You're listening to another edition of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Roger Adamson. I do beer marketing and education for Binny's. I'm Hillary. I tweet things. I'm Greg. I do communications. I'm Pat. I handle spirits things. And today, we are gonna talk about one of my favorite spirits subjects, and one of Roger's, you know, I know you can't see him because it's a podcast, but Roger is dressed like a pirate today, and that is because we are talking about rum. Isn't that right, matey? Yarr! We've been putting this one off. Like, we were gonna do it months ago, and Pat refused because he cares about Roger. That's awesome. That's true. Much appreciated. Yeah, and now, so like, it's really hard to cover rum in one podcast because rum is a sprawling category that has many different styles, many different countries, things like that. So we're gonna kind of touch... Wolfily misunderstood. It is wolfily misunderstood. So we're gonna cover a few, like, basics today of some stuff that you can get in most Binny stores, plus a couple kind of oddballs, and we can go from there, but we may end up having to come back with a rum part 2, depending on how interested Just to lay them out on the table, I don't get or particularly care for rum, so I hope my opinion changes. Yeah, well, the door's over there, okay? If you don't like rum, you can get out. I can get on out. Really, though, rum is any distilled spirit made from a base of sugar cane or its derivatives. So normally that means they're made from molasses, but it can be made with sugar cane syrup or fresh pressed sugar cane juice as is the tradition with most of the French speaking countries in the Caribbean. So we'll cover some of that later. Outside of that, there's really no regulations. Most rum is aged, not all of it necessarily, though. It does have to be bottled at least 40 percent alcohol for America and outside of that, that's about all the rules there is. You can add coloring to it, you can add extra sugar to it, you can age it in pretty much any kind of barrel you so choose if you're going to choose to age it. There's a lot of leeway for these producers to create their own house style, so to speak. How many different kinds of sugar derivatives are there? I think I named most of them. Fresh sugarcane juice, molasses, you can use sugarcane syrup, you could use granulated sugar and turn it into a syrup with a water, so really just as long as the fermentable sugar is somewhere down the line came from a sugarcane plant, then you're A bit of history here. So when sugar was a big deal and a huge commodity, we think of sugar now, beet sugar is where you get most of the sugar from, but in the past it was from sugarcane. So because of that, the sugarcane growing regions in the Caribbean and South America is where a lot of rum exploded. Yeah, and it is important to mention that sugarcane is not native to that area. Sugarcane is native to Southeast Asia. Chances are it looks like there was a distilled spirit made from sugarcane made on the Indian subcontinent maybe as early as like the 1300s or maybe as early as the 700s. There's a lot of old Sanskrit text talking about something similar to rum, and then it kind of spread from there. So when Europeans started raping and pillaging Southeast Asia, they found this thing they really loved, and then when they went over and started raping and pillaging North America, they decided, hey, this is a good place to grow this stuff. So they moved it all over there, and kind of the dark side of rum history, I mean definitely the dark side of rum history is, rum was dependent on really a triangular trade of slaves and molasses and rum. They were producing so much sugar. I heard an interesting story about some of the first stills in the Caribbean, English wise, were in Barbados, and they had so much leftover molasses that they were just literally dumping it into the sea. Yeah, they were for a very long time, and then they kind of figured out, somebody noticed that molasses that got left out kind of started to ferment, and when it mixed with rainwater and stuff, because you got to water it down a bit, and that's kind Malque Rum, we carry some rums from them, they kind of celebrate as one of the oldest, continuously distilling distilleries. What are we tasting? All right, our first rum is El Dorado 3 Year Old. And the first thing you'll notice here is, does this look like it was aged in barrels for 3 years? Looks like vodka. No, it is perfectly clear. And that's very common with a lot of the rums you see that are clear are actually aged in wood. And they filter the color out using some kind of activated carbon, usually like a charcoal. Bacardi Silver, for example, like the rum that pretty much the rest of the category is kind of measured against the baseline, you know, kind of everybody's first rum. That is actually a blend of one to three year old rums, and they filter the color out of it. So aged in Barrel then filtered? Yes. So same thing here, El Dorado. El Dorado is maybe my favorite rum distillery. El Dorado is made down in Guiana at DDL. It was DDL at one point, Demerara Distiller's Limited. Guiana is home to the Demerara River Valley, which was famous for the quality of the sugar cane it grows. At one point, there were dozens of distilleries down there. Through some experimentation with communist government and stuff like that, they all consolidated into one unit. Now we have this distillery that