Hi, I'm Andy. I'm from Wisconsin (originally).
It was during school at UW Madison when surrounded by thousands of beer drinking coeds when my love for rum formed. Yes it may have been a little odd to sip on Captain Morgan Private Stock (2) at fraternity parties. But I knew once that sweet golden nectar touched my lips, there was no going back to local stouts for me.
Over the next few years I accumulated quite a rum collection, I'd say an assortment of 30 or so bottles all aged between 5-15 years. Since I was the only person most of my friends knew who drank rum, their standard party gift quickly became rum as well. Hence the growing collection.
Then came the day I thought my rum career had come to an end, when my wife and I moved to London with 2 duffel bags each. In the battle between packing underwear or rum, my feet narrowly beat out almost all other senses
So what's a good lad (3) to do living in a tiny apartment in London with no rum stash? Why not start a rum website of course!
At first the site was going to be a personal rum blog, but I quickly realized I had no rum and likely nobody cared about my taste in rum anyway. Then I discovered as part of my major (4) I could do a research project. HA, THAT WAS IT! I would design a research project around building a website. Little did they know I had rum on the mind...
So after researching websites in school and some help from a few German developers I just happened to meet, I launched RumRatings (5).
To make a long story short, over the last 3-4 years I have slowly and steadily built a website where users can create their own rum cabinet. I honestly just wanted to keep track of the rums I liked (6), but then other people said they wanted to rate their favorite rums as well.
What I thought would be a little rum side project now has a life of it's own, with something like 15000 ratings. Whenever I have some free cash I ask a few developer friends to add more features, and in general I can't even come close to keeping up with user rum additions or feature requests.
I'm certainly no 'rum expert', but I do have 50 ratings in my RR cabinet and have probably tried another 30 on top of that. Sometimes companies send me rum to rate even though I tell them I'm just one out of thousands of other users (it's a little awkward actually). I have generally a sweet palette and enjoy the typical Plantation XO, Zaya, El Dorado 12/15, Diplomatico RE, and etc in the sweeter category.
So that's me. Really happy to be involved in this rum community and already see a few RR friends here as well. Thanks to Capn Jimbo for setting it up, and I hope to connect with many of you soon!
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(1) I call it pomp, some just refer to the stiff upper lip. Same thing
(2) to a college sophomore this was the epitome of rum
(3) see how I slipped in another Brit reference? They're really starting to get to me over here...
(4) I moved to London for business school
(5) I think Jimbo said I couldn't put links in posts, but he did put the link in my profile if you're interested.
(6) the site didn't even have a signup process at first - I was the only user!
