Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
Rum is a blind spot for me. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s that I rarely drink it without a mixer that significantly obscures its taste. In college, that was Coke. After landing a junket trip to cover the America’s Cup in Bermuda — I was SB Nation’s designated “white guy sports” for a while there — it became dark n’ stormies.
This was always fine, because the extent of my rum purchases was more or less limited to:
a) Costco’s spiced rum (a tremendous bargain), and
b) whatever was marked down in the bargain cart at Woodman’s for $5.99. For a while this was Bayou rum, which is also pretty good.
But Gosling’s offered me something better and terrifying. An $80 bottle of rum aged in rye whiskey barrels (hell yeah).
Gosling’s already has a built in advantage as a go-to ginger beer (especially since it’s one of the few brands to make a light option). And they’d already kinda crushed their entry into the ready-to-drink cocktail market, albeit with entirely too many calories in each of their canned dark n’ stormies and some rough fruit flavors that mucked the whole thing up.
Maybe this left me a bit compromised on my way to this taste test. On the other hand, I’m a big rum dummy so maybe it didn’t. Let’s see what we’ve got.
Gosling’s Family Reserve Old Rum: A-
I’ve poured it into a rocks glass with ice. Clearly, my fanciest rocks glass for my fanciest rum. It’s dark and a little thick and smells sweet and vanilla. You pick up a little bit of that bourbon barrel influence as well. Since we’re dealing with an 80 proof spirit there’s no disguising the alcohol within, just making it smell a little better.
It is an undoubtedly sweet spirit, which, duh. While you’d never mistake it for a lighter drink, there’s no real burn involved here. Barrel aging has softened the edges of a booze I’d ever only used for mixing in the past. It starts off a bit neutral with some light candy bar flavors, then the rum hits your tongue running with a little cinnamon, a little allspice, and lots of that vanilla.
That makes it a deserving straight-up sipper. And as the ice melts it mellows down nicely into a lovely dram. I don’t typically drink rum straight up. This may change that.
Gosling’s Family Reserve Old Rum with Betty Buzz ginger beer: A-
Look, I probably shouldn’t. But it’s rum. I’m gonna mix it with *something.* And while I’d love to make a dark n’ stormy, I am tragically lime-less. But that gives the rum an extra chance to shine against the spicy and bready carbonation of the ginger beer.
Tonight we’re rolling with Blake Lively’s brand of mixers, Betty Buzz. You may remember her from the Betty Booze line of canned cocktails that punched well above their weight class. Well, I’m taking that base and using it for my own, very basic drink.
Good news: this rules. The carbonation and ginger heat thread together, creating a dense flavor that’s sweet but uses that mixer to create a balanced, simple and borderline lazy cocktail. A lime would add another layer here, sure, but the fact this can stand up in a two-step drink is a testament to its quality.
Do you want to use an $80, barrel aged rum as a mixer? Probably not! Can you? Oh, hell yeah. It’s great.
Would I drink it instead of a Hamm’s?
Welcome to a new feature on these reviews; a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Gosling’s Reserve rum over a cold can of Hamm’s?
Absolutely. But I could buy about 160 cans of Hamm’s for the cost of one bottle of Gosling’s Reserve, so I probably won’t.
