Bought 10th December 2022 from Royal Mile Whiskies for £71.95

It’s St Patrick’s Day and Irish eyes are smiling! I bought this bottle a few months back and have been very gradually working my way through it.

I’d say that my rum journey started in St Lucia. I went there on holiday as a young man with my brother and his then girlfriend (now wife) and my then girlfriend (now ex girlfriend). Before going to the Caribbean I knew of rum but this trip really threw me in at the deep end. Rum punch was being served everywhere you looked and I bought my first bottle of rum there, a bottle of Bounty which I still own to this day.

The box and the bottle are beautifully presented. With the box including a fair amount of information about the rum’s namesake, Admiral Rodney and also some information about the rum. The rum has been aged in the valley for 11 tropical years before being moved to ex Irish whiskey casks for another 9 months.

In the glass it is a colour which is something between ruby and bronze. It really is a beautiful looking rum. I have no reason to believe that anything has been added to this rum to make it look like this, it just looks very well aged.

The nose straight after the pour is quite spicy and you get a lot of the alcohol coming through, especially considering it isn’t the highest abv. After it has been left a while in the glass it mellows out quite a lot and the whisky notes start to come through.

This tastes like a very well developed and flavourful column still rum. It doesn’t feel like any corners have been cut in it’s production. Similar to the nose you get a lot more after leaving it to sit for a while. My first impression was that it has a number of similarities to a Foursquare ECS but I poured a glass of Foursquare 2010 for comparison and it wasn’t as close as I’d first thought. Admittedly it may have been another ECS bottling that had stuck in my memory or maybe just the general result of an established distiller experimenting with different vintages and casks.

I haven’t seen this particular rum reviewed anywhere else but if you’re looking for an overview of the current state of St Lucian rum then I would definitely recommend this episode of Rumcast, I found it to be a really enjoyable listen and it certainly filled me of enthusiasm for future releases from this distillery.