Line of rum makes debut in isles

One of the things I love about the distilled-spirits scene is how easy it is to fall down the rabbit hole, so to speak, chasing after your new favorite liquor. With so many different brands to choose from at price points that range from affordable to crazy expensive, your personal drinking adventure depends only on how much money you have to spend and time you have to nurse any hangover the next day.

I’ve done that with scotch, bourbon, even vodka, and after being introduced to Kirk and Sweeney rums, which became available in Hawaii last week, I can feel my focus shifting to another brown spirit.

There are plenty of light rums out there that look just like vodka until you smell and taste them in a glass. But the type of rum I’m generally interested in is more like bourbon whiskey, of which the better-quality stuff usually comes with an age statement. Since most of the world’s best rum of this type comes from the Caribbean, evaporation of distillate during the aging process is always a big issue and leads to more expensive prices once the rum makes it into bottles.

Appleton Estate, for example, sells its 12-year-old Jamaican rum for about $30 to $35. It does well in cocktails along with being a decent sipper. I really enjoy Appleton’s older offerings but can’t justify spending $125 for its 21-year-old rum and $350 or more for the 30-year-old bottling.

Kirk and Sweeney, which is imported by California-based 3 Badge Mixology and produced in the Dominican Republic by J. Armando Bermudez &Co., sells its 18-year-old rum for about $40. It’s just $5 more for a bottle of its 23-year-old rum.

Most comparable age-stated rum of this quality usually starts around $60, so I jumped at the chance to check out a tasting last week at Formaggio Wine Bar with 3 Badge national sales manager Chuck Kane, who attended Kamehameha Schools as a child before moving to California.

The secret to keeping down costs is the distillery’s relationship with another major brand. The Bermudez family has produced rum in the Dominican Republic since the 1850s, but most of its product had been for the local market until it partnered with 3 Badge to release Kirk and Sweeney in the U.S. The family also produces massive quantities of neutral grain spirits from the same sugar cane used to create rum, which is then sold to Proximo Spirits for use in Jose Cuervo Mixto.

“They make so much money doing that,” Kane explained. “Cuervo is the No. 1-selling spirit brand in the world. So Bermudez rum will always be older and will always cost less.”

Kirk and Sweeney draws its name from a Prohibition-era ship that smuggled rum from the Dominican Republic to New York nearly 100 years ago. It managed to elude authorities for years until it was seized by the U.S. Coast Guard and turned into a training vessel.

“It’s an ode to the rum-running spirit,” Kane explained. “The bottle it comes in is called an onion bottle and is the traditional shape of the era.

“Out on the boat at sea when the ocean got rough, these bottles wouldn’t tip over on the shelves and wouldn’t break. And when sailors hung them in string bags on the deck, they could tell how big the waves were by how much the bottles moved back and forth.”

Kane also explained an important aspect about aged rum: distinguishing between barrel-aging and solera-aging.

“A lot of aged rums out there use the word ‘solera’ on the bottle,” Kane said. “They’re adding raw distillate to the rum as it ages. So if it’s laying there 23 years, two times a year they’ll open the barrel and add raw, fresh rum. So after 18 or 20 years, there’s not much 18- or 20-year-old rum left in that barrel due to evaporation.”

That’s not the case with Kirk and Sweeney. The 12-year old rum is actually a blend of 8-, 12- and 16-year-old rums to create an average age of 12 years by volume, as required by Dominican law. The 18-year-old rum contains a blend of 18- and 20-year-old rums, while the 23-year-old contains 23- and 25-year old rums.

Get it in the glass, and each Kirk and Sweeney expression impresses for different reasons. The sweetness from the sugar cane is present throughout, but the added oak influence helps create something magical in the 18-year bottling, bringing together sweet banana and cake batter notes to go with spice flavors from the wood. The 23-year-old rum creates a dryness on the palate that pushes its flavor profile into the realm of cognac.

“I always say cocktails with the 12, a cigar with the 18 and dessert with the 23,” Kane said. “Think of it like wine. The flavor profiles all pair differently. And then this product comes from sugar cane juice, so there is still a bit of underlying sweetness to it.”

Jason Genegabus tracks the local bar and drink scenes in “Barfly” every Friday in TGIF; read his blog at inthemix.staradvertiserblogs.com.