How would you like to see Rum countries listed

If one considers Plantation rums, their final bottlings are all in France, eventhough they are created from all over the Caribbean (I don't count their horrible one from Fiji).  On this site, none are labeled as being from France. As for Smith & Cross, I have it labeled in my large spreasheet as coming from Jamaica. For rums coming from several different places in the Caribbean, I just label them as Caribbean.

So, the bottler's location should not be labeled on any of your rums.

I agree with Paul, country of origin is the