has all these different kinds of stills from all these historic sugar plantations and distillers under one roof, making all kinds of different styles of rum. This is the alternative to like if you're buying a silver rum and you're because a lot of, Roger can explain this a little better, but a lot of tiki cocktails, a lot of rum cocktails require several different kinds of rums. They might call for a light rum and a dark rum and an overproof rum. Even if you want to have this, I'm only interested in really sipping strong, dark aged rums, there is always a good use for a white or a silver rum in your house. It doesn't have to be one of those mass market brands like a Bacardi. You can spend an extra couple of dollars and get this El Dorado 3 Year old and it's fantastic. For example, when we think of rum, what's the most common cocktail you guys come to? What comes to your mind when we say rum? Rum and Coke. Okay. Rum and Coke, obviously, if you're feeling fancy, you'll call that a Cuba Libre. No, that has a line in it. Maybe technically, yeah. Take the best kind of correct. Right. What else? What about you, Elle? Like Tiki drinks or- Like Mai Tai. Yeah, Mai Tai. Mai Tai is one of them, a daiquiri. A daiquiri was actually one of the most famous cocktails for a long time. It has fallen out of fashion because now we associate daiquiris with frozen drink machine like a syrup. Yeah, but actually, it isn't like that, right? It's just like white rum and lime juice or something. Exactly. The most common way to drink rum that's been done for literally centuries is to mix weak, which would be water, sour, which would be some sort of citrus, usually lime, strong, which is the rum, and then sweet, which is sugar. A quick background on sugar. When you go to the grocery store and you buy brown sugar, ironically, that sugar is usually refined white sugar, which has had molasses put back into it to give it color and flavor. What you should look for that you can literally substitute in your recipes, you can put it in your drinks, coffee, tea, etc. Baked goods. Really interesting flavor to it is true brown sugar. This goes by a couple of different names. You'll usually see it as sugar in the raw. That's a famous Hawaiian producer that was the first on the market, so you'll see that. You'll see it referred to as demerara sugar. Sometimes you'll see it referred to as turbinado sugar, which is a reference to turbines used to process the sugar. But any of those are essentially less refined sugar, so they aren't bleached at all. There's still a molasses content to them, and it's going to give the sugar a different taste. Yeah, a little richer flavor. So if you're making a cocktail, the sweet aspect nowadays is usually like a simple syrup, and it's typically made out of refined sugar. If you want to kind of make your cocktails a little different and more upscale, try making your own simple syrups. It's super easy to do. It's just equal parts sugar and water. You dissolve it over heat, let it cool, and you're good to go. So if you make a cocktail with a simple syrup that's made with a dark demerara sugar, it's gonna have a totally different flavor than if you made it with just the sugar from your canister on your countertop. That's all refined. Worthwhile sugar tips, courtesy of Roger Adamson. So we get back to the daiquiri. Traditionally, daiquiris, they're usually gonna use a white rum. So you want the drink to look aesthetically pleasing and to have kind of a very neutral color to it. It's gonna look kind of silvery, maybe have a slight tint to it. And you want the citrus and kind of the pure rum flavor to shine through. You don't necessarily want as much of that richer, kind of fuller sugar flavor that you'll find in some of the darker rums. So back to our white rum here. Wait, don't forget the tiny umbrella. Oh, yeah. Very important. So our white rum, though, that we're using in our hypothetical daiquiri here, El Dorado 3 Year Olds. What do you guys think of this? It smells pretty neutral, honestly. Yeah, it's got a little bit of soft vanilla from the oak still, but it's not dark and heavy. It's not super molasses heavy. It's not oak heavy. It doesn't have that overwhelming tropical fruit, banana type of thing going on. It is clean cane distillate. Totally. I didn't think I would like this on its own, and I could see myself sipping on it. Yeah, I wouldn't even guess it is rum, honestly, just by the nose. Once you taste it, I think it's pretty clearly rum, but it's not neutral, but it's light and it's mixable more importantly. Also with the clear rum, something we run into, it reminds me of cider when we talk about hard cider. Unfortunately, one of the misconceptions with rum is that it's sweet, that all rum is sweet. The problem with that is that there's plenty of rums that are sweet. There's some that are horribly sweet, but your better rums and your more premium rums don't rely as heavily on residual sugar, any color or flavorings. If you've had rum in the past and you've tried maybe a tiki tropical drink, and it's just been way too sweet and not to your liking, you can make a daiquiri with this and it could be as dry as you want it to be. You could barely put any sugar in there. This is a dry rum and you're adding a very sharp citric juice like lime juice. It's going to be sour. Yeah, it's going to be sour. You just add a little bit of sugar to taste and you're good. One of Hemingway's favorite cocktails was a