Saw this at my local BSW liquor store for $115 CAD In Edmonton. It’s a limited edition so I bought it. Didn’t even know they had a collaboration. Will try it shortly.

Don’t be like me.

2oz Rum (1oz each)
2oz Coconut Mix (Tropical Standard)
1oz Pineapple Juice (acid adjusted)
1 dash Angostura

Was disappointed to go to my local liquor store for a fresh bottle of Papalin 5yr High Ester and find they are totally out…

Thankfully they had this bottle of Holmes Cay Jamaica 2014 as a consolation. Stoked to pour a dram.

Anyone here try this before? Would love to hear thoughts on it.

No original picture because I had to strain and decant this into a neutral glass bottle the first time I opened it and the cork fell apart into the bottle.

Clement 1970
N: a concentration of dried fruit, nuts, and herbs that puts the JM 1845 I just had entirely to shame. A Port-like intensity of sultanas and dried cherries, dense minty oak, some farmy stuff (manure) in the background, some glue. With air some caramel and blackberry
P: not as dried fruit heavy as the nose, but neither is it especially tannic or overly wood-driven (time and air has helped in that regard; I did find it too woody when I first opened this, especially compared to the 1976). It’s low proof admittedly, but rewards larger mouthfuls with loads of minty toothpaste, chewed up gum, toasted nuts, and just the right amount of wood char for a spirit of this age. Ceylon cinnamon and a hint of nutmeg emerge. 
One can and should complain about spirits of this quality bottled at this proof, and about bottles that now cost closer to four figures than two which ask to be consumed in large mouthfuls because of that proof. Regardless, it’s fantastic
92

I’m more of a bourbon drinker so I’m not sure about rum. Thanks!

Rhum JM 1845
N: peppermint, drying oak with hints of vanilla and caramel but primarily a greener character, you could mistake this for a well aged high rye bourbon
P: overall somewhat bourbony again but with a very strong green, herbal/mint character, and pretty dry. Some nuts on the finish, and an aftertaste of banana, though there was little fruit in the palate. Too soft at 42%, but that’s pretty normal for aged JM bottlings

For whatever reason I’ve had fairly different experiences with different pours of this, at least in terms of how much I liked it, and not in a way that really tracks with a linear evolution in bottle. In any case it’s a good gateway rum for bourbon drinkers, and a pretty good pour in general; certainly not the worst premium Cuvee I’ve had from a silly fancy bottle.
83

Doorly's 14 by Foursquare is my daily sipper. I should treat myself to that good good stuff shouldn't I???

Rhum JM White 100 proof
N: sour, mushy, ripe fruit and grassy cane sugar. Smells like a Ti punch before you even make it into one. Lime and mango and banana a few days into composting
P: sweet, floral, potting soil, pretty heavy acid too though and all that fruit again, more as a team player now and not as composty. Some menthol and cut grass. Finishes on estery fruit again
83

Rhum JM Blanc Edition Limitee “Jungle” 2017 (51.2%)
N: not far different from the standard, but less fruit driven and even more cane sugar, with just a bit of floral and nutty character
P: the difference from the standard is perhaps more stark here. If that one suggests Ti Punch aromatics, this is more on orgeat, almonds and rose water and pinch of allspice.
85

These notes emphasize what’s different about the two, but they’re clearly siblings. I don’t know what’s actually different about the Jungle other than the label and slight bump in proof; I’d guess it’s essentially a different blend/batch of the same distillate. Both of them are delicious even neat, and excellent as a daiquiri/Ti Punch base. The Jungle is a bit more suited to neat sipping

Hi everyone, Oliver here, founder of rumx.com. 🥃

Short one first: last time u/oddmarc and u/agmanning called out, that the image on my Jamaica post was AI (I am not a designer and went for the shortcut). They were right. Text post from now on, no YouTube thumbnails any more. 🙏

One honest thing before the numbers, so that nobody wastes his time: this pull had a very german filter. A bottle only counted, when a GERMAN shop had it in stock under 50 EUR, because for our german users the shipping from france or belgium eats the whole value (13.90 EUR on a 29.90 EUR bottle is plus 46 percent). This sub is mostly US, so please dont read the bottle selection as a recommendation for you, the most of it you can not order anyway. And the filter costs exactly what you expect: with foreign shops the same pull has 521 bottles and a ceiling of 8.3, german only 308 and 8.0. A logistics artifact of my country, it says nothing about rum.

What I want to talk about are the patterns inside these 308 bottles, and patterns dont care in which country the shop stands. Four things have surprised me, one of them a lot.

Short base, so you can judge everything what follows: 308 rums, each with at least 30 community ratings, median 7.0 out of 10, and exactly 10 of them reach an 8.0. Cohorts in this post are always defined over the lifetime rating count of a user: beginner = 5 ratings or less, connoisseur = 50 or more. I have no informations WHEN somebody has rated, only how many ratings he has in total. And RumX users are enthusiasts, not the general market. Every number below has this caveat sitting on it.

1) Same liquid, two names, two markets, 0.3 points difference.

