da'rum: 3 overproofs side by side

Now's here's the real stuff - traditional, cleans your socks on the way down. Unlike the Royal Navy, the pirates drank while eating, sailing and fighting - the first multitaskers. Here's to Port Royal, the Port of Orgies! Say it loud and say it plowed!
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da'rum
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da'rum: 3 overproofs side by side

Post by da'rum »

Tonight's contestants are;

Pusser's 75% super over proof Blue label,

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Lemon Hart 151 75.5% over proof Demerara

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and

Smith & Cross 57% Jamaican over proof.

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Results later.....
Last edited by da'rum on Fri Nov 30, 2012 4:14 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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da'rum
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Post by da'rum »

Ok so a side by side of these rums,

Bottling;

No nonsense bottles, men’s bottles! Not bottles for wankers in suits smoking over priced shitty Cuban cigars. They couldn't put these bottles in a titanium lined davidoff glass cabinet and impress Nigel the commodities broker from next door. I would only say that at 75.5% the Lemon Hart 151 NEEDS a cork. The angels will be helping themselves to more than their share, the alcoholic little bastards....

Colour,

ALL of these rums have caramel added for colouring, what is interesting is the amounts.

First a pic of S&C
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Second is the Pusser's
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and finally the LH151
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So as you can see it seems that S&C has the least and LH151 the most. When I measured and poured the three drams it seemed that the S&C had less in the glass because of it's light colour and LH looks like it's port.

So I had a nose of each glass before adding any water to them. The SC is mellowed ripe apricots and nuts, sort of like Christmas cake still wrapped in wax paper. The Pusser's was vanilla with all old things behind it like a hint of tobacco a bit of furniture polish and the smell of timber floors in old houses. The LH151 was cigars half smoked, empty well used pipes and old leather.

So now I added water to them:

The Pusser's and LH received 20 ml to their 30 ml's bringing them down to about 42%. The S&C was 10ml to again bring it down to 42%. Nosed again:

The S&C reacts well with water and the aromas are really let go with everything you can smell in the pure form being fluffed out and becoming richer and easier to breathe in without assault of the nose. It's a fruit orchard with a nut processing plant operating upwind. S&C watered would have to be one of the best smelling rums that I know.

The Pusser's changed a bit with water, the polish disappeared and out came sawdust, damp rich earth, nice fresh tobacco and rich vanilla. A very unique aroma that when written seems awful but it's not at all. It's pleasant and can be described as a hearty aroma that makes you want to watch football or sail a yacht or invade a small island, I'm not sure what but whatever that smell is suggesting the police or green peace probably wouldn't approve.

The Lemon Hart 151 also changed it was all empty tobacco pipes, toffee hints of cocoa and maybe seawater or sea weed there is something there that I can't quite put my finger on.



So after all that crap I decided I might drink some.

The S&C is wonderful it is as lovely on the tongue as it is on the nose, it screams POT STILL at you whilst thrashing your tongue with fruit backed up by mild sweetness and vanilla. It is pungent and has an all senses filling capability when sipped. It has quite a dry finish for such a pungent and flavourful rum with a hint of brine to say adios!

The Pusser's is beautiful, it is such a well made rum. It's it's mild but flavourful with the taste notes of earth and fresh hardwood sawdust matching the aroma notes but with added hints of green apple, caramel, a very slight brine taste. I can see how this is often described as the scotch of rum. As I sip and breathe in I get tobacco as well, I am sure I can smell the deck of the Endeavour just before she bumped into Australia. It doesn't have the pungency that the S&C has and is so finely distilled that I could easily be tricked into thinking that this was column stilled or a blend of column and pot similar to the ElD's. The finish lingers a little longer than the S&C and waves slowly goodbye as the fluid pulls out from the harbour of your tongue to into the bay of your stomach ;)


So now to the Lemon Hart 151, Toffee, leather and cocoa a nutty after-taste. This again is a fine rum and stands alone having significant enough differences to negate being compared against the first two except in perhaps the drinkers preferences and since a reader of reviews shouldn't really give a fat rats nut about the the author's preferences on 3 differing and unique styles of rum I won't go deeper into that right now. So, I digressed, this rum is a a fairground with candied nuts and caramel, toffee apples (where you just pick the toffee off) but the toffee is burnt. Maybe this is all the colouring that has been dumped into it as it definitely has the burnt sugar notes. It's a pleasure to drink, would be great in a cocktail and I say thumbs up, BUT it doesn't make me want to be a pirate like the Pusser's does.

No scores.

Just a recommendation to buy them all. They are all very good, worth your money and deserve a reserved spot in a collection.

