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