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Try to get a well lit shot from the front of the rum label
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The Sugar Controversy...or...Everything You Know Is Wrong.
The only reason for this 5-year old original post to suddenly reappear is that someone clicked on the Like button. He has not posted a review in 4 years and I certainly miss him. So it is time for me to add my two cents worth again.
I have my own system for rating sugared rums by grams per liter,
0-9 gpl are dry
10-19 gpl are semi-dry
20-29 gpl are sweet
30-49 gpl are sugar bombs
50 gpl and higher are flavored
I still buy El Dorado 8 Year as a semi-dry rum because it is so versatile and not too sweet. However, there are two reasons to avoid heavily sugared rums.
1) They really mess up one's internal plumbing
2) They don't last in the bottle for more than one month
And thanks to Captain Jimbo's Rum Project along with fellow reviewers like Earl Elliot and nomad, we all now know how much sugar was added to each. Thanks!!!
I also have to end this post with my typical ridiculous humor. When it comes to pickled quail eggs, life is nothing but a yoke.
It popped up because of a spam post which I flagged and it was removed.
I began to wonder how many flavored rums I have reviewed, so I sorted my spreadsheet. I have also included sugar bombs with 30-49 gpl of added sugar as well as actual flavored rums with more than that. I am almost ashamed to admit that 120 of my 420 reviews qualify as having 30 gpl of added sugar or more, which is about one quarter of all my reviews.
Since I no longer submit any reviews and no longer buy heavily sugared rums, why did I review these in the first place? There are those out there who want something better than Sailor Jerry or Captain Morgan Spiced for their spiced rums and I certainly found them. And there are those who want better than Malibu Coconut, which was a lot easier to find coconut rums that are much better. To me, coconut palm trees waving in the Caribbean breezes is the very essence of the tropics. And then there is my category of just Flavored, which could include anything other than Spiced or Coconut. Many frown upon flavored rums, but they are of use to quite a few.
Looking at my 50 rum reviews that I rated as an 8 or higher, half of them were Dry. The other half were dominated by Semi-Dry, Agricoles, and Overproofs. And looking at the 89 rums from my 7 rating, about one third of my highest rankings were dominated by the Dry and Semi-Dry categories.
My dream would be to have some kind of AI-type system in place that somehow 'knew' the insights you were sharing. If anyone knows how to build that kind of intelligent recommendation system please get in touch :) With almost 100k ratings now I'm guessing just the % of ratings that use words like 'sweet' and 'dry' broadly correlate with the kinds of gpl metrics you're using.
Andy:
What I recently posted was accomplished from several complex sorts in my spreadsheet. Sure there is a way to scan a document to find key words, but I forgot how to do that.
There is also a very small number of reviews that call sweet rums dry and vice versa. Those would not be enough to cause errors in AI.
If any one person on this planet at any given moment of time knows rum, it's PIRATES. Step on board my friend and experience the world of rum! By the way, sugar is the basis of rum so why not indulge? Go to Martinique for a vacation. They serve rum with a bowl of sugar and a carafe of water. To each his own! One last comment. What is all this hype about slavery.? We live in a world that has graduated way past such atrocities. It took a bunch of situations to put rum where it is. Appreciate the fact that if it wasn't for the history we wouldn't be where we are now, in Pirate (Rum) heaven!
This could be a sorted tree that branches off by region, then by producer and price (which are similar in taste). If you rate rum from one region, then a rum from the same producer or nearby region is recommended (same price region). The algorhythm only needs to know if it is sweet or dry rum.
Most IB or manufacturers fill either pure or sweetened rum. It is difficult with Plantation, they have both (this must be done manually).
Sorry, it's been awhile since I posted, but I can assure you that the Rum Project forum is still alive and heavily visited. Added presences on FB and Wordpress as well. There are over 5000 long and educational posts on everything rum, and related subjects.
But the most important contribution remains the Master Sugar Lists, with now over 1600 sugar tests, in alpha order.
Although I know a few rummies for whom rum is "food", lol, it is not. The standards of identity and labeling do NOT require rum to list the amount of sugar. Once again, I have to emphasize that those who argue tradition and the false notion of sweetened rums are - still - entirely wrong. It's not a matter of tradition or practice, it is a matter of law. It is absolutely in contraditions of official US spirits regulationl to add sugar to a product labeled "Rum". Sugar is considered a flavoring, and along with the other cheating additives, requires that rums so altered MUST be labeled "Flavored Rum" and name or imply the primary flavoring. Period. No exceptions. If the practice continues it's because the regulations are not well enforced, as they are for whiskey for example. No distiller would dare add sugar to an aged Scotch or bourbon. If you want to know how much cheating your rum exhibits, the Master Sugar List is the world's only one-stop compendium of all the data from the countries who test, and tests by the Pirate and many other concerned independent testers. All in one list: you can see the rum, who tested it and the result. The ONLY legal and regulatory result will be rums that show about 3 grams or less of sugar as the specific gravity of these may also include other substances obtained from the wood (and not sugar, or phony flavorings). The 1600 tests now take up two long pages: start with http://rumproject.com/rumforum//viewtopic.php?t=1683Capatain Jimbo:
Thank you so much for the updated list of added sugars for various rums. I compared this list to my spreadsheet of 437 rums. This yielded 25 more amounts plus quite a number of changes. Some even caused me change categories, usually from Sugar Bomb to Sweet or vice versa. The new entries from fatrumpirate really helped.
Four years ago, I started out with sugar bombs just like most of the other newbies to rum. After watching the flavors deteriorate rapidly in the bottle on these, it was quite disheartening. Plus, all of the added sugar really does a number on one's internal plumbing. For this reason, I have been only buying dry rums for the past few years.
Your project also appears to be causing many rum companies to become more transparent as to their additives. There have been a few that actually have reduced their added sugars.
guys, this is really intriguing discussion, started in 2016, and i respect Cptn Jimbo as an expert,
but i think it s too late to go back to have just honest rum with no additives
big producers do this dosing, put all in charming bottles, do good marketing
and people just buying and telling others how good stuff they bought and drink
(just look what are ratings in this site), i ve fallen for many good looking bottles too,
now i try to check all those hydrometer tests before buying ...
only way this can be stopped it s to have a global regulation about this spirit
i m curious to see the day that a rum with additives will have on the label
rum liquor instead of just rum, will the sales drop ? will the so called premiums
be expensive or have prices lowered ?
but until big producers are so strong i can t see this day coming, probably they will
never allow such a global regulation ...
same it s happening with food and beverage industry, big corporations making big
profits by poisoning us slowly, or what about big pharma ?
maybe i m a pessimist, maybe just realistic ... but i do like reading what people like you
writing here, it give me some hope for the future ... good job guys !!!
So glad for this informative post. Relatively new to appreciating rums on a finer level (though I've long enjoyed them as an 'amateur'). Overall, I'm glad to have a reason to avoid a lot of expensive additive-laden junk.