather, vanilla, sweet smoky paprika and freshly cut bell peppers, plus honey and maybe a wine-y hint or two. Some raisins, some crushed nuts, stale coffee grounds and all this leads to a short, lacklustre finish that’s an indeterminate mish-mash of caramel, vanilla, orange peel, and those coffee grounds again.

From these brief notes, you can clearly see I’m not impressed, because, for a rum positioning itself as special, there’s not enough to justify either the cachet or the price. For its time, I guess it did its job. In this day and age, it’s fails the Stewart Affordability Conjecture, in spades. It’s clearly a rum, decent enough – it just doesn’t deliver anything we don’t already get elsewhere with more flair at lesser prices. And if you want a comparison, just take down any Foursquare ECS edition bottled at a similar strength, and meditate on the difference between this pleasant but one-dimensional rum, and real craftsmanship.  But you know, the virtual disappearance of the rum from any kind of “best-of” lists or medal winners in recent years makes the karmic point better than any rebuttal I could write here, so I’ll just shrug, smile and move on.

(#1130)(80/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Company background (from Review #1129)

Gosling’s hails from Bermuda, which is a British Overseas Territory, Britain’s oldest: the company is closely identified with the island and is, aside from tourism and some manufacturing, a mainstay of Bermuda’s non-financial-services economy. 

The Gosling enterprise has been in business on Bermuda since 1806, when the ship’s charter for business in the USA expired while on the high seas (the ship was apparently becalmed for longer than expected). So instead of landing in Virginia, James Gosling, the son of a wine and spirits merchant in England, went ashore in St. George’s instead, and set up shop there with his brother Ambrose, trading in spirits he had brought with him. Rum blending from imported distillates began in 1860, with the Old Rum brand launching three years later. The company’s rums were originally sold directly from barrels to customers who brought their own bottles, a practise that continued until the Great War; however, Goslings’ rums’ popularity and sales took off when they began salvaging used champagne bottles from the British navy’s officer’s mess, filling those with rum and sealing them with black wax.

The Old Rum was renamed the Black Seal, with the now-famous seal logo designed and coming into use in 1948: the champagne bottles are rarer now, used only for the Family Reserve line, but the logo has remained in use ever since. It is the company’s flagship brand and goes hand in glove with their signature cocktail “The Dark ‘n’ Stormy, which was developed in the mid 1960s and trademarked in 1980 (and rigorously enforced).

Commentary | Opinion

First released in 2005, the Family Reserve Old Rum proudly adheres — on both the label and the website — to all the annoying lack of disclosure I remarked on with the 151 Overproof. The provenance is murky, the outturn is unknown, the blend is supposedly but unconfirmed to be pot and column distillates, and it’s aged “up to” sixteen years – hardly the best way to flog a much-touted premium product which the Caribbean Journal named its Rum of the Year in 2012 (Goslings on their undated website entry for the rum, casually restates this as “the Caribbean Journal named Goslings Family Reserve Old Rum the No.1 aged rum in the world.”)

Maybe those were simpler and more innocent times in the rumiverse, and maybe my impatience with marketing-speak informs my snark. Frankly, it surpasses my understanding how in this modern day and age, when the provision of information has been a hotly discussed point for over a decade, we still have to be Sherlock Holmes to get some bare bones, basic info. Goslings positions the rum as some kind of premium rum while telling us almost nothing about it. It was perhaps understandable back in the day, but now, it’s indefensible. 

Other notes

  • Video recap link
  • The bottle number is 4992/19 – my conjecture is that the last two digits represent the year of release.

Amrut Two Indies Dark Rum (India) – Review

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Apr 212025
 

You’d think that after a bit more ageing and less components to squabble together, the lacklustre performance of the underwhelming White would be somewhat redeemed, but naah, there isn’t much to report here either. Amrut continues to chase the mass market at the expense of something (anything) more upscale, and I guess we’ll have to accept that and move on.

Just to recap the background, Amrut Distillers is an Indian-founded and Indian-run spirits company which, unlike several other Indian spirits combines, did not originate from a British run colonial enterprise, and has always been completely local. They have been making rums for far longer than the whiskies for which they are now much more famous, and in the 2024 Paris Whisky Live, I took the time to see if they had upped their game any, by running through the entire (2023 released) rum line which they had on display.