Tschüss

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*edited to add text that I somehow missed when copying this from office to forum.
Last edited by da'rum on Sat Jan 17, 2015 11:20 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by da'rum »

After I wrote this I read a few write ups with three standing out. They were write ups by people already spoken about here in this forum.

One wrote the LH151 off as a mixer based on his trying the rum at full strength 75.5%. Of course at that strength his mouth exploded and he immediately dumped the rest of the dram into a glass of coke.

He then wrote it up as having all kinds of flavours and notes that has me scratching my head at how he found these.

The second pretty much did the same thing but wrote the rum up as some kind of frontier rum for wild eyed crazy men, bull riders or bare knuckle fighters or some such. Again based on full strength testing.

The third was an interview of someone a little more cunning than the first and may or may not have a vested interest in the rum. He stated that you can't just water the rum down it needs to be watered and then stored to "let the flavours marry". Bullshit.

Of course this rum can be watered and if someone wants to try and distinguish any kind of notes from it (it's hard with so much caramel apparently added post distilling) then it must be watered down to 40 ish % so the palate can pick the flavours up.

I'm not really arguing that their end conclusions aren't correct. It is perhaps better used in cocktails but it is by no means impossible to enjoy this as a sipper.

If however you have a bottle of the Pusser's then sip that instead. That's a much better rum.
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A Tour de Force...

Post by Capn Jimbo »

A Tour de Force...


Brilliant! Bravo! Some of your insightful observations with which we identified...

1. The use of caramel. The regulations would imply this is E-150, which is actually quite bitter, but is required in such tiny, tiny amounts for its purpose of coloring, that it should not affect the flavor.

Unfortunately, the use of dark or even medium caramel is likely. These caramels do add flavor, and are used in relatively huge quantities. Our dear regulators don't care.

2. The use of water. The addition of (usually distillled) water is common to drinkers of very fine and very expensive single malts which are often bottled at up to 50% or so. Professional tasters believe that spirits must be compared at around 40% or so. Some of their sipping glasses are even graduated to make accurate the addition of water.

Your example of the monkey who suggested that the water addition needed to be aged before tasting is a banana, er nut case. The addition of water has a very quick effect, and chemically actually releases hidden esters, et al. Professionals would advise that the addition be conservative, even using eye droppers, to find the "sweet spot".

3. Smith and Cross, like Pusser's is terribly unique, and completely Jamaican in character. Jamaican rums - unlike any others - are actually rated in terms of the number of esters, et al, that they contain. While an ordinary rum (represented by the 151 here) may have only 40 or 50 distinct esters, the S&C may have up to 500. This is because rums like the S&C were often produced as flavoring agents, and were often exported to Germany for that purpose.

Other than Pussers, S&C is one of the few easily available rums that is truly classic. The pussified drinkers of the commercial sites are so enamored of their Batshit Dingleberry flavored rums, or sweetened and altered Diplomaticos, Pyrats, and Z-rums that they simply don't appreciate the real McCoy (pun intended)...

Again... bravo!
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Post by da'rum »

A couple of weeks ago I had a PM conversation with Jimbo and we briefly spoke about Lemonhart 151. I gave an opinion on it

it was;
I haven't tried the old Lemonhart but have a bottle of the newer version, bought when doing an overproof comparison. It is the only bottle of rum I have left unfinished. I have tried a few coctails with it but the caramel is too over powering. I can only make syrupy sweet coctails for the girls when they have a get together here. The men tend to turn their noses up at it. Myself included. It might go well in an unsweetened ginger beer (highball) but finding unsweetened anything in Germany is like finding a grain of salt in a sugar stack.
To which Jimbo said that the above would make an interesting or at least worthy post in the overproof section of the forums.

I thought you daft bugger I already wrote a big comparison in which the Lemonhart 151 was included. I went to this thread and re read what I wrote..........my god. What a load of shit. I must of been drunk and feeling witty. Not only is the wording horrible but the descriptions of the rums also 'off'.

I apologise for such a half cocked and ridiculous review.

I will re do this and make sure I take the time to make it better. I will also not post the results when I am obviously drunk and an idiot. Instead I'll write the results when sober and an idiot.

It was a very long winter here and my health suffered due to laziness and winter food. So for the last couple of months I've been on a dry spell and a health kick.

When I get everything back in order and am sure that a heart attack is not imminent I will attempt this comparison again.

Cheers.
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Post by Capn Jimbo »

Drunk or sober...


I value da'rum's honesty and posts, the OP in particular which remains a Tour de Force. This was/is one of the great comparisons published here, a terrific piece of work.

Keep on keeping on. Can't wait for the comparison...
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Post by Rum Warrior »

Lemon Hart 151 Haiku Review

Long-lost Tiki rum
It will hold you in its arms
burning with sweet soul
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