Review: Plantation Grande Reserve 5 Year Aged Rum

Money.  I don't have a ton of it.  (I'm presently unemployed, which I guess makes me a gen-u-ine rummy?)  But you had probably already figured that out based on how crappy my camera is.  As such, value plays a larger than normal role in my evaluation of any given beverage.  So a few days ago when I was in a liquor store in Providence, I asked the man in charge if he had any recommendations for a rum that wouldn't devastate my personal budget.  He practically jumped out from behind the counter and, with the kind of puppy-dog eagerness that only true nerds-in-sales can muster, shoved a bottle of Plantation into my hands. Well my friends, if you are looking for a sipping rum, you're done.  Just stop right now, and go buy a bottle of Plantation 5 Year Barbados.  Is it the pinnacle of fermented achievements in this earthly kingdom?  No.  Is it probably the best booze of any kind that you can buy for <$25? Probably.
    While it lacks the powerful complexity and balance of the more rarefied bourbons and scotches, this humble 5 year old sugar water is pleasant and enriching in a way that belies it's plebeian price point.  It is stunningly rich with notes of butter and vanilla and bananas.  In a lot of ways it reminds me of a mainstream scotch, sort of like an older lowland, but with more of a buttery emphasis.  Though it is a term I generally despise, this drink is preternaturally smooth, and with a texture which borders on maple-syrup.  Basically, imagine getting punched in the mouth with a fist made of all things platonically soft and sweet, and you have this rum.
     So we know it's good.  But exactly how good is it?  After all, this is America, we demand some quantification.  So, for this, my inaugural rum review I've decided to institute a numerical rating system.  Now, the standard booze rating system is of course the Robert Parker 50-100-but-lets-be-honest-it's-more-like-75-100 scale.  I hate that scale.  I think that level of neurotic minutiae is stupid, and I highly doubt that most raters would be capable of scoring the same booze the same thing twice in a row in a blind test.  So instead, I'm going to make a tip of the hat to fellow Rummynesian Inu-a-Kena, and use a modified version of the 10 point scale from his reviews.  A couple of changes I've decided to make: Inu has a category for "appearance" which seems superflous to me - I don't care if a rum is green, as long as it tastes good.  But I DO care about the bottle it comes in - packaging is an incredibly important part of how we make and percieve our liquor buying decisions.  I've renamed aroma to nose, because I'm like that.  I've also combined Taste and Aftertaste, but reduced the total for the two by 1 point.  That 1 point I have taken and put into a new category: Distinction.  This category rates a couple of different concepts.  First, how unique is the liquor in question?  Part of being a pro-am consumer of any given thing is that you can become jaded, and just how interesting something is matters a lot.  The other part of it is how much any  given rum reflects it's particular style and place of origin.  A Jamaican rum should taste Jamaican, and it should be distinct from a British navy or a Cuban.  So I left a point for that.
     In the case of Plantation-5, those scales read as such:

• Packaging: 1/1
• Nose: 1.5/2
• Mouth: 1/1
• Taste: 4/5
• Distinction: .5/1
• Total: 8/10

Still life with bottle opener

Simple cocktails are the joy of a simple life.  Rum, orange juice, some lime to add vigor.  Refreshing yet fortifying - rum in a nutshell.

Rum Weather

During a recent Twitter conversation a friend expressed his condolences to me over the increased amount of grey weather he expected me to endure while living here in New England.  My instant and automatic reply was to remind him that all weather is rum weather.  Which, if we take a moment to reflect on it, is both true and extraordinary.

There are very few other spirits which can be consumed year round with absolutely no effort: gin is a drink for late spring and summer, whiskey tastes best with a chill in the air; I believe it has been scientifically proven that there are no conditions under which vodka does not suck.  Rum on the other hand, is an incredibly protean beverage, refreshing and invigorating in the sun, solemn and fortifying under grey skies.  I am by no means the first person to notice this phenomenon: Esquire recently ran a piece on the subject which I highly recommend.

A large amount of this versatility stems from the fact that rum cheats.  There are at least four entirely distinct families of liquor under the rum umbrella, each with a unique seasonal character.  The big split is of course between those rums made from sugar cane juice, and those made from molasses.  The cane juice rums, cachaca and rum agricole, are much more temperamental drinks, with a considerable amount of botanical variance in their tastes.  These find a home primarily in the cocktails of summer - mojitos and caipirinhas, things with bright, cutting flavors that are best served cold.

Proceeding to the molasses rums, the tree splits into the three familiar branches: light and aged rums, dark rums, and spiced rums.  In more civilized times, the difference between the light/aged rums and the dark rums was that light rum had been filtered, and the dark ones had not, retaining a great deal of their antecedent fluids rough, sulphuric sweetness.  In modern times though, I suspect that all the rums are filtered, and the dark ones then receive a post-distillation addition of color and flavor.  The spiced rums of course, make no bones about the fact that they have been doctored after their original distillation.  Regardless of their production method though, each category contains examples both sublime and deplorable.

