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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.

(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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