Root |root|:
1.
verb, Australian origin; recreational procreation, with all the “pro”s and no “creation” (if things go as planned).
See Also: horizontal mambo, shag, beast with two backs.
Uses: “Rootin’ in the Back of the Ute” (Kevin Bloody Wilson.  Translated: “Fucking in the Back of the Truck”), or “Oy, youse wanna go ‘ave a root before the old lady gets home?”

2.
noun, Santa Cruz origin; Gabe Potkowski’s nickname.

I was first introduced to the slang form of the word “Root” in high school, when we slapped an astonishingly stupid Pollock friend of ours with that same nickname.  This because he was convinced to purchase some shaggy-looking pubic hair mixed with sawdust from a local rastafarian, with the promise that it was “Ganja root, mon– it get you mighty irie.”  Needless to say, it didn’t.  But the name stuck.

Years later, I was reintroduced to the verb form of the word by a diminutive Aussie girl with a missing front tooth inside “The Party” club in Surfer’s Paradise, when she shouted at me over the roar of a Pearl Jam tune “Oy Seppo, youse wanna go down the beach and ‘ave a root?”  The subsequent reflection about my dumb Pollock friend caused me to miss a beat or two before busting a gut laughing, which she didn’t take so well.  Needless to say, we didn’t.  But two of my less-discriminating Aussie buddies were happy to oblige.

Then, after a good 15 years of forgetting about the alternate forms of the word, I got an email from someone at Art in the Age, asking me if I would like to try a bottle of ROOT, a brand new 100% organic American cane liqueur.  I have to admit, I was skeptical; though I instantly admired their sense of humor:  the unspoken subtext of the name meaning to me that you drink some ROOT with your date and then drop trou and root your way to kingdom cum.  In my mind, with the marketing muscle they’ve thrown at this product, there’s no way in hell no one had thought of this lovely double entendre.  So I immediately liked them, as a company.

In the last couple of years, we’ve received some pretty weird shit in the mail.  Some of it has been reviewed here, and some not (it’s the “can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything” approach).  It has been a long time since someone sent us something really good.  I’m happy to report that the long dry spell has now officially ended.  ROOT is awesome.

ROOT is a natural spirit made from the same stuff you use to make root beer, which started out as “root tea”, a native American fermented beverage made from spices and cane.  Years later, some puritanical dumbass found a way to strip the alcohol out of it, which resulted in what we now know as Sasparilla, Birch Beer or Root Beer.  Funny… when it was called “tea” it got you loaded, but when it was called “beer” it got you fat.

Then along came Art in the Age, an artist’s collective out of Philadelphia, PA.  They revived the old recipe and distilled it into a truly unique sipping spirit.

This stuff is made of sugar cane, cloves, cinnamon, orange peel, cardamom, lemon, nutmeg, birch bark, spearmint, wintergreen, allspice and smoked black tea.  Basically, it’s 80 proof Indian Chai with a kick.  I like it in a Riedel tequila glass with a single ice cube, where it smells almost exactly like root beer.  The taste is akin to an aged spiced rum, without the cloying sweetness.  It finishes amazingly clean, leaving a super pleasant spicy tingle that reminds me of the last time I sat butt naked on a pile of goose down while sipping mocha chai.

I’ll save the goose down story for another review.

You might think that this is just another gimmicky mixer that’ll make a splash for awhile with the 18-year-olds in Ensenada for spring break.  Wrong.  This is a sipping spirit of the highest caliber that happens to also make a really fucking good root beer float.

Let me reiterate:  it makes a really fucking good root beer float.  Talk about a party in a glass– one 16oz ROOT float on a hot day and you’re almost required to be bare-assed on the slip-and-slide.

I like this stuff a lot.  In fact, it’s going to be my new drink of choice for awhile.  I’m actually quite pissed off that I asked them to send the larger sample down to the San Diego contingent, who have yet to weigh in on this review.  Hopefully we’ll hear from them soon.  Chances are, they’re too busy with the slip-and-slide.

So this reviewer is giving ROOT a solid 100 point score, with another 10 added on for being totally organic, and 5 more to be added if I actually get to root my wife tonight.

Cheers!

PS, apparently this stuff is so new that you may not see it in your local liquor store.  You can get some online here:  http://www.hitimewine.net/istar.asp?a=29

Gotta tell you, this boozereviewing side job is a real tough gig sometimes. See, every so often I roll out of bed at noon or so and, in order to get the old bowels warmed up and ready to clear out, I check my email. And, every so often, there’s an email there from a winemaker, distiller or brewery who wants to send me some booze for review. Crap.

Now, you might be saying to yourself “self, what the hell is this guy’s problem?!”

