Actually I like both Berry and Richard Seale. I've never met the former, but Sue Sea and I began our exploration of rum at the personal hands of Richard at a Burr Bothers tasting in an exotic Miami location.
It was at that tasting that Richard Seale dramatically poured a tasting of a "special new rum" he'd brought. He offered a bottle of his magnificent Seales Ten to anyone who could correctly answer three questions...
1. Cane juice or molasses based?
2. Pot or column stilled?
3. Approximate age?
The consensus was molasses, pot and around 7 years old.
"You're all wrong," he revealed with a wink, "it's a brand new, column-stilled rum that I phonied up to taste older, more complex and richer!". We'd all been had and there were some pretty experienced tasters in that room. Richard had added vanila flavoring and a few other additives to demonstrate his point.
That most rums are altered and anything but pure.
Enter Jeff "Beachbum" Berry. At theGerman Rum Festival held in Berlin about a month ago, he took notes of the following paraphrased quotes...
Yup, that's the Richard we know, and god bless him for keeping up the good fight - for good, pure and honestly produced rum...Master blender Richard Seale, on distillers who dope their rum with sugar and artificial flavor extracts: “The rum world is a jungle. It’s the wild west. There are no rules. Anything goes.”
