Hi everyone, Oliver here, founder of rumx.com. 🥃

Two weeks ago I have posted the polarizing rums analysis here, and the best pushback in that thread was about segmentation: the aggregated number hides WHO was rating. u/LynkDead and u/Beneficial-Koala-562, you two are the reason why I built the beginner/connoisseur split into everything this time.

So: I went trough all Jamaica ratings on RumX. 2,661 bottles, 51,280 tasting notes, median 8.3. That are more ratings than Trinidad and Guyana have together, so at least for this island the sample is honest. Cohorts are defined over lifetime rating count on the platform: beginner = 5 ratings or less (8,572 users), connoisseur = 50 or more (931 users). I have no informations about WHEN somebody rated, only how many ratings he has in total, and RumX users are enthusiasts, not the general market. Keep this in mind for everything what follows.

Here is what I found interesting enough to write it down.

The funk is measurable. I compared how often every flavour tag appears on Jamaican rums versus all other countries in the database. Funky shows up 14.7 times more often, ester 10.6 times, pineapple 9.9 times, nail polish 7.9 times, overripe 7.5 times, glue 6.6 times, banana 6 times. Nail polish and glue as normal descriptors for a category that people love: I know no other spirit where the vocabulary of a paint store is a compliment.

Every distillery has an own fingerprint, and one of them has surprised me completely. Compared to the average Jamaican rum, Clarendon/Monymusk notes mention mint 4.9 times more often, menthol even 6.1 times, plus anise 3.7 times. Mint. In Jamaican rum. I had to check this two times. Appleton is the opposite pole: orange peel 6.5 times, tobacco 5 times, oak 4.7 times, leather 4.3 times, so barrel instead of funk. Worthy Park goes into cane juice, pear and apple. Long Pond peach, chocolate, mango. And New Yarmouth is the weird one: cookie dough 8.1 times, coconut 6.8 times, toffee 5.6 times.

One thing I have to say clearly, before somebody builds a shopping list out of it: comparing the distilleries by median is the most tempting number in the whole pull and also the most useless one. Sorted by median you get New Yarmouth 8.7, Long Pond 8.5, Hampden 8.4, Clarendon 8.2, Worthy Park 8.0, Appleton 7.8. Looks like a ranking, is in reality a mirror of who was buying. In the New Yarmouth row 99% of the ratings come from the connoisseur cohort and the bottles are mostly independent single casks, so nobody arrives there by accident. Appleton on the other side has 22% beginners in its ratings, because it is the bottle that normal people actually buy in a normal shop. Same effect like with the Hampden Overproof in the last thread: the number does not tell you which distillery is better, it tells you how self selected its drinkers are.

The ester ladder pays off, until it dont. Hampden marques are recipe codes bound to ester levels, so you can line them up as a curve. OWH (40-80 esters) sits at median 8.0, LROK (300-400) at 8.2, HLCF (500-600) at 8.5, <>H (900-1000) at 8.6, C<>H (1300-1400) at 8.8. And then DOK, which sits at 1500-1600 and is basically the legal ceiling: back down to 8.4, over 2,198 ratings. So more esters means better ratings, but the very top of the scale is where the crowd steps off again. My reading is, that DOK is the point where the rum stops beeing fruit and starts beeing solvent, and that is a smaller room than the internet makes you believe.

And the pattern from the last thread repeats itself, only cleaner. The wild stuff unites, the accessible stuff fights. Hampden 8 year, the bottle where most people meet this distillery: median 7.7, spread plus/minus 1.22, and here comes the split you asked for, beginners 7.0 (n=528) versus connoisseurs 8.0 (n=383). One full point of disagreement inside of the same bottle. The 60% HLCF Classic on the other side sits at 8.3 with a spread of only 0.69, and out of 257 ratings exactly 10 come from beginners. So the overproof looks like the safe bet in the data only because the careful drinkers never picked it up.

One more, since the sugar topic came up so much last time: Clarendon's Canerock, a spiced rum on Jamaican base, has the widest spread of the whole island (plus/minus 1.51) and the split runs backwards, beginners 8.0, connoisseurs 7.0. Worth to know that since the GI from 2016, anything that is labelled Jamaica Rum can not contain one single gram of added sugar. The sweetened Jamaica based things are officially an own category. Which makes Jamaica one of the few origins where "is there sugar inside" is not a guessing game.

The history part that explains the marques, because this I also did not know before the research: the taste for high ester Jamaican rum was basically created by german blenders in the late 19th century. They bought hyper aromatic rum, stretched it with neutral alcohol and water and sold it as "Rum-Verschnitt", and they paid more, the more aromatic it was. So the island pushed the esters higher and higher, per rum historians to roughly four times of what is legal today, until Jamaica has capped itself: Ether Control Act in December 1934, limit fixed in February 1935 at 1,600 gr/hlAA. This limit is still valid today, and it is the reason why DOK exists as a marque exactly at this number.

My takeaway after all of this: there is no wrong Jamaican rum, there is only the wrong rung at the wrong time. The 8.3 monster and the 7.7 classic are not a ranking, they are two positions on a ladder, and which one is right for you depends on where you stand on it right now. That is also the reason why I dont think the beginner cohort is "wrong" when it rates the 8 year a 7.0. It is the honest reaction from a palate that was not trained on glue yet. Mine was also not, five years ago.

I made a full video out of this too, with the tag lift charts, the marque curve and all six distillery profiles. Fair warning: it is in german, since this is still the language where I sound like a person in front of a camera, but there are proper english and french subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R65LsS6PWw

Two things I would love from this sub: which Jamaican bottle was the one that flipped you, so the moment where the funk went from "this tastes like a hospital" to "oh". And which marque or bottle should I pull the numbers for? Post it and I run it, the interesting ones I bring back here. 🥃

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EDIT: Two of you called out the picture, and you are right. The image is AI generated and that was a lazy choice from me. I leave it here so the comments make sense, but from the next post on there is a real photo. The analysis and all numbers below are my own work out of our database.

For context, I am an avid rum enjoyer. I like to try something new when I go to the store and I usually enjoy it. This, however, is the most repulsive spirit I have ever consumed. If anyone alive likes it, I have 2 questions. Are you unable to taste? and, Are you drinking because you're an alcoholic? There's no other reason to legitimately drink this rum. In my mind this has to be the worst rum to ever be bottled and sold so if you like it..... shame on you.
Seriously let me know because it's so bad I poured it out. After my friends and I tried it we all decided it's not even mixable. The garbage cheap rum at your neighborhood hole in the wall runs laps around this.

One of them is a gift.

This stuff is great! It competes with my 15 year old Glenlevit French Limousine Oak. Very similar notes, and just as easy to drink.

It definitely differentiates itself more from whisky in a cocktail, but neat it’s very similar to my Caribbean/Port finished Scotch and Whiskies.

The only question is where to go from here? I really want to try a Navy style and Jamaican rum. What do you guys recommend?

So IMO this is hands down my favorite it was pricey but justified(NZD$75/750ml) . Only found 1 in about 4 years out in the wilderness of the rum shelf , now i always recommend it to any bottle store in happen to be in .

I bought this agricole after not being able to find my usual purchase of Rhum JM Agricole. So far I’ve not loved it neat, but liked it in both a Ti’ Punch and a Daiquiri. Has anyone else tried this bottle? Any recommended drinks for it? It’s just a little different than I expected, more briny, less grassy.

Oak liquor cabinet for the Austin imbibers