In this case, that was the Two Indies “Dark” rum, which is not an aged version of the white we’ve looked at before, but a different rum altogether, with only two parts to the blend: a jaggery-based pot still rum made in the state of Karnataka and aged there in ex-bourbon, and a Jamaican rum. Now this is where we have to be careful, because RhumAttitude (a French online liquor store) says the non-Indian part is a blend of aged rums from Jamaica, Barbados and Guyana, while my preceding comment comes from Amrut’s own website product page. Moreover, it’s unclear whether the resultant blend was further aged, or simply left to marry and then bottled – if they follow the production policy of the white, then the blend is probably aged around one more year. We should accept, I think, that it’s a lightly aged sub-five-year rum and leave it there.

We may be on short rations with the info that’s provided, so let’s go to the tasting.  The nose of the 42,8% Dark presents with an initial note of brine, olives, avocados, raisins, and very ripe cashews on the edge of going off. Unsurprisingly we can also smell some caramel, brown sugar, light molasses and bourbon, together with a snap of cinnamon, coca cola, freshly ground coffee beans and tannic, oaky hints bringing up the rear.

Palate wise, it’s not the sort of thing that would drive a cask-strength aficionado into fits, while fitting well for those who don’t mind something easier (and, yes, sweeter). A soft, easy, dark mouthfeel with the same raisins, olives and brininess, and maybe a few more dark fruits (prunes and plums and sapodilla). The nice thing about it is that it adds a bit of smoke and tannic bitterness at the tail end, which rescues it from sugar oblivion, and leds into a short finish that recaps all of the above and exits too quickly.

I genuinely don’t know if Amrut adds anything to the blend to make it easier sipping, but it’s hard to not at least consider the possibility. The rum just tastes a bit too caramel-y. and is sweet and thick —  too much to be simply good blending, and even if this conjecture is out to lunch, it says a lot about the doubt in which Indian rums are held generally that we could entertain the thought constantly, whenever we try one.

Did I like it?  A bit, I guess. My tastes are pretty ecumenical and I can appreciate a low-ender made to a different standard and for a different audience in a different country, if made with passion and ambition, as much as a top flight rum that’s more exactingly and imaginatively produced. Here what we have is a rum that seems more tailored not to piss anyone off rather than appeal to any one demographic. It is, even with the tasting notes described, somewhat simplistic, has that sweetish note, and, in the words of one frined of mine, is something of a one-trick pony that vanishes too damned fast.

The majority of Amrut’s rum sales continue to be internal rather than exported (although they do have an ever-increasing presence around the world), but they have yet to produce a rum on the level of the initial Single Malt that gave them such status and kickstarted the premium whisky game in India. The Two Indies Dark is unfortunately not the one to spearhead a similar revolution in rum, in India or elsewhere.

(#1118)(78/100) ⭐⭐⭐

Other notes

  • Video recap link
  • More production data (from the review of the white rum (R-1102)): The source of the juice is the Bangalore facility where the company HQ is also located, from cane grown in their backyard, and the jaggery. This is unrefined brown sugar from palm sap or sugar cane juice, with a higher mineral and vitamin content, and a staple and nutritional supplement in many parts of the world. It is known as “gur” in Urdu, “gud” in Hindi, and “vellam” in Tamil. Many Indian distillers use it to make their spirits instead of molasses; it is sourced from India’s sugar city of Mandya, SW of Bangalore. The distillates from whatever source are blended (and likely aged for a short eight-months-to-one-year period in ex-bourbon casks), then released at 42.8%, which is the Imperial 75 proof from colonial times that was never abandoned.

El Dorado 2012 12YO LBI/DHE High Ester Blended Rum – Review

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Sep 172024
 

More than ever it has become clear that DDL has found a way to fold special editions into its core El Dorado range. I had remarked in the video review of the PM 2009 12 YO that until relatively recently, special limited bottlings did not get much attention from the company, or the public: the Rare Editions which replaced Velier’s iconic Demeraras did not always get serious traction, consumers did not cotton on to the “Colours” quartet, and the 15 YO and 12 YO wine-finished releases were at best modest sellers. 

Yet to have cask strength limited editions that showcased the heritage stills had to have been seen as the path forward in the drive to premiumization. And by the early 2020s, we began to see El Dorado rums popping up on the shelves and being touted at rumfests. They were stronger than the norm, remaining in the 12-16 year age range, and showcasing (for the most part) the heritage stills. It did, however, remain the province of the independents to issue truly esoteric marques (not just PM, VSG, EHP or ICBU) like AN, KFM or SWR.