daiquiri essentially, and the way that he liked them at the Florida was to be double the strength of rum, and he didn't want any sugar in there. He's diabetic, so no sugar. There's a little splash of grapefruit in there in addition to lime and a little splash of maraschino liqueur that gives a kind of nuttiness, not necessarily cherry. It's a misconception that liqueur is actually pretty dry and nutty, but again, an example of a cocktail that's rum based that's very dry. In front of us right here, we have the lightest, the unaged, clearest rum, next to the darkest rum. So I think it'll be interesting tasting these side by side. Well, yeah, so these are from the same distillery, but again, rum can have some coloring to it. I would probably guess there's a little bit of it in this El Dorado 15. It doesn't say that it doesn't have color, therefore I'm kind of suspicious that it might. But either way, our next rum here is El Dorado 15 year old, one of the best rums in the store, and one of the best deals in the store. I mean, this is a rum that routinely sells for under 50 bucks always, pretty much, and sometimes you can find it as low as 40 bucks, and it's a true 15 year old product. Some of the rums in this blend are actually up to 25 years old. This too, it is important to remember that when you age spirits, the climate that they're aged in really affects how they age and especially how much evaporation there is. I don't know that it's necessarily this intense, but a lot of distillers down in the Caribbean like to say that you can double the number if you were to compare that aging versus say aging in scotland, because they always like to compare themselves They always do and they do say it's about double. The extraction you get of those oak flavors happens faster and is more intense. Well, are they aging single malt down there for comparison sake? I know that they've done some indie rums that get exported. No, there's a lot of rum aging in scotland. There's a huge amount of rum aging in scotland and the Netherlands, and they have a huge thriving independent bottle of rum business. They just want to make this unscientific marketing claim. Yeah. But it's crazy humid and it's really hot. Right. So the point being, when they open the barrels, there's no disputing the fact that there's going to be a lot of spirit lost. Yeah, there's a lot of angels share. So to drive home what Pat said, this is one of the best values in our store, and I agree it is one of the best products in our store. Where it comes from, I had mentioned earlier about the history of this distillery, but I would argue that this is maybe the most historically significant distillery in the Americas, as the amount of history under one roof is unmatched. So when they combined all these different sugar producing plantations and their respective distilleries, because the way it was back in the day, each sugar producing plantation also usually had a distillery on it just to make use of the leftovers. So molasses is the leftover essentially from processing refined sugar. Instead of just dumping it in the ocean, you know, you could still make money on it. So that's why most of these sugar plantations had a distillery. So they all had different types of stills. So at the El Dorado distillery, they have the last working wooden coffee still in the world. This is a two-column continuous still made out of wood. They have wooden pot stills there, and they have just, I think they have 11 or 13 stills now, plus some modern ones. So this particular bottle is a blend of rums made on the Enmore and Diamond coffee stills and the Port Marant still. The Port Marant still is a double pot still made out of wood, and it's also made on a single wooden pot still as well. So you get a lot of that heavier, fuller-bodied pot still character with some of the lighter column coffee still character out of this too. That's incredible that there's a wooden still. Yeah, and it gets used enough. And to think, this is obviously a piece of wood receiving intense heat, and it doesn't burn or anything like that. I mean, it's been soaked and sealed and all that over the centuries. So El Dorado, 15 years old. I don't like the nose of it. I think it smells a little dirty and a little funky and a little corky, but it's so good when I taste it. Yeah, it's round and rich and balanced, and it's got that, I had mentioned earlier, the three-year-old didn't have a lot of that banana and tropical fruit. That comes roaring back here, but it's balanced by this brown sugar soaked, just like stone fruit thing too. It's awesome. Like a clovey nutmeg-y spiciness on the back end that you wouldn't expect. Are rums highly caloric? alcohol is calories. So yes, 40 percent alcohol has calories. It depends on the rum. That is something they don't have to disclose. That is a point of contention with the rum nerds right now. Certain nations, you have to disclose that. So for example, I know that there is 44 grams of sugar per liter of Ronzacapa 23 because they have to disclose it on the label in Norway. And some rum geek took a picture of it on a store in Norway and put it on the internet. 