Having written about spiced rums in our last blog, it’s time to turn to dark rum.
We’ve had a good one on board over the last week or so — Caramay of St. Kitts Signature Blend Dark Rum by SK Blenders in Basseterre. As usual, there’s zero useful information on the label apart from the words “dark” “blended” and “aged in oak”. How long it was aged and what exactly was blended, we shall never know. Since they no longer grow sugar cane on St. Kitts, the “West Indian” rums they blended came from somewhere else.
*sigh*
All we can do is drink it, and tell you what we think.
Anyhoo, it’s been on the boat for a week, mostly used in rum punches. We haven’t written about it mostly because we had nothing to compare it to. Honestly, there aren’t a ton of dark rums on the shelves down here, apart from Myers (which to me is for cooking) and Goslings, which is already familiar to anyone interested in rum.
Looking for a good benchmark, my eye was drawn to El Dorado Dark Rum. If you’ve suffered through our previous 11 rum blogs, you know that I am a huge El Dorado fan — a fan of both their low-end and high-end rums. Well, they have a low-end, or at least low-price, dark rum that I was aware of but which I had never bothered with. Today, I bothered. For $7.50, why not?
El Dorado, if you need reminding, is a product of Guyana. Their products are widely distributed throughout the Caribbean, and their higher-end rums — the 5-yo, 8-yo, 12-yo and so on — are available in the US as well. They’re all good, and like everything else, much cheaper down here than they are in the US. Their “Five Star” rum has been my top value rum three years running, and the 12-yo is one of the rums we keep on board (along with other West Indies rums such as Cruzan Single Barrel Estate and English Harbour 10-yo) as the bar to which all other molasses rums aspire.
But how would their value-priced, screw-topped, 80-proof dark rum fare against SK’s pricier Signature Blend, also 80 proof?
It didn’t take long to find out. Although the SK is commendably smooth, as you might expected of a blended product, Melissa very quickly abandoned it for the El Dorado, which has a much stronger molasses, or treacle, flavor. Now, Melissa enjoyed treacle candies as a child and is partial to that taste. You may not be. But if you’re looking for true dark-rum taste to add to a mixed drink, the El Dorado Dark has that in spades. I don’t think I could sip it for long — for sipping I might default to the SK — but the El Dorado is going to give you all the dark-rum character you could ask for. And what are you buying dark rum for, if not that flavor?
A “blended” dark rum like SK is, of course, a compromise. It might be the right choice for some folks, but when we have two bottles on the table and we both keep reaching for the same one, that tells you all you need to know. And in this case it was the El Dorado.
As I told Melissa when I plucked it off the shelf in the Chinese market on Sint Maarten, El Dorado has never let me down! But a word of warning: dark rums are sweet rums, and they’re usually not aged rums, so abusing them will certainly lead to a nasty hangover. Moderation always!
The Cruises of Marlinspike 