Until, that is, this one came on the scene in 2024. 

In one fell swoop DDL tried to marry an almost unknown marque with a high ester rum. Previously high ester spirit had just been pushed into the major aged blends, though any Guyanese would know that the Superior High Wine (which was only sold locally) was mostly from that little-known small still. And LBI (La Bonne Intention – it’s an estate on the East Coast of the Demerara) is enormously obscure, with only a couple of Velier releases from The Age (1985 and 1998 vintages) and a very occasional indie like Nobilis or Nectar of the Daily Drams ever demonstrating the style. As you can imagine, the geek crowd went slightly ape when this came on the scene.

Now for the trivia nuts, permit me a small digression: LBI had a distillery since the 1800s, and a rum from there was judged at the Calcutta International Exhibition back in 1883. Rum continued to be produced until at least 1959, and sometime in the early 1960s distillation was rationalised by Bookers into Uitvlugt (along with several others), with the distillation apparatus that could not be used being mostly scrapped. The distillate in this release must therefore have been put together on a currently existing still, based on stored production records since no still remains in existence from the original estate.

Enough background, then. Quick facts: French Savalle Still for the LBI part, 57% ABV, 12 years old, blended with a high ester rum from Diamond’s John Dore double-retort copper pot still (not the PM, which is of wood). Difford’s notes “in excess of 1500 g/hlpa” for the DHE component, which is unconfirmed elsewhere, but even so…ouch. We are not given details of the proportion of each…not that I expected any, but it would have been nice. Aged in ex bourbon for 12+ years, and that’s all we need.  And of course, the question after all that is – what’s it like? 

The nose is, in a word, outstanding. It comprises three major components.  The first aromas one notices are the esters and congeners, those sweet acidic notes like gooseberries, bubble gum, strawberries and pineapple, with something like attar of roses in the background, and some burnt pimentos, balsamic vinegar and ginger. The second is a more pastry-like smell, of hot croissants daubed with salted butter, fresh from the oven, biscuits and damp sawdust, behind which can be sensed some leather, floor polish, linseed oil and glue. And after all that is said and done and you hang around for a while, you’ll get some sweet spices – cloves, cardamom, cinnamon and vanilla. There is a lot to be unpacked here and it rewards the patient.

The palate is simply strong and very firm, fortunately without any kind of bitchy sharpness. It’s more like a very hot very sweet and very strong black tea. There’s salt, honey, olive oil, brown sugar, salted caramel ice cream, orange peel, sweet soya, and then a repetition of the sweet spices, freshly baked pastries, coffee grounds and unsweetened chocolate…and more of the spices mentioned above.  The rum as a whole presents as somewhat dry, but it all leads to a really long, dry, aromatic that sums up the profile quite nicely, but without introducing any new elements.

Well. I must say, I’m happy that this is not a rum which was twisted into some semblance of conformity by some moron’s idea of a formula. It’s quite original, while still hewing to a profile that is recognizably Demerara. To do so was probably the right decision, since, overall, the rum works extremely well. The high ester component  is less assertive than the Jamaicans have led us to expect (that’s not a criticism, just an observation), yet it does well to balance off the more traditional flavours provided by the LBI, which, even back then, always seemed to be somewhat indeterminate. Honestly, because of the obscurity of the LBI marque and my interest in any DDL high ester rum, I would have preferred to see each released as an individual bottling. However, it is possible that the LBI distillate didn’t turn out to be anything spectacular, so a blending choice was made to marry the two and create something (possibly) better than either on its own.

I can only say that the final product is really quite good.  It costs about a hundred dollars in Canada, so it won’t break the bank; and seems to have distribution in both Europe and the US, although unfortunately the outturn is unknown.  For that strength, that nose, those tastes and the overall quality, there’s nothing here that I don’t like. My suggestion would be to park the high ester expectations, enjoy the complexity of the blend, appreciate the strength, and maybe even drop the coin to get one for yourself.

(#1089)(88/100) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Other notes

  • Video recap can be found here.
  • Historical notes come from Marco Freyr’s seminal historical work on the Guyanese distilleries, used with permission and thanks.
  • Not tested for sugar, but will add the statistic here when I get the bottle home and test it.