44 grams a liter. That's like a Coca-Cola. So is that ingredient sugar or is that like actual output? That is what's in the bottle. Whoa, in addition to alcohol? Yes. Whoa, yeah, that's caloric. So the alcohol itself has caloric value, but then the other stuff in the liquid has calories too. And if it's sugar instead of water, yeah, it's going to be higher in calories. That's my problem with rum cocktails is just I feel like I wake up with the worst hangover because they add all these extra sugary. Well, I mean, to Roger's point earlier though, if you're making rum cocktails like that at home, you can always take the sugar down a bit. You always can. A lot. You can omit so much sugar. Most tiki drinks are actually, the syrup does not need to be a huge percentage of the ingredients. They involve lots of different things, usually multiple liquors, some liqueurs, but fresh fruit juice, a lot different than stuff out of a can or whatever, less sugar. They don't need to be as sweet as they are. It's good to know, I've got a Bachelorette party coming up, and we need to make some tiki drinks. Roger is available for hire for bartending at Bachelorette parties. Just by the way. I want one anecdote. I will be quick. On that pot still, one thing that I wanted to mention, if you've ever heard of the Naval Rum Ration, for literally hundreds of years, this didn't stop until 1971, I believe, the British Royal Navy gave all of their sailors a daily rum ration. So, the type of rum that was supplied to the British Royal Navy tended to be a very heavy pot still character. That actual pot still that El Dorado has was one of the stills used to produce the rum that the British Navy bought. Yeah. So, the... Pretty cool. I mean, El Dorado is a large distillery, and they make a lot of rum, and they sell it to a lot of different bottlers, and a lot of different branding companies that take that rum and take it all over the world. Black Top Day, the last day of the Daily Rum Ration, was July 31st, 1970. Our next rum, we are going to the other side of the planet, just because we can. This is a Fijian rum. So this is a plantation Fiji rum from 2009, distilled 2009. It was aged seven years in Bourbon Barrel in Fiji, and then it finished for two years in a Cognac cask in France. This stinks. Do you not like it because it's sweet? This stinks like aerosol so badly. So this is what you would call the agricultural character that some rums have, which is a very acquired taste. Does it remind you of green bananas or green plantains at all? Yeah. Yep. That's often how like tend to describe it to people. Even more vegetal too, like peas. Yeah. I've had American agricultural-esque rums that have smelled almost like olives. Yeah. There's a little bit of olive in here. Actually, that quality is abundant, but it's not poopy the way that Jamaican rum can be. It's a grassier style of rum. Yeah. It's not as thick and sticky as some other stuff, like some of the Central and South American rums can be. I like it because it's a little more delicate on its feet, and you get a little bit of that sweetness from the Cognac Cast Finishing, but I think it allows that fresh sugarcane character to shine. Sugarcane is a type of grass, so when you make things out of sugarcane, it can get a little grassy. What's the proof on this? Proof on this is 44.8 percent. What's neat with plantation is they're not afraid to do some overproof expressions or to do something past 80 proof, which a lot of rums tend to just stay at the bare minimum of 80, and sometimes it's really nice, especially in cocktails, to have Holds up to getting water down by juices and sugars and stuff like that. That's where it seems like it would work really well. That quality that it has, it's almost like plastic. Yes. If I was just going to have a glass of rum, I would probably choose El Dorado 15. If I was looking for something that shows a little more character in a cocktail, this plantation would be awesome in just a basic daiquiri with lime. Yeah. Because those green flavors really paired well together. Or with pineapple and cherry juice. That would be a great combo. Something like we like that plantation bottle stuff at Higher Proof, I always give them crap for adding sugar to the rum. They're notorious for adding sugar at the back end. They call it dosage. Other people will call it back sweetening. To their point though, they're not trying to sweeten the rum, they're adding sugar to try to round out the mouth feel. They're really not adding that much, but it can be noticeable in certain bottlings. I'm always a big proponent whenever anyone buys a bottle, especially whiskeys, to tell people, you don't have to just drink it neat. So with rums, especially the premium ones, you don't have to just drink it neat. I drink a lot of rums with a little bit of freshly squeezed lime. It has to be fresh lime. Don't bother buying pre-done lime juice. Pre-done lime juice has a sign in place. If you're gonna have to make 30 daiquiris, you're probably gonna wanna buy pre-done lime juice. But if you're making yourself or your significant other a cocktail for an evening, you're a damn fool if you're buying a bottle of lime juice. This is so funky. Oh, we haven't even gotten to the funk yet. All right. Next rum here. Yeah. Can we play some George Clinton, please? Stop. Jim, do you wanna get sued? Our next rum is from my other favorite distillery, El Dorado, and then I love, love, love the rums from Four Square on Barbados. So Four Square is run by a man named Richard Seale, and he is a big component of transparency with his rums. So they do not have sugar added, they do not have coloring added, and what you're getting is rum in its purest form. So we are tasting Four Square Premise. This was a limited release