Staff Tasting Notes
Nose: Bounty bars, banana bread, Demerara and nutmeg. Very creamy, developing nuttiness (almonds, macadamia, brasil), dry fruits, cola and fruit salad sweets with a hint of cherry.
Taste: Spicy on the tip of the tongue with a creamy body and a finish more savoury than expected. Ginger bread, more sugar (muscavado this time), cream soda with an underlying bitter, citrus note.
Finish: Long with nutmeg and cinnamon.
Comments: A good quality rum sitting proudly on our staff favourites list, it even converted the non-rum loving tasters!

Family Reserve is a limited release given exclusively to the British branch of the rum-making Seale family. It is aged in small American white oak casks for a minimum of 12 years. Tropical ageing in the Barbadian climate imparts a character and complexity comparable to European spirits twice this age.

The IWSC Tasting Notes are:
Medium to dark amber. Rich, aromatic nose with raisins, prune and some treacle. Slight vanilla notes and lots of wood. Big and full in the mouth with lots of rich flavour and mellow maturity. Fairly sturdy oak influence. Vanilla plays an important part in long lasting finish.

“Wow, that’s a serious rum” - Dave Broom, Editor Whisky Magazine & author of 'Rum'

	Product Details
	Age:	12
	Volume:	0.7
	Alc. Volume:	40

 

Rum has its origins in and around the Caribbean and its history is tied to sugar, colonialism and slavery. Originally produced as a way of extracting some use from the waste material from sugar cane - molasses - rum is made using techniques familiar to the whisky enthusiast... adding yeast to the sugary wort (or molasses) to trigger fermentation, distillation in either pot or coffey stills, then maturation in casks. The story is even more varied than that of Scotch Whisky production, however.

As a guide, here are some of the basic styles of rum, in rough order of style from lighter to heavy:
Cuban/Latin Style: Light and delicate, with admirable finesse. Bacardi now dominates the world, and is a famous example of this lighter style, made using continuous stills.
Rhum Agricole - Produced on the French Carribbean islands, this type of rum is made using fresh sugar cane juice rather than molasses as its starting point. This produces a more vegetal sweetness, without so much of the heavy treacly sweetness of other rums. It is often matured in spicy French oak casks too, and is often said to have a more cognacy, "grippy" palate. Good examples: Barbancourt and Clement.
Demerara: A "soft, subtle, medium bodied style" says Dave Broom, although this can depend on the specific still. A lot of the 'dark' rums such as OVD etc called themselves Demerara rums because they had Guyanese spirit as their base. However, the huge amounts of caramel added to these blends masked any true Demerara character. All Demerara rum comes from Guyana, on the North-East tip of South America, and where 200 distilleries used to operate, only one now does: Diamond Distillery. This contains a cornucopia of stills however, with wooden pot stills, Coffey stills, copper pot stills, and the last working wooden Coffey still in world (named Enmore). Crazy!
Barbados: The Bajan style is gorgeously soft, balanced and easy-drinking. Perfect for someone who likes something "smooth" for easy-slugging. Good examples: Doorly's XO and Mountgay Extra Old.
Jamaica: In the same way as Islay whiskies stick out a peat-lashed tongue at the lighted, rounded style of other malts, Jamaican rums are defiantly individual. Distilled in pot stills with loony levels of esters, their pungency can take a little getting used to, but behind this are lots of ripe bananas and pineapple notes. Also referred to as the Wedderburn style.

With sincere thanks to Dave Broom - the worlds foremost Rum dude - for writing the excellent book 'Rum' and letting us quote from it and use tasting notes. If you want to learn about this sunny spirit, buy it immediately.