Banana Bama Bo Bama Dept: Dzama Rum

[Capn Jimbo]

Now at Total Wine, but is it for you?


For simply the curiousity factor it might have been, until I read this review from the Rum Club's March event, featuring Dzama as presented by their rep:

"It is common in rum production to use already used whiskey barrels for aging rum, which is why you can often pick up hints of bourbon in rum. It is also common in rum production to enhance flavor by adding fruit and spices to the rum directly.

We learned that Dzama is unique in that they do not infuse their rum directly, but by soaking their wood barrels in citrus or vanilla bean water, and then letting the infused wood impart flavor into the rum during the aging process. With the darker rums, Dzama uses vanilla infused wood, which they re-cask, meaning the barrels are reused for aging, allowing each batch to have different levels of boldness. The first with strong notes of vanilla, and each batch that follows more mellow."

http://rumbumsunite.blogspot.com/

I have a one word reaction but I'll leave it to you to reach your own conclusion...

[Hassouni]

Cheating?
Fraud?
Fake?
Racket?

Are any of those the word? Isn't one of the signatures of oak (besides tannin) the VANILLA (cf. bourbon)!? Sounds like a way to get "fake age" without really doing much aging.




*******
Capn's Log: Bingo! Just another day in rum hell...

[JaRiMi]

This kind of "wood treatment" also no doubt allows them to buy inferior casks, because the actual wood does not really have to give any of the normal flavours oak imparts to whisky - or rum.

Instead, they pump "juices" into the cask with high pressure, and then put alcohol in the casks to mix with the juice sucked into the wood. Probably for a good measure, some of the juice is left also into the cask - just to make sure.

Oh my God...How depressing. So little faith or even ATTEMPT of getting the natural cask aging process to work.

Interestingly as well, Dzama's own website makes absolutely NO MENTION of such methodology. Instead it tells the usual story of maturation in finest casks, climate etc producing such fab results.

Again - are they being honest to the consumer? If this is an integral part of their process, should their site tell about it? And is this "rum" or SPICED rum?

[Capn Jimbo]

Glad Dzama ain't my mama...


J, and they're not alone. Tanduay is known as an absolutely humongous company, every bit as powerful as Bacardi. They literally "assemble" what they call "rum" from alcohol shipped in tankers, sugar and flavorings. And they actually bragged of this on their old website..

Tanduay:

"The most important ingredient in rhum is distilled alcohol. Tanduay’s main supplier of distilled alcohol is Asian Alcohol, which provides 70% of the total requirement, while the remaining 30% comes from other local and foreign suppliers. Raw Alcohol is transported to the plant by tanker. Within the plant, the alcohol is blended together with demineralized water, sugar and other ingredients..."

And the "other ingredients"...

“VARIOUS INGREDIENTS. Various ingredients and flavoring agents are used in the production of rum. The main distributor is International Flavors, which supplies 75% of the company’s requirements.”

Make no mistake...

What Tanduay makes is a rumlike fluid made in mindboggling quantities, and labeled quite creatively in terms of age. But here's the real news:

The rum is likely no different but their new website is. All of their previous admissions are now gone and "disappeared". New bottles and a new website exclaiming an invented category - "Asian Rum" - and full of glowing copy and illustrations full of the usual invented superlatives like "160 years of intrigue", sugarcane that is the product of "thousands of years... in pristine volcanic soils" and a combination of " heritage asian noble and ancestral wild canes".

And that's just the beginning. Excuse me while I puke. Gone is the honest copy of industrially assembled alcohol, sugar and other ingredients and in with the 160 years of intrigue and pristine volcanic soils. I mean, really. What's really needed are monkey minds pristine enough to buy this line of uh, rich soil.

JaRiMi and others once had a lively discussion of Tanduay (here) in an article called "BJ: Shillery aglow about Tanduay Rum", an excellent read for those with functioning and properly skeptical minds. No monkeys, please...