last year. It is still available at most Binny's stores. This is 92 proof, so that is outstanding, and it was aged in both bourbon and sherry casks for 10 years, and it is a blend of rums made on a pot still and a column still. A lot going on there. For sherry aging, you'd think it would be sweeter. I think the sherry shines through, and it's because I was wrong on the last one. The last one smells like plastic. This one smells like aerosol. This smells like aerosol propelled adhesive spray. It tastes like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. I think it smells like overripe bananas dipped in brown sugar. There's a big brown sugar component, like real brown sugar that bordering on molasses. There's vanilla tones though that I think. Definitely vanilla. I think whiskey drinkers and especially all you pastry boys out there that are obsessed with vanilla beers, welcome to the world of rum. You could buy a bottle of rum for the price of some of these beers these days. This is a whiskey drinker's rum for sure. I mean, you're getting cask influence, heavy cask influence like you would with either a scotch or a bourbon, but you're also still getting, like you had mentioned, Roger, that real rich brown sugar note and fruit. And nail polish remover. You know what? You're just a loser. I'm still on the outside on this one, I guess, gosh. You're just a loser. Again, though, to Greg's point, so again, I'd like to emphasize that Greg has a very good palate and he's perhaps a little hypersensitive to some of these things. secondly- Especially criticism. You can, by adding a tiny squeeze of citrus, be it lime or lemon to this, it can round out and soften some of the- I think you can cocktail out the Fiji. I'm not sure on this one. There's no- Well, you don't have to cocktail this out. There's no harm in adding a garnish to something you're sipping neat, and that's somewhere people are like, oh, I'm ruining it with a lime wedge. It's like, no, you're really toning down flavors you don't like and enhancing others with a tiny little bit of citrus. Don't be afraid to- using garnishes is manly. We're going to start a hashtag about this or something. Just put a bolt in there. Give me a lime wheel. You don't even need to squeeze it. Just put a lime wheel on there so you've aromatized it. A buckeye. Going to garnish with a buckeye. I would love to do that. That's what you garnish the peanut butter whiskey with, is a buckeye. Just bitter. Moving along, so I had mentioned earlier that we have a lot of different styles of rum. I mean, we tasted a white rum, we tasted a couple of dark rums. We're gonna taste a rum now from Jamaica, and Jamaica is home to a very specific kind of flavor profile rum. And. It smells like poop. It does not smell like poop. It kind of smells like rotting fruit, though. It smells like rotting fruit. Like olives. No, it smells like- I get olives, too, and kind of they get kind of brownie. So Jamaican rum, they make high ester rum in Jamaica. What's the question, Greg? I get these same notes from olives and then Ethiopian coffee. I get the same. Oh, that kind of green citric East African coffee for sure. Yeah. Jamaican rum, Jamaicans have been making a style of rum called high ester rum for a little over a hundred years now. And to their credit, modern chemistry was really the driving factor in Jamaican rum distillation long before other distilleries and other distilling nations started paying attention and taking measurements and doing anything else. They were really on the scientific forefront and frontier of distillation globally. And you wouldn't think so because it's right in our backyard and it doesn't have the history of cognac or single malt whiskey. But some of the most scientifically specific and exacting distillation has been taking place in Jamaica for a very long time. And so they make this high ester rum. And esters are these fruity, funky compounds that come out during both fermentation and distillation. And the way they do this is they add something called dunder. And dunder... Dunderstruck! Really? ACDC sucks. And dunder is kind of the equivalent of sour mash, but it's even more sour and weird. What's it made from? So dunder, you take what is essentially the leftover stillage, the bottom of the last fermentation and distillation, and these scrapings of gunk. Like plant gunk. Yeah, and you put it in what's referred to as a muck pit, which is literally just a giant stinky pit. And they're making its muck. Dug into the ground out. Yeah, no Jamaican distillery wants to show you this. You can tour a lot of distilleries in Jamaica, and they never talk about this, and they never show you this, but there is a giant pit dug into the ground full of the leftover... I mean, if you're visiting, Greg, they throw you at it. Yeah, full of the leftover. I'm imagining a hole behind that row of blue outhouses at any beer festival. Yeah, kind of, yeah. It smells like Dark Lord Day. But then when you smell these crazy tropical elements, they throw fruit into the dunder pits too. So there's all these unique tropical fruits that are native to the island. So the muck pit, so they put the dunder in the muck pit. The dunder is like the stillage was what's leftover at the bottom of the still, and it's what's like the leftover kind of croissant leftover frothy yeasty crap from the leftover fermentation. They put it in the muck pit, and there it sits, and it bacterially ferments forever. Time