After seeing a post on the UK Rum Club Facebook group I signed up to be kept informed about a new offering from The Colours Of Rum called the Up Spirits Club, and kept informed I was! After forming a tasting committee to select which cask they were due to release they sent out periodic emails keeping us up to date on how the release was progressing. They even sent out a poll for the members of the club to decide which colour scheme they used for the branding on the bottle, an added bonus being that they went with the one I chose.

On 7th June, just after I had purchased a bottle of Foursquare ECS 2011, an email appeared in my inbox with a link to purchase the above bottle. Around the link was some information about the release which can be summarised as it having been distilled at Trinidad Distillers Limited (Angostura) in 2009 and aged for 10 years in the tropics (presumably Trinidad) and a further 4 years somewhere else (presumably Poland). 259 bottles were produced from a single cask and released at cask strength of 62.90 ABV.

The only orders I have made from Europe since Brexit was from sites which are VAT registered so this order resembled a bit of a risk. My gamble paid off when two weeks later my bottle arrived with no import or other taxes being levied. Premium is a word which is often misused in the rum world but I do think the presentation of this bottle earns that label. This is in line with the rest of the Colours Of Rum offerings, they do a good job. I should also add that this was the most secure cork seal I have ever come across. I had to use a little wine opening Swiss army knife thing to get to the point of being able to open it.

The nose has a kind of warming spice but not in a wintery Christmas pudding kind of way, more like a ginger cake for want of a better comparison. The first impression from drinking this rum is off the chart. I have tried a couple of Angostura releases but this is my first one from an independent bottler. There are notes that I recognise but only just. This rum is a savage, incredibly raw and aggressive, especially for a rum of this age. The nose didn’t seem the most complex to me and it certainly didn’t signal what I was about to taste. There is an awful lot going on with this one and it all seems to happen at once, all that is left after is a bit of a perfumey aftertaste. I am really interested to see how this is after a while in an opened bottle. Even in the time it has sat in the glass it has slowed down a bit with a more prolonged medicinal note which is more in line with the warmth from the nose.

I don’t anticipate this being one of my longer posts but I have been doing quite well lately at actually putting stuff up on here instead of just keeping notes and images in drafts so I wanted to keep the momentum going. I won’t spend too much time elaborating on what the Foursquare distillery is and what they do as I’m going to work on the presumption that if you have found your way to this rag tag rum blog then you’ll already know. As part of their ECS offering Foursquare release a vintage each year which has been tropically aged for 12 years. Last year’s 2010 release was one of my favourite ever ECS bottlings, I even ended up buying a second bottle to put behind the bar for my daughter’s christening party. Let’s see how they managed to follow up on that…..

Purchasing this bottle was refreshingly easy. At the time of writing it has been released for two weeks and there are still plenty of bottles available to purchase at RRP. After years of seeing Foursquare ECS releases sell out in minutes, I have a few theories why this might be the case. One is the cost of living causing people to purchase less rum or cheaper bottles, I know this is the case with a few of my friends. Another reason could be that maybe the bottom has fallen out of the resale craze, this is possibly related to the first factor, and something I hope to be true. Yet another reason would be the number of bottles released, I believe that there was 30,000 bottles of the 2010 ECS released, I haven’t seen an official number for this one but I presume it will be a similar amount. Maybe there is also some snobbery around the vintage ECS releases being less exciting than the named ones which are generally aged for longer and/or involve a mix of different types of casks. As well as finding this bottle easy to buy I also pulled off a masterstroke of pre loading my Whisky Exchange basked with enough miniatures to be eligible for free shipping. As well as this bottle I also had delivered miniature bottles of El Dorado 12 years old, Rivers Royale and French Antilles 2020 Port Cask Grand Arome. I intend to return to my recent El Dorado high ester post and use the 12 year old as a point of reference. The Rivers bottle is to appease my friend and his family who have been insisting that I try it although not so much that they have ever brought me a bottle back with them!

Now it’s time to drink the stuff. In the bottle this looks much darker than a 12 year old rum might, maybe it covered a particularly warm few years in Barbados. The nose is obviously Foursquare but seems a bit of a departure from recent bottlings, it is sharp, light and fruity. I cant quite fully place it but it’s something like a packet of midget gems or boiled sweets.

2011 was the year I met my wife and much like she was, this bottling is overwhelmingly instantly likeable. It is quite evident that there has been no experiment here with different casks, this is just pure Foursquare. All of the notable flavours are there and this is still a very complex drink but it feels really light and fresh. Despite the lightness the finish is almost buttery. I really like this and if anything I think they might have managed to improve on the 2010 release. Luckily I still have some of my 2010 left so I will have a go at comparing them sometime soon.