The Black Tot Rum Rare Old is another of those demerara unicorns and the second bottle in my 1975 Port Mourant collection from the Uitvlugt distillery. This exceptional liquid is a blend of five casks aged for 40 years, with an outturn of less than 300 bottles, and bottled at cask strength of 44.2% abv.

Before exploring the rum, I really want to thank @mitchsaidthis and Lily of Elixir Distillers, and @thetruedar, Stephane and Nicholas of LMDW Singapore for helping out when I had some logistical issues with the bottle!

(Image Source: @weixiang_liu)

So on to the nose of the rum, waves of deep purple fruits, plums, ripe cherries, sultanas, then rich brown molasses, vanilla. Leaving it out longer, you also get notes of charred wood and roasted coffee.

The palate is just as exciting as the nose. After the initial bouquet of purple fruits, it transitions to a mix of sour cherries and a strong bite of oak, albeit without any unpleasant bitterness. This is followed by light hints of leather, and then a long elegant finish that is balanced between sweet and savoury notes, olives, raisins, more prunes. But because this rum trends to the drier notes, I would not recommend leaving it to breathe for too long as the wood eventually overcomes the sweetness.

This for me is an excellent rum, one from a bygone era of rum production, when distillation was perhaps more craft than science, and the result is literally an art in itself. But what really draws me to the Black Tot Rare Old is the structure of the rum, the layers of complexity, the indulgent sweetness at the beginning and end, but yet a woody and sour middle that injects vibrancy into an old rum!

Your occasional rum addict!

@weixiang_liu