Review #: 106
Description: Rhum Barbancourt 3 Star
Spirit: Rum
Background: Barbancourt is a distillery in Hati making an “Agricole Style” rum. While Agricole rum is tied to former French colonies, this technically isn’t agricole as it uses sugar cane syrup in addition to sugar cane juice in the production. That said, it still carries are large amount of influence and certainly differs from molasses based rum. I believe they use french oak mostly for maturation but couldn’t find too much information. The 3 star is aged for 4 years. This was used for any tie-breakers in the Mystery Showdown and notes were submitted before the final reveal.
Reviews 103-106 were done as part of a “Mystery Showdown” where about 10 contestants were each given the same set of 4 mystery samples and went head to head to determine an overall winner. Points were assigned based on guessing the spirit correctly, where it was made, proof, type of still, type of cask, age, and any “style” points the judge deemed appropriate. Bottles were selected randomly from a pool of all spirits, but with the knowledge that all would be fairly standard profiles or readily available bottles. A maximum price point was given, but no other information provided. The contents were revealed after guesses were submitted. This was a lot of fun and really a great exercise to try on blind reviewing.
Distillery – Barbancourt
Bottler – Barbancourt
Brand – Barbancourt
Selection – N/A
ABV – 43%
Age – 4 Years
Nose – Sour wood and artificial sweetener. Not exactly pleasant. Kinda hard to figure this out just based off of the smell.
Taste – Sour milk but at the same time sweetened almond milk. It also has a bit of bitterness to it
Finish – Pretty light. Sour and grassy, bitter sweet. Just enough sweetness in here to make me confident enough to think its a rum
Guess: Ok, I think this is some younger, agricole type rum. Barbancourt is coming to mind but french oak isn’t an option in the barrel type so now I don’t know so I said ex-rum. Mildly confident on agricole but we shall see. Let’s hope I don’t need a tie breaker. My guess will be Barbancourt 3 star though
Score: 3
Would I buy a bottle? No
Thoughts: *Drops Mic* Welp, I have peaked. I wasn’t even in the running for the championship and didn’t even have a tie breaker so this wasn’t even used, but even weeks later, I’m riding the high of picking this. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to pick a blind mystery spot on again. I swear, I had no idea of what spirits were possible. I had a vague idea of what the total cost of all 4 samples would be, but even that was not a guarantee. Never even had barbancourt before. A blind squirrel eventually finds a nut, right?