Background
Time for some old Guyanese rum. I won’t even try to dive into the rabbit hole of Guyanese rum marques, so I’ll just tell you what I know: this rum, designated as SWR, was distilled on a Savalle column still in 2001, aged for twenty-one years, and bottled by 1423 under the S.B.S brand in 2022 at a cask strength of 54.1%. The consensus seems to be that SWR does have color added, and it’s likely that a significant portion of this rum’s aging took place in a continental climate.
Tasting
On the nose, I get cocoa powder, freshly-tilled dirt, geosmin, wood smoke, overripe banana, maple syrup, and maybe a little bit of cinnamon. This reminds me a whole lot of maple syrup flavored cereal, like French Toast Crunch or something.
The breakfast notes from the nose are replaced with tons of treacle, black pepper, and cocoa powder on the palate. Beneath those notes are unripe pear, more geosmin, mushrooms, and some buttery pastry. It’s intensely dry, somewhat bitter, and heavily oak influenced, as one might expect.
Verdict
Very nice! This is full of decadent confectionary flavors, but it doesn’t entirely do away with the weirder earthy notes. Those notes certainly take a back seat to the cocoa powder and treacle, but they’re present enough to keep the experience interesting. The bitterness, which I suspect is partly the result of added color, is a bit intense for my liking but not so intense that it becomes distracting. I don’t think this style of rum is really my favorite, but this does nonetheless seem to be a great representation of that style. (7/10)