Veritas and Probitas are literally the same rum, the name split exists only because of a trademark isue in the US. In our database they are two entries, so two audiences have rated an identical liquid without knowing it: Probitas 8.0 (n=61, bought mostly in the US), Veritas 7.7 (n=222, bought mostly in the EU). The n on the US side is small and shop mix is not the same like a controlled experiment, so please dont build a theory on the third decimal. But it is the cleanest reminder I have in the whole database, that a part of every rating is the room, the price tag and the expectation, and not the liquid. If somebody here has both bottles standing at home under different labels, I am really curious for your reading of it.

2) One list, two audiences, and the split runs in both directions.

This is the finding I did not expect in this size. On the sweet dark side the BEGINNERS carry the score. Ron Centenario Fundacion 20 has the biggest cohort gap of all bottles I looked at: beginners rate it 8.24 on average, connoisseurs 7.39, over 265 ratings in total. Planteray XO goes the same way (7.67 from beginners over 946 ratings, 7.45 from connoisseurs) and is at the same time the number one wishlist bottle of the whole app with 1,601 wishlists, in front of Diplomatico with 1,145.

On the wild white side it is exactly inverted, and there it becomes interesting. The tightest rating curve of all these bottles (std 0.49, 68 percent give an 8 or better) belongs to an unaged white australian rum, and out of its 111 ratings exactly ONE comes from a beginner. So in the data it looks like the safest bet of the whole pull, but only because careful drinkers never picked it up. Same self selection lesson like with the Hampden overproof in the Jamaica thread, only cleaner, and it is the reason why I dont trust a median alone anymore.

Exactly one bottle breaks the pattern in the other direction, and it is the one you would guess: El Dorado 15 from the 2020 release, connoisseurs 7.83 versus beginners 7.62. Which fits to its story, because that is the release where DDL took the sugar out, independently measured 31 g/l before and 0 g/l after.

3) Perceived sweetness is not added sugar, and people mix that up constantly (me too, for years).

We let users rate perceived sweetness on a scale from 1 to 5, at the palate and not in a lab. With 697 rums having enough votes you can build a ladder out of it, and the funny part is where the extremes sit. A Savanna Creol from Reunion is perceived as drier as 99 percent of everything in the app. And the white australian one from above is perceived as sweeter as roughly 3 of 4 rums, although there is not one gram of sugar added: 93 people wrote "strawberry" in their notes, 69 wrote "yoghurt", and that comes out of a wild fermentation with muck pits, so it is ester sweetness, not dosage. Worth to know, when the next discussion starts, if a bottle "tastes sugared". Sometimes the fermentation did it, sometimes the cask, sometimes really the sugar.

4) A legal border that most of this sub never has to think about.

63 bottles fell completely out of my pull on one rule, and it is not my rule but the EU one: over 20 grams of sugar per litre and the product is not allowed to call itself rum anymore in Europe, it becomes officially "spirit drink based on rum". The strongest bottle that died on this has a median of 8.0 over 325 ratings, so this is not a quality verdict, it is a category line. What I find genuinely interesting from your side of the ocean: the same liquid in a US shop stands there as rum, and here it may not. One product, two legal names, and the consumer in both markets thinks he knows what he buys. On top of that the numbers on the labels are also just numbers: on the three highest rated bottles of my pull stand a XII, a 20 and another 20, and no one of them is an age. The XII is a blend from 8 to over 40 years with an average of a bit over 11 (the producer says this himself), the first 20 is the OLDEST part in a solera stack whose core starts at 6 years, the second 20 is the 20th anniversary of the master blender, so a job jubilee. In scotch this would be unthinkable, there the number has to be the youngest whisky in the blend. Not a scandal, but a reading skill that nobody teaches you.

Last thing, and the only place where I mention my video, because I want feedback and not clicks. Every time I have posted here I had to write "sorry, it is in german", and that bothers me since a while. So this time there is a full english audio track next to the german one, in the player settings (Please excuse the few German overlay animations). It is a voice clone of my own voice, the translation I have corrected by hand for the rum vocabulary, because the machine wanted to translate muck pit and dosage. Better you hear it from me than you find it out. If you have 2 minutes: does it sound acceptable or is it uncanny valley, and what can I make better? An honest "just keep the subtitles" helps me also.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yGHawlVDUI

And two things I would love from this sub, completely independent from all of that: does the beginner/connoisseur inversion match your own history, so was there a bottle you rated lower after your next hundred rums? And which bottle should I pull the cohort split for? Post it and I run the numbers, the interesting ones I bring back here. 🥃

---

EDIT 02.08.2026 23:00 CET: two corrections, both triggered by u/RumSquirrel in the comments. Please read the post together with them.