out, time out. You're telling me that the reason that I'm smelling rotting fruit is because they literally have a pit full of rotting organic matter that they use to flavor the rum. Yes. You let me put that in my mouth. No, okay, but flavor the rum is a misconception because it runs through a still, so it's being sanitized at very high temperatures. So they have this stuff, and there are many distillers in Jamaica who will say they have never seen the bottom of their muck pit. Stuff gets taken out of it, stuff gets added to it. Yeah, that's called a compost pit. Yeah, it's kind of. It's a compost pit. They're keeping it natural, man. And so depending on how much dunder gets added to a distillation depends on the ester levels. And so we can chemically measure the ester levels, and they have different names for different amounts of, it's grams per liter is how ester levels are measured in rum, kind of how we would measure like PPM and smoky scotch. And so like there's common clean and wetter burns, and then all the way up the most high ester rum is called continental. And that's because the wacky Germans love the most high ester rum they can get. And you're talking this is like 1600 to 3000 of this grams a liter, it's not grams, it's Hg, whatever Hg is. Hectograms? I don't know what a Hectogram is. But it's like the highest ester rum they make was always the most popular stuff they sold in those kind of Germanic nations. And so this day, most of that rum gets sold over there. And a lot of it gets aged over there too. Hillary, when you try this, when you taste it and smell it, does it remind you of any perfumes you've smelled? No. Because nobody likes smelling like poop. Now, this doesn't smell like poop, but it smells like it's grassy, it is overripe fruit. It's definitely an acquired taste. And there's a reason most bottled Jamaican rums don't taste like this. But this is, the one we're tasting, I don't know if we even mentioned yet, is called Doctor Bird. And it's actually bottled in America. It's a hundred proof. But this rum was blended and designed to be like the highlight of high ester Jamaican rum. Yeah, this is supposed to be the extreme of high ester Jamaican rum. The reason that I ask about the perfume is that some of these distilleries are literally distilling distillate to these crazy high ester levels for perfume manufacturers. Really? Yes. I believe it. So when you think about it, try it again, one of the things I want you to think of is Juicy Fruit Gum. Juicy Fruit Gum will never divulge what their gum is supposed to taste like. Juicy Fruit is vague enough that it's just tropical fruit. It's been argued that it was modeled after Jackfruit, which is a super weird tropical fruit. I feel like this comes up every third of podcasts. Fruit King. Try this now and think of Jackfruit. Roger, the Fruit King, Adamson. Think of Juicy Fruit Gum. It's got a Juicy Fruit Gum. Sometimes people refer to it as a tutti frutti flavor. It's weird. This is super weird. There's no offense and buts around it. One thing that I will say that's neat about high ester rum, regardless of the producer. Can I jump in with the bubblegum thing? Yeah. Bubblegum, the flavor, the pink bubblegum, is a combination of a bunch of crazy fruits, but they also have to put in sulfurous rotten egg smell because otherwise it tastes synthetic and we sense that and that's this and then we sense that it's something organic instead of synthetic and it tastes better to us. Pink gum is all those wacky fruits plus farts. That's why gum is gross. That's why people like gum. So mixing wise. It's absolutely true. Just like the Dum Dum's Factoid. Go ahead and Google that you guys. If you mix with this, there's two things I like to suggest. One, jump in both feet full forward, use it as the main rum and mix it with guava and pineapple. Those are the two things, especially guava that I find it mixes really well with. If you want, conversely, use this literally like you would bitters. You put drops of it in a cocktail. That way, a tiniest bit goes a super long way. You literally drop. You're saying a lot of Caribbean rum manufacturers that do a regional blend use it in that sense to give it a little bit of complexity. It's a flavoring thing. It's just like our classic tiki drinks that have three different types of rum. Those blended regional rums will have a little bit of high ester Jamaican rum in, but again, a little bit. Even the Jamaican rum distillers themselves, any bottle of Appleton, for instance, does not at all taste like this, but it has a little bit. Hey, by the way, I'm knocking this, but I think that everybody should try it because it is something to experience. Also, in Jamaica, the people drink clear, high overproof, high ester rum. Yeah, off the still, overproof, high ester rum. Nobody drinks aged rum in Jamaica. It's not a thing. They drink it with a bunch of fruit juices. They make it into like a rum punch. Again, it's like Isla whiskey. You'd think it was a spice ingredient in other blends of whiskeys, or if you want really over the top flavor, you can just enjoy it by itself. But this is a great rum to add some complexity to a mixed drink. It's going to taste super different, but it's different. I understand when people are like, whoa. All right. I can't tell if I like it or not. That's a good way to think of this. It's hard to wrap your mind around it. How much is it? Doctor Bird is $27.99 at your local Binny's. I