This is where the commercial and faux commercial wannabees end up. These are just ordinary putzes who just happen to possess ego and time enough to put up a "rum website". They are almost never - well, never actually - qualified as real authorities. What they're really after is to gain attention, to get lots of freebies and/or to promote their rum business. In time, a bunch of monkeys come to regard this webmasterbater as an "expert", and here's the key - this individual now feels obligated to act the part.
They have painted themselves into the "Expert's Corner". This week its Seldom Heard at the Shillery. A newbie asks a very intelligent question, one that should be basic...
Excellent! And this my friends, is exactly what went through my mind when we first discovered rum. And what kind of answer did our sincere and intelligent fellow traveller get?Intelligent Newbie: "I'm new to rum and have only tasted Bacardi 8. Are there any rums with a similar flavour profile... I'm not asking for similar tasting rums, what I want are the profiles which are a different thing. Rum seems to generally categorised as dry, sweet, smoky from what I'm reading.
I think it'd be a good idea to list rums by flavour profiles when doing reviews... to give us newcomers a bit more of an idea of what to try. After all, one mans nectar can be onother mans poison.
Yup, the Preacher's standard Shillery swill "It's all good, my favorite rum is the one in my glass". Hey, just drink up man! Poor fellow - he comes along, registered and reaches out for some real guidance and he gets - nada. For me that advice was worse than nothing. It led me to buy many, many rums and still have no basis for understanding or appreciating them. It was not until I bought perhaps the best single source for rum appreciation - Dave Broom's "Rum", along with Ian Williams wonderful historical tome - that two things became apparent:Seldom Heard: "...one mans nectar can be onother mans poison."
You summed it up best. It's YOUR journey. If something sounds like you might like it, give it a shot.
1. That there are indeed styles (Broom's Jamaican, Demeraran, Cane Juice and Cuban).
2. That from our point of view, the styles reflected the history and devopment of rum as distilling migrated through the Caribbean.
For all practical purposes Barbados - with perfect conditions and closest to England - was the defacto home, moving to Jamaica, and later Guyana and the other islands. The Cuban style was the latecomer as established by Bacardi in Cuba. Thus there are surely four basic styles to which the Bajan rums is a natural, identifiable addition. Dominican and Trindadian rums - while being identifiable - might be considered as well.
The Key...
The current classifications of rum - from the Shillery's "it's all good" monoclass - to the notions of color, age, overproof and the like - all fail for one reason. They can't be identified by blind tasting. A category is useless if you can't taste and identify it. And it is counterproductive to vainly try to compare rums of different styles. Only style meets that criterion, as each of the styles can usually be identified by a modestly experienced rum afficianado. Although this also leads to idea of personal reference rums for comparison, it all begins with the basic styles.
Basta!
It was this continuing failure of almost all the commercial and wannabee sites to continue the ridiculous "...it's all good" bullshit, that led us to establish The Rum Project and to do our fumbling best to educate others to better understand and appreciate real and authentic rum, and to understand how it all came about.
Thankfully the Seldom Heards of this world are seldom seen...
) and others who contribute on this site! I'm glad I'm here!