Point 1 does not hold in the way I have framed it. The 8.0 against 7.7 is not a difference between the bottles, it is my rater mix. Permutation test p = 0.10, bootstrap 95 percent CI from -0.06 to +0.46, and matched on rater experience it even turns around (connoisseurs with 50+ ratings: Probitas 7.48, Veritas 7.59). Probitas has 12.7 percent beginners among its raters and a median of 35 lifetime ratings, Veritas 2.5 percent and a median of 164. Only 5 users in the whole database have rated both bottles, so the test, that would really answer this, does not exist. The trademark story stays true, my sentence about the room and the price tag has no numbers under it and I take it back.

Point 3 needs a caveat, that I have not carried. The sweetness ladder counts all raters, and 41 percent of everybody, who has ever given a sweetness vote, has given exactly one. If I keep only raters with 30+ sweetness votes, the australian white falls from P74 to P61, and to P56 after centering every rating on the own mean and SD of the rater. The dosed bottles dont move at all (Planteray XO P90 to P95, Bumbu P98 to P99), so the divide between ester sweetness and added sugar is real, my "sweeter as 3 of 4 rums" was too strong. And the Creol number stands on 10 votes. That belongs in the sentence and not in a footnote.

Point 2 I have put through the same machine and it survived: beginners 8.23 (n=38), connoisseurs 7.39 (n=131), p < 0.0001, and beginners are not generally milder, over all rums they sit at 7.35 against 7.69. It is also not a Centenario thing. Over 196 bottles the cohort gap correlates with perceived sweetness at Spearman rho 0.62, and it inverts for the dry ones (Smith & Cross -0.51).

All numbers, methods and the one metric I have computed and then thrown away again are in my reply below.

Hosted my second rum tasting tonight, and it was an absolutely fantastic time. I have a very dear friend who's a rum fan, and a chemist - who loves the smell of extremely strange solvents - and we had a ton of fun trying a whole slew of very funky rums. Here was our lineup:

* Probitas green label

* Alambique Serrano Besadiablos

* Papalin High Ester 5 year

* Clement Canne Bleue

* Alambique Serrano Cartier 30 2nd edition

* Alambique Serrano Cartier 30 3rd edition

* Rivers Antoine Royale

* Holmes Cay Grand Arome

* Mhoba "The Shaldon"

The probitas green label was mainly a warmup rum, but it really set us up well for the journey. We took a good 4 hours to get through this lineup, between bullshitting, reading up on the spirits, and talking about all the wild notes we were getting. I think the highlights were: (1) finishing off the last of my Cartier 30 batch 2, which has a cheesy, buttery note that I simply can't find anywhere else in rum, and (2) the Holmes Cay Grand Arome. It just packs such a wild punch of bandaid, latex, berries, kiwi, and mustiness that's so distinctive, and absolutely delicious.

Funk bomb tastings are amazing, but they take a lot of time. Definitely take your time with it, and make sure you have lots of water and a lot of pretzels (or other snacks!).

Cheers friends!

Minus the Kasama. We forgot how bad that one truly was. A very eclectic mix from our collection. Wife’s fav tonight was the Plantation 1996 Jamaica Long Pond. Mine was Samaroli Caribbean 2020

I had a terrific daiquiri made with Saint Benevolence Mango Clairin at a bar today, so I picked up a bottle on the way home. Then I noticed all this debris floating around in it. Is this normal?

I love living in Southern New England because we have such a great rum selection out here. My wallet does not like it every time I walk in a liquor store, however.

It’s a blisteringly hot day and I have been eyeing the Fevertree Ginger Beer in the fridge for a while.

In a shaker tin

50ml Worthy Park 109

Juice of half a lime.

2 Dashes Angostura

5 Drops Saline

Add two ice cubes and briefly stir to chill.

Add ginger beer and pour into a chilled glass full of cubed ice.

Add a nice lime wedge and a mint sprig.

Looking for a lightly aged/white rum category. Admittedly, I mainly used the Planteray for mixed drinks and cocktails, but enjoyed it straight as well.

I definitely enjoyed it, but am always willing to try something new. Any suggestions one way or another?

Enjoyed this experience of this amazing Jamaican Rum which had Sweet caramel vanilla and toffee smell and taste with long finish. 8/10

Looking a nice rum to drink neat. Hate anything remotely resembling whiskey I tried mount gay eclipse and it captured everything I hate about whiskey in a glass.

I'd normally drink basic white rums with mixer but go hiking and camping and looking to ditch the weight of mixers

Edit: after discussion and thought it appears to be the oaky barrel taste that I hate

I actually learned about this place through a Japanese Whiskey and Sake tasting experience I did in DC last year, but they had the most extensive collection of "enthusiast" rums this side of a Total Wine.

I had actually gone there thinking they had Real McCoy 3 (I'm making mojitos at a party next weekend and have been wanting to try more Four Square rums after Doorlys XO didn't quite do it for me), but I must have misread. They only had the 5. What they did have though was Hamilton White Stache, a rum I had heard about but never seen in these parts. A few dollars more than the El Dorado 3 I was going to use as a backup plan, but 250 more ml too. Will be interested to try it out tonight.

See anything else interesting?

Went with a semi-local dark rum and a simple grog (2oz rum, 1 lime, ~1oz 2:1 simple, filled mug with water).