Plantation Jamaican Rum Xaymaca Special Dry

This pot still rum from multiple Jamaican distilleries gave us strong notes of solvent and smoke, with hints of caramel, banana, brine, ginger and medicine.

This blend of 100% pot still rum from Long Pond and Clarendon distilleries in Jamaica is bottled at 43% ABV, is aged for a minimum of two years, spending at least one year aging both tropically and continentally. The bottle and corresponding page on Plantation’s site are a rum nerds dream: along with all the information you’d expect from a reasonably transparent brand, we get fermentation time (1 - 3 weeks), the break down of not only volatile substances (312 g/hLAA) but also the portion of esters (156 g/hLAA) and coloring (E150a, between 0% and 0.1% by volume).

In the lab we measured a density of 0.942g/cc, agreeing with their declaration of no added sugar. Though interestingly they choose to say “Dosage : 0 g/L”. This seems to say “There’s no added sugar, but not because that’s like,,, bad or anything.” which is simultaneously a fair, and a little funny.

On the nose the first things you notice are smoke and solvent. Nosing deeper there might be a little overripe pineapple, and then some tobacco. On the palate is remains fairly aggressive: not really funk per se, but peat, brine, something medicinal. A little caramel and banana. The finish is moderate, especially considering it’s low proof; finally there’s some oak, followed by a little ginger.

While we were a bit perplexed by it, it didn’t do half bad in our blind taste test: we thought it was pretty good neat (7.3/10) and as a mixer (7.7/10). While it’s not particularly funky in a high-ester sort of way, I wouldn’t really recommend it as an introduction to Jamaica; it’s very interesting but it’s idiosyncratic, and can be hard to approach on it’s own terms.