would try that with guava. Yeah. It's one of those things that I don't want this type of rum all the time, but every once in a while, it's really cool. Fun fact, the Doctor Bird is the National Bird of Jamaica. It's a hummingbird species with these really long, cool looking tail feathers right there on the front of the bottle. I love hummingbirds. They probably don't feel the same way about you. My dad tracks them every year on this app. It's a very dad thing to do. That's awesome. Is it Hummingbirdler? Oh, that's my preferred hummingbird app. Hummingbirdly. Have you guys ever seen a hummingbird moth? Yes, I get them in my house all the time. They're really interesting. Last rum for today. With how much Roger wants to talk about rum cocktails, we're probably going to have to do another one of these soon. We should do a whole- Rum part two, rum cocktails. Yeah, we should do rum cocktails. Rum part two, how to drink your rum. Oh my God, we can get Tiki cups. Sure. Only if you order the Star Wars ones. But whereas Tiki drinks are super complicated, usually involve a ludicrous number of ingredients, for this next type of rum, it's a three ingredient drink. Yeah, so we are going to taste a Rum JM Single Barrel, hand-selected by us here at the Whiskey Hotline. This is barrel number 729 we're tasting, and this is about a four-year-old, almost four-year-old rum. This is a rum agricole. The people of Martinique where this particular rum agricole is made, drink a very specific cocktail. You want to tell us about it, Roger? Sure. It's called a tea punch as in petite or small punch. Instead of lots of punches which involve all these different kinds of fruit juices, this is again that classic formula. You're going to use rum, something sweet, which in this case, they use cane syrup. That is sugar cane juice boiled down into a syrup, and then lime juice. You take your glass, you pour in a circle of the syrup about the size of a dime. You pour in about an ounce and a half, two ounces of rum. Again, with a cocktail this simple, it's totally up to your own customization. I like a lot of acidity and more lime, so I pour, I squeeze about half of a full lime. You mix it up with a little ice, boom. Ready to go. So this is a rum agri-col. Rum agri-col is an AOC protected French designation of a particular style of rum. And that rum, instead of being made from molasses, is made from fresh pressed sugarcane juice. So sugarcane stalks are cut, and within 24 hours, they are pressed, and the juice is collected and sent to fermentation. I like this. So this is a very approachable rum agri-col. Rum agri-col, because you're talking fresh pressed cane juice, can get very green and grassy. Vegetable, right? And also tends to have a big stewed vegetable character, very specifically stewed tomatoes. Like there are rum agri-cols out there that just taste like stewed canned tomatoes, and that's how they're supposed to taste. That's kind of gross. Now, I like this one because it's kind of a gateway into the style without being too polarizing like that. This is about a 47.3% and it's just easy drinking, approachable rum agri-col that can be sipped, can be a good cocktail on its own, could be used as a component in a cocktail, and it's pretty cool. And I mean, it is the most natural form of rum. So rum agri-col is spelled R-H-U-M. You'll see that in any of the French speaking countries, but not every French speaking country does in the Caribbean technically produces rum agri-col. Right now, you're limited to Martinique and Guadalupe, as well as the Reunion Islands and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. So yeah, rum agri-cols, they have such a romantic and cool story, and they get written up every once in a while, and then people go and try them, and they never seem to take hold. It's sad. I think one of the problems in the past was that the entry level was always a clear one. And an unaged rum agri-col is about as acquired of a taste as it gets, like Pat described. Strewed tomatoes. They're tense and weird, but with a little bit of aging. And this rum, the interesting thing about these, because they're so different, this is pretty young rum, but it tastes like a much older rum than it is. And well, I mean, again, we're talking about that tropical aging, you know, it definitely speeds up some of that extraction process. How much? So this one is $49.99 on sale right now for $44.99. The other thing that's worth mentioning because of the these are pretty uniquely French usually, the aging is a little different and a lot of them are aged in French oak, correct Pat? Yes, a lot of them are aged in French oak. This one was aged in American oak. I think the reason that I like it is because the vegetal quality gives it, and maybe it's the wood too, gives it a real whisky quality. It almost could be bourbon or even a single malt from America. I think it strikes a good balance of the natural cane flavor and just enough wood that you know you're drinking an aged product like that without getting wood dominant. If there are any of you out there, I know there's not many, the world needs more sherry drinkers. Sherry drinkers are going to find some familiar characteristics to these wines, particularly the drier end of sherrys. So, if you're one of the few esoteric people that enjoy finos and manzanillas, montiados, there's some of that same. Yeah, there is like a salinic nutty quality to that. That's delicious. That's absolutely