What is it? Well, this is the evolution to the Lost Spirits Navy style rum I reviewed back in April 2016 (clicky click). In short it’s “reactor aged” and not aged in a barrel – you can read the background in the Lost Spirits review. Santeria has taken the next step; the process has been refined and the machine has been leased out, essentially, for 3rd parties to produce rum for them – in this case it’s for Rational Spirits. A snapshot of the target rum is taken, as well as the distillate used and a few other components, fed into the computer and a rum is produced with the same signature (spectrographically speaking) as the target rum….so you want a 20 year rum? You scan it in and bang out the result. Where the technology has changed is that light is now used during the “maturation” period to break down the wood, oxygen is fed in to convert the chemicals and a temperature stage is used with bacteria to further convert acids into esters (yummies). There is more background here.

In terms of the actual distillate here, it’s molasses based and produced in a pot still. My bottle is from batch number 1 and bottle is number 768.

The rum is natural colour (which is pretty damn amazing), unfiltered and bottled at 46% abv.

Sugar? No

Nose: Coffee, black and over brewed, dark chocolate (80% stuff), toasted oak, chocolate covered banana sweeties and some black bananas too. Plenty of dusty old notes of clove, tobacco, forest floors, damp earth and mushrooms – stuff that smells really old. Something sour and green, maybe gooseberries, walnut shells or something. Some mild sweetened black liquorice and treacle toffee. There is that sour, bitterness throughout and it really does smell old.

Palate: Medium, slightly coating. Very similar to the nose in terms of delivery order and progress; coffee and dark chocolate first, smoky cask char, tobacco and wet soil which bitters to over roasted nuts. There is the “green” note again, sour wood or tart fruit I can’t pin down and this artificial taste I also can’t seem to put my finger on.

Finish: Medium. Liquorice, treacle, bitter molasses moving to semi-sweet with creamier dark chocolate this time (60% stuff), milky coffee, toffee’d bananas and dark cherries – think Black Forest cake.

Taste: Nice but odd. This is more mellow than the Lost Spirits Navy (yeah I know it’s only 46% abv…) and the flavours are better balanced and more integrated, but there is always this feeling of fakeness from somewhere. I mean, it definitely tastes old, around 20 years plus, maybe Guyanese, but its not totally fooling me, I can tell it’s “different”. Maybe I’m prejudiced by knowing what it is, but I still suspect if I tasted this blind I’d know something was up with it. It maybe show up the same as an old rum on a spectrograph, but there is more to the experience than just the chemical evidence – we’re humans.

It does benefit from being in the glass this rum, and with some time open and breathing. Would I buy again? No, I don’t think I would.

Price? £50.