As the Brits say, I feel rather chuffed to be here...

Yes, the obligatory introductions section, but serves a good purpose - like a good, soft toilet paper - used only once but truly wonderful! "Here's to you and here's to me, may we never disagree - if perchance we ever do, here's to me and to hell with you!"
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Andy
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As the Brits say, I feel rather chuffed to be here...

Post by Andy »

...and that's about the extent of my British language knowledge. Even though I've lived in London for 5 years, my American accent still flies high in the face of the local pomp (1).

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!

---

(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!
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Capn Jimbo
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Post by Capn Jimbo »

A big welcome to Andy...


...you are among good and knowledgable folk. I've been in communication with Andy and his rum ratings site which - as an initial comment - which I found especially interesting in that the site logs ratings given by ordinary rum drinkers (not reviewers). Thus, it's easy to see what the hoi polloi, we of the unwashed masses, like and rate highly or well, lowly.

Most of the Project's readers are well aware of the Reviewer's Reviews (Scuttlebutt section), in which the reviewers ratings were analyzed and presented in a graphical spreadsheet format. The presence or absence of a normal distribution (the old "bell curve") was fair indication of whether that reviewer's score were fair, or tended high or low. A few like Dave Broom or BTI (and a couple others) were quite normal and reliable. Many more were not and for some strange reason, their distributions were well, high.

It was thus both surprising and refreshing to see that Andy also has chosen to report the public ratings in similar fashion, and as expected, most exhibit a reassuringly normal distribution.

Thus, it's each to find where the bulk (the bell) of ratings fall, and where the bulk/center/median of the public ratings fall. But I digress...

Nice to see you here, look forward to your active participation.
da'rum
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Post by da'rum »

Welcome Andy
in goes your eye out
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Nomad
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Post by Nomad »

Welcome! While shopping, I use your site (and also the sugar test results index here) for quick impressions of whether a new to me rum might fit my palette. Well done.
RobBosman87
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Post by RobBosman87 »

Nice to see you here Andy, big fan of your website!
Cheers,

Rob
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SlowRain
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Post by SlowRain »

You're THAT Andy! Thank you, sir, for your fine website.
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