It is the dark and the spiced rums specifically which lend rum its extraordinary versatility.  Rum as a spirit has always been rather less concerned with definitions and propriety than any of the grain derived boozes.  Thanks to this, the same basic drink that makes the pina colada such a masterfully refreshing drink, can also come straight out of the bottle ready to take on apple cider, liquified ice cream, and hot butter.  I suspect the idea of welcoming esoteric infusions of sugar and seasonings to liquor makes a lot of purists nervous, but it's an attitude that I suspect will begin to change, warily, over the next couple years.  American's love novelty and invention in our foodstuffs, and at some point we're going to decide that we've gone as far as we can with the traditional, minimalist approaches to distilling.  Luckily for rum, it will already be there, ready to forge ahead.

Don't believe my assertions of potential?  Well try this: make the following cocktail recipe.  Do it once using your preferred aged rum (or start with Cruzan, if you don't have a preference) and then do it again, and use Sailor Jerry.  Yep, Sailor Jerry, the spiced, cherry infused rum that's joined root and brand with fucking Ed Hardy.  I tell you what though: for my dollar, all that extra junk they put in means that it stands up in a cocktail in unique and highly appreciable ways.

Grog Punch:

Mix one full jigger of rum with a teaspoon of sugar and the juice of 1/2 a lime.  Pour over ice in a glass, and fill the glass with soda water.  Sprinkle liberally with bitters.  If your glass is too big (an oversize porcelain Buddha perhaps) proportionally increase the recipe until you get where you need to be.  Enjoy carefully.

Drink, drink in the place where you are.

A new day, a new name, another attempt at sucking philosophy down the neck of a bottle.  This time though, there is inspiration and (wind and tide willing) focus.  Sweet Sweet Whiskey we called ourselves, but that was then, in a land of corn and pigs and fresh water and smog.  Now we come to a new, more spiritually compatible home, a place of salt and indolence, the capstone of the triangle trade, a little piece of the Caribbean flung erroneously far to the north.  This is a land of rum, and it is of rum that I will write.

All melobelsa having now been excised, let me address you in a more natural tone.  My name is Alec Boyle, a middling writer and accomplished drinker who finds myself recently relocated to the be-lighted shores of beautiful Rhode Island.  I am under employed and over supplied and find myself with a lot on my mind.  I spend a lot of time thinking about terroir, both my own and that of the things I consume, what it is and what it should be.  I spend a lot of time thinking about localized economic specialization, specifically how it relates to the terroir of the things we consume.  I spend a lot of time thinking about rum, and what it means to the past, present, and future of this place.

We live in a time of rapidly crumbling gastronomic barriers.  Until about 20 years ago, it was a given that all the best wine came from France.  Until about 10, that the best beer was from Germany.  Until about 5, the best whiskey was all still from Scotland.  Today we know that the French are only particularly good at making French wines, that the Belgians always made the best beer until the Americans decided to one up them, and that India and Japan are both perfectly capable of turning out exceptional single malts.  What I have long suspected though is that all of this is just the beginning.  My profound hope is that in the next 20 years we will come to see that all of this decaying perceptions were merely the result of a few unfortunate informational bottle-necks that cropped up over the last 1000 years or so, and that as a species of drinkers we are capable of so much more.

I recently met a man in Vermont who run a winery (include link).  His winery produces exclusively fruit wines.  For decades fruit wines have held relatively deserved reputation as the foremost front of America's war on glucose sensitivity. This man though made very very good fruit wines.  Dry, balanced, accomplished wines.   This man in Vermont

, he said a very profound thing to me, something which jived exceptionally well with a lot of unexpressed thoughts of my own over the years.  What he said was that the Vermont was the Napa valley of the East, but that it was suited to the growing of stone fruit and apples than to grapes.  And that, is a truly thrilling thought.  Because America is an incredibly bounteous country.  And every region of it has a thing that it is best at the growing and production of.  And if human history has taught us anything, it is that if we can grow a thing, we can turn it into booze.

Which of course brings us to the obvious logical road block in my little thesis statement here: rum is made of sugar, in the form of either cane juice or mollases, and in no way does the growth of sugar cane or the production of mollasses occur anywhere in or near Rhode Island.  But the people of Rhode Island, like so many inhabitants of resource poor islands before them, have commerce flowing in their veins.  And rum is in many ways the ultimate expression of that commerce and terrible, delicious exploitation upon which it is built.  I believe that going forward, rum has the potential to be great.  I'll discuss exactly what I mean by greatness in a future article.  For now though, lets just say that I believe it has the potential bring us a greater connection with our past, and to define entirely unknown bounries for our future.

As I go forward with this blog, I intend to explore all aspects of rum, from it's terrible past to middling present, to it's hopefully brilliant future.  I hope that you will all enjoy that exploration as much as I will.