But– let me just be clear here — sometimes it’s a little scary…

Let’s take Braddah Kimo and his Maui Rum from Haleakala Distillers as our example here; and please allow me to ramble on for a few moments about nothing at all rum-related:

Now, I like to surf. I’ve surfed all my life, predominantly in the cold water and powerful waves of Santa Cruz, CA. Since it’s so damn cold and crowded here, I like to travel and surf. As a traveling surfer, I have made the inevitable pilgrimage to Hawaii in order to fill up on my fix of warm waves. And, like many other traveling haoles (eg. gringos en español), I got to Hawaii and discovered quickly that traveling haole surfers from California aren’t exactly the locals’ favorite people to surf with. I also discovered that a lot of the local crew in the water in Hawaii are very big boys. A regular diet of kahlua pig and beer makes for a very one-sided Hawaiian-Haole wrestling match.

OK, are you with me here? Hang in there and maybe I’ll get to the payoff sometime soon.

Now, so here we have a (formerly) skinny Wop surfer who likes to go to places like Hawaii. Said skinny wop surfer has a real powerful liking for aged caribbean rum (aged being the operative word here, at least 8 years being the operative qualifier) from small distillers. And here we also have Braddah Kimo, who, the Wop can only assume, is a very big boy, a Maui kama’aina (local, person of the land), who has just sent the Wop 3 bottles of his labor of love. And said kama’aina makes fresh, new (not-so-aged, at least not-so-long) rum grown, produced and bottled on his beloved homeland.

So, when the aforementioned Wop rolled out of bed at noon one day to see that Kimo wanted him to review the aforementioned labor of love, the Wop said “uh oh”.

The Wop assumed that, since the rum’s not really aged, it would be the kind of rum you make a mai tai with and nothing else. The Wop was also a tad scared and conflicted: On the one hand, this seemingly friendly Hawaiian gentleman had sent him 3 bottles of hooch, which caused the Wop to have an instant liking for the fellow. On the other hand, the Wop found himself praying to God, Buddha and King Kamehameha that the rum would be good so the Wop could write an honest review and still show his face in Hawaii again without fearing the wrath of any very big boys.

This stress caused the Wop to drink heavily for about a… well… it may have been a week.

Thank God the Wop had 3 absolutely outstanding bottles of rum to help him with that drinking-for-a-week task. Oops… I think I may have already offended Braddah Kimo… as, on his website, he encourages everyone to drink only moderately.

So. OK. I am so happy to once again say that I had my head shoved very deeply up my ass regarding the whole aged rum thing. All 3 of these rums I’ve got here, the Maui Rum Platinum, Gold and Dark, are like nothing I’ve ever tasted. They’re all amazingly floral (I mean amazingly!), extremely fresh, crisp and well-rounded. So, now that I’ve spent way too much time explaining my HUYA (Head Up Your Ass) Syndrome, I’ll give you a breakdown of the 3 rums we tasted:

First, I have to say that Kimo’s rums were sampled by the entire BoozeReviews crew, due to the fact that we were all together for the holidays this year. Second, I have to say that I am the only one of the crew that really loves rum. So this review will be heavily saturated with My Opinion (which, I believe, is the only True and Right opinion anyway, so fuck it).

Now, the first one we tore into was the Haleakala Platinum rum.  Braddah Kimo claims the Platinum is his mixing rum; but now a week later, I am still sipping it out of a snifter while I write this. This stuff just reminds me of vacation. It smells like tropical flowers (tuberose or plumeria) with a hearty whallop of vanilla, a shot of coconut, some banana, macadamia and white chocolate, all bundled up in an 80 proof fresh-sugarcane snifter full of aloha. Yeah, you can (and ought to, just for fun) mix this stuff, but as a sipper it’s basically it’s own cocktail. I have never had any rum (especially white rum) that tastes and smells as interesting as this. There’s nothing artificial here, no cloying sweetness, no weird aftertaste. There’s a real distinct presence of cane– loud and clear. And, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that Kimo was tossing whole vanilla beans (and maybe a hint of sweet, just-harvested pakalolo) into the kettle with his mole asses. Seriously, I can’t think of any way a person could better put the flavor of Hawaii into a bottle. I don’t know if it’s the Hawaiian cane or the Hawaiian rain — or both — but this stuff just smells, tastes and feels like everything that’s good about Hawaii.

My compadre reviewer Bohdi, who has heartburn and can’t handle the hard stuff, was making horse noises while he drank it, for some reason. J David was just mumbling to himself. Sounded something like “mmmthisshitsprefuckingooood.”

Grandpa Ray is hitting his followed by a slice of tangerine, and says “That is about the easiest drinking rum I’ve ever tasted.”

I think it would make a seriously bad-ass coco loco or piña colada, but that it’d be a waste of all this stuff’s floral goodness to mix it with anything.

