Where has all the rum gone?

THE GREAT RUM REVIEW

The rum collection, the Matusalem (middle) belongs to my friend

Hello everyone and welcome to yet another great tasting! Today I had the great opportunity to sample six different styles of rums with a good friend of mine! As you already might know, the previous reviews with cognacs, herbal-liquers and vodkas have all been great successes so I decided to keep the winning streak going on but with rums. But not just any rums, instead I was going for the aged ones.

Without going into too much detail what rum is, aged rum differs enough from the basic blanco ones. An aging process and moreover, a way more complex flavor profile than your regular "Bacardi white". So four of the six rums were ordered from online (of which one belongs to my friends), one from another good friend of mine (holla Michael!) and one from my ex-colleagues when "El Capitán" (me) left his navy (holla Stockmann!). The collection, and for the sake of me & my readers, I shall go through the list as it appears in the picture. I also gathered bits & pieces of information regarding that specific rum so we all know what we're dealing with:

• Ron Pampero Aniversario NAS
• Venezuelan
• Aged in oak casks
• a blend of ~ 2-8yo rums

• The Kraken Black Spiced Rum NAS (Wild card)
• Caribbean / Trinidad & Tobago
• a blend of 1-2yo rums with added spices

• Pyrat XO Reserve Rum NAS
• Guyanese
• Blend of 2yo Demerara stock & other stocks from various Caribbean producers

• Ron Matusalem Gran Reserve 15yo
• Dominican Republic
• NOT a 15yo rum per se, but aged via Solera system

• Appleton Estate 12yo
• Jamaican
• Aged in old Jack Daniels barrels

• El Dorado 12yo
• Guyanese
• Aged in old bourbon oak casks

(NAS = No Age Statement)

Tasting order: Matusalem, Pyrat, Appleton, Aniversario, El Dorado and Kraken

I deliberately left the Kraken Rum to be tasted as our last, since its style clearly differs from the five others.

As you can see, even in their apparent outlooks they differ quite a lot. Keep in mind that in the alcohol business a lot of producers use caramel coloring to make their product look more appealing. Check out this link to find more about it and why producers do it. "Luckily" the random order I chose (except for Kraken) for the tasting was almost from the "faintest" golden to the almost plum-colored dark.

With water on the side and coffee beans for us to smell in between (and old crackers to cleanse our palate :D) we started our journey into the rum business. We both took notes of each rum and again, this was not a simple task at all.

Fancy as f**k!

The Pyrat XO did have the most distinct fruity and sweet notes in comparison. So fruity it almost couldn't be count as a rum but more of a fruity-candy-liquor!

Our wild card Kraken was something completely different as well. Again, it's hard not to compare this rum as itself but to others when there are five aged ones waiting in line. But given, the Kraken didn't really cut it in the big boys' league BUT it works damn fine with coke! It's a spiced rum so it works as a mixer just fine!

So now we're dealing with Matusalem, Appleton, Aniversario and El Dorado. They all got good scores/reviews and quite frankly, it was impossible to say which one of these was the ultimate best. Appleton 12yo and El Dorado 12yo got both 8½ points out of 10 and both Matusalem and Aniversario got 7 points.

These four were all great rums and top-of-the-line products.

As a summary I would say, it was awesome once again to have a tasting like this. And as said before, it wasn't easy to find differences in these rums. Fair enough, some had more or less afterburn or sweeter, honey-type notes to them but overall it wasn't a walk in the park, at least for me. But you can't go wrong with these rums. No sir!