delicious. Craig, I think you liked more of these than didn't. Oh, turn them into a rum drinker. I'm not a rum convert yet, but I can see what's approachable. Wait till rum part 2 then. Appreciate it. So we'll probably have to come back with rum episode 2. Rum episode 2, Pirate Boogaloo. If a single person writes in and requests it, we'll do it. Rum redux. Folks, that brings us to the Q&A portion of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, where we answer your question on the podcast for a $20 Binny's gift card. Email your questions to comments at binnys.com or hit us up on social media on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Binny's Bev. Our question this week comes from another Bourbon Women Night submission, because we were hanging out at the booth. What is charcoal mellowing? Well, that's the lincoln County process. charcoal mellowing, when done in Tennessee whiskey, is referred to as the lincoln County process. That is where they filter the fresh distillate through sugar maple charcoal, and it supposedly mellows it, gives a little flavor, and then it goes into the barrel for aging. That is about it. It is a filtration, and it adds a little bit of sweetness and takes out some of the rougher edges. Are there any producers besides brown form producers that do the lincoln County process? Yeah, for sure. George Dickel, Tennessee Whiskey, uses it. Who else? The Uncle Nearest Tennessee Whiskey does it. Anybody making a true Tennessee Whiskey now and labeling it Tennessee Whiskey has to. There is one Tennessee Whiskey maker that does not, and that is Pritchards. Pritchards was making whiskey before this became a law. This only became a law recently, so they are grandfathered in. They can label their stuff Tennessee Whiskey and not use this process. Never with bourbon because bourbon is not allowed to touch anything, but it might have bourbon. You can do it with bourbon, just no one does. All right. Would you have to label it as bourbon? This is a filter. This is a filtration process that has evolved into this marketing term and this marketing schtick. Plenty of stuff gets filtered through charcoal. Some people call it the lincoln County Process. Like most bourbon history, there's so many pervasive myths. People think it has to be two years, as to be. I heard for quite some time that you couldn't call it bourbon if you did this beforehand, so. No, there's nothing in the federal regulations saying that. I mean, the whole Tennessee whiskey and bourbon thing is more about a state rivalry than it is about actual different styles of whiskey. Okay. We could call Jack Daniels bourbon. The bourbon guys I've heard will call it cheating. They say that you're imparting some character to the distillate by doing that. That sounds more like rivalry than rooted in fact. They say it. I'm just saying what they say. They say it. That's fair. Thanks, Terry, for that question. That's a $20 Binny's gift card coming to you. Everybody else can email the question to comments at binnys.com or hit us up on social media at Binny's Bev on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. I'm curious. What was everyone's favorite, Raj? El Dorado 15 is pretty hard to beat. That is one of the most amazing rums on the shelf. The El Dorado 15 is delicious, but the rum jam is an interesting step aside and eye-opening. My rum equivalent of a fridge beer for sure is going to be that El Dorado 15. That's his hams of rum. Yeah, it is the hams of rum. The El Dorado 5 would be the hams of rum. El Dorado 15 is $50 a bottle. Stop hating on hams. My fridge beer of rum is definitely El Dorado 15, and for something different and a little change of pace, I really like that four square premise. I like the dried fruit dimension that the sherry cask agent gives it. Hill, what's yours? El Dorado 15, but still, I really am digging the Doctor Bird. That was cool. Well, thanks for tasting these wacky rums with me today, guys. We have more rum to talk to at some point. We can get really intense with it, and more importantly, we can make Roger make us all tiki cocktails. Yep. The wide world of rum is we've only scratched the surface. So until next time, this has been Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Roger. I'm Hillary. I'm Pat. I'm Greg. Keep tasting. Roger, what's orange and sounds like a parrot? What? A carrot. What do you call a pirate with two eyes and two legs? A guy? A rookie. Like you, a rum rookie. Because his other pirates haven't cut off his legs or chopped his eye out yet, apparently. How do you turn a pirate furious? Take away the P. Keep going, keep going. Okay. Why is pirating so addictive? They say once you lose your first hand, you get hooked. Why don't pirates shower before they walk the plank? Because they'll just wash up on shore later. That might be one of the better ones. Yeah, it made you laugh. Nothing about booty. Roger wants that booty. We didn't do any talking like a pirate jokes. What's a pirate's favorite letter? Tis the sea. That one, come on. This pirate, I saw a pirate and he had- Do you really think the answer was tis the sea? That's the joke. I thought it was R. Right. That's the joke. You say R and you go tis the sea. I've never heard that joke correctly then. The pirate had the boat steering wheel in his pants, and I was like, hey man, you got the boat steering wheel in your pants. He was like, I did. It's driving me nuts. See, that's a good pirate joke. That's rated R.