Despite the fact that I was completely blown out of my tree by the Platinum, I was pretty damn eager to move onto the Gold, which Kimo calls his Sipping Rum. With the Gold, the banana/vanilla thing is getting casually replaced by some really rich caramel & butterscotch. Ray’s calling out custard. I’m gonna call it a custard and cane sandwich from the Sandwich Islands, without much, if any, residual sweetness. Take the great flavor of cane and butterscotch or custard, leave out the extra sugar and give it a healthy 80 proof bite, then throw in a healthy dose of aloha, a vanilla bean and a rum-soaked tuberose blossom and you’ve got the Gold. Where the Platinum was a cocktail, this one’s a piece-of-tail: sweet, tasty, smooth and oh-so velvety. Totally — I mean totally — unique. In a class by itself. Coming from classic caribbean sippers like Zaya and Flor de Caña, I was impressed and awed by the richness of this rum and really just stoked overall on the crispness that’s just not present in the rums I’ve always enjoyed in the past. I had no idea rum could be like this.

All the while Bohdi is still making horse noises. I really don’t know why, but thought it should be noted. I think J David has passed out cold. Grandpa Ray’s eating custard now. Power of suggestion, I guess.

OK, so at this point we were pretty much wowed, so we decided to move onto the Dark and see what the hell happened to us.

Did I mention that we started tasting these at 11:30 AM? Um, well… yeah. See, we had a few more reviews to crank out while we were all together, so we thought we’d start an hour or so earlier than usual.

OK, so yeah, the Dark.

This one leans way over into the Kahlua realm, syrupy with coffee undertones and a hearty dose of mole asses. Grandpa Ray immediately poured his shot into a glass of egg nog and, just like that, discovered the Christmas Drink of the Century. Holy shit, with Hawaii in my mind, never, ever, would I have thought of mixing this  particular rum with egg nog (which I usually refer to as “elf semen”), but Grandpa Ray, who has a ridiculous sweet tooth, just went and sipped his taster of dark rum, looked at the fridge and said “hmm…”. Then he proceeded to finish a bottle of rum and a gallon of egg nog over the next 2 days.

By itself, it’s not a liqueur exactly, as it’s not that sweet, and it has a bit more of an alcoholic bite than the others (which helped it cut through the egg nog), but it definitely works nicely as an after-dinner drink for those who want something stiffer than and not-as-sweet as a kahlua or similar. Or after-breakfast drink, if you’re us during the holidays.

Overall, I think I have to give this stuff the highest review I’ve ever given on this site, for a few reasons. I’m gonna unzip my fly and whip out 200 points, no deductions, because (1) this stuff was so outstanding and unique that it changed my mind about what a rum can and should be, (2) because it really, truly reminded me of Hawaii somehow, and (3) because, from everything I read on their website about the maker’s methods and means, this stuff is made the way the maker likes it, and because the maker loves it. I think, if I had the means to distill my own hooch and had access to homegrown cane from a place I loved, I might just put this kind of heart and soul into the hooch I made. And I’d want others to love it as much as I do. And (4) because they’re proud of the fact that sometimes, when the waves are good, Kimo goes surfing instead of going to work making rum. They actually advertise that fact on their website. I say Right On. Aloha. Mahalo.

What’s a pirate’s favorite letter?? Aaaaaaaarrrrrrr…. Most rums make me feel like a pirate, but this 2-decade old cane juice makes me like I’ve just pillaged, plundered and despoiled many virgins. Aaaaaaarrrrrr.

What we have here is some top-notch Guatemalan hooch. Like the Zaya, which I previously claimed to be “the best rum ever made”, it’s got that classic Guatemalan sweetness to it. It’s thick legged, just like you like your women– and she wraps those suckers around you, digs in the spurs and rides you to the mercado like the jackass you are, where you pick up a healthy sack full of cloves, a healthy shot of booze and some cinnnamon for the ride back home. Once home, she strokes you to sleep… and while you’re sleeping she hits you over the head with a fry pan and steals your wallet while giving you the best hand-job you ever had while unconscious. Sound like fun? It is if you’re a Pirate! Aaaaarrrrrr!

Anyway, I digress. The oak’s nearly gone here. Or should I say, it’s so infused with the cane that you can’t distinguish one from the other. What you have in the end is a totally unique-tasting thick-legged hooch like nothing you’ve ever had before. It doesn’t have that artificial-tasting sweetness like Pyrat, just a mellowed caramel body with spice around the edges. It feels like a wine when you drink it. In fact, there’s almost no harshness to the alcohol– though it is 40 proof, it drinks like a wine or even a liqueur.

100 points, plus 2 for the hand job, and 20 more if she brings back my wallet.

So this is my first review, and I haven’t read any of the others so I’m just gonna shoot from the hip…..So this is my first review, and I haven’t read any of the others so I’m just gonna shoot from the hip…..

I’ve always been more of a Whiskey/Scotch/beer drinkin’ kinda kid, but Johhny has turned me on to the higher end Takillyas and rums, and I think I might have found a little gem today…. I went in looking for another bottle of Cruzan Single Barrel Estate Rum (which I’ll review if it hasn’t already been done) but they were sold out so I took a shot with the Aniversario 12- just uncorked her, poured her over some rocks and started smiling…. tasty stuff…. it is closer in taste to the Flor De Cana 10 year- just sweet enough, not too spicy, nice and complex finish- has me trying to figure out if it’s the oak that I’m tasting most…. hold on, I’m gonna go get another glass….. o.k, back and a little warmer now….. strong enough to heat up your chest, but not strong like a whiskey- it’s begging to be joined by a Cuban if you know what I mean…. almost has a very faint chocolate or caramel flavor when you swish for a second or two. Complex is a term that is a little too sophisticated for old Slade Dog, but it’s the only word I can come up with right now- very interesting finish and after tastes….
Overall I’ve got to recommend this one- holds up to Flor De Cana, Cruzan Single Barrel, Pyrat- not super cheap at about 30 bones but hey, I’ve spent more than that in 15 minutes in bars in LA just drinkin’ beer…..
I will say that overall I think I dig the Cruzan just a little bit more, probably because it has a little bit more bite and reminds me of an aged whiskey such as Eagle Rare….. but again, I’m more of a whiskey guy….
so no clever comments here, no funny stories- just a good little rum….. now I’m gonna get drunk and read all the reviews and jump in if I have anything to add……
takereasy
Slade

12 year old Guatemalan rum is like nothing we’ve ever tasted. They brag on the label that it’s the finest rum ever made… and it is, dammit.I don’t normally like sweeter rums… but this one is like a perfectly-balanced wine. If you ever see this stuff anywhere, buy two bottles. You’ll drink the first one in a couple of nights because you’ll be so amazed, but then you’ll have a 2nd one you can save so you can be amazed again at a later time. We’re working on a full review of this extra-extra special rum, but until then… let’s just call it good.

A 12-Year-Old Nicaraguan Rum that’s so damn good you’ll be begging Dubya to let you fly to Cuba for a cigar to go with it.

I was down in Costa Rica recently on a surf trip and we missed a turn one afternoon and ended up in the sportfishing mecca and run-down port town that is Golfito. Being late in the day, we pulled into a nicer hotel (in Costa Rica, that means we paid $50) with a nice-looking bar attached and decided to call it a night. Moments later, we were bellied up to the bar and staring at what is absolutely the best selection of rum I’ve ever seen. I mean, these guys had rum on the menu that I’ve still never heard of. Asked the bartender what her favorite was, and a minute later I had in my hand a nice-sized snifter of 12-year old Flor de Ca?a. The rest of the night consisted of a bottle of the stuff, a rather large Cuban-made Cohiba and a long sit-on-the-porch spent staring out at the ocean whilst trying to keep my eyes focused and determine exactly how many boats that little panga in front of the hotel had morphed into.

Most American bars are sadly devoid of anything that approaches a real rum. Most Americans think that, if you want to have good rum in your rum and coke, then you order Malibu instead of Bacardi. WRONG. I wouldn’t go so far as to call either of those beverages rum. They’re the stuff you make rum and cokes with, that’s all. Real rum, real good rum, has a character on par with the finest of the fine high-end bourbons. A real rum is as complex as cognac, ballsy as bourbon and interesting (I would say intriguing if it didn’t make me sound like an ass) as any a?ejo tequila. Really good rum is not sweet. Really good rum hits you up front with a strong oak two-by-four, smells like the hull of an 18th century wood-hulled rum and spice-smuggling pirate ship, and then lays back and takes the edge off the cigar jammed between your teeth with it’s soft caramel edge. A real rum makes you think of the tropics and all the trouble you’re capable of getting into while in the tropics.

Flor de Ca?a is a real rum. A really good rum. I like it with 2 ice cubes in a small cognac snifter. As of this date 2/7/05, I have not encountered a better rum. And it ain’t all that expensive either. 90 points. Would be 110 if I could buy Cuban cigars in the US.

Also comes in a 7-year and a 15 year. The 7 year is extremely good as well. I’ve not tried the 15-year yet, but would be willing to bet that it would cause unexpected and violent, though subtly pleasant, orgasms.

Addendum, 1/6/07
Well, as it turns out, there happens to be an 18 year version of this sumbitch. I got a bottle for Christmas! Woo hoo!!

While I didn’t quite splatter my undies with the 18, it was damn nice (notice past-tense here– bottle’s gone). In fact, it was un-fucking-believable. But the 12 was un-fucking-believable too. In fact, I can discern little difference between the 18-year and the 12-year, while the difference between the 7-year and the 12-year is night-and-day. The 18 is a little mellower, a little more caramel-infused oakiness. All-in-all, a rum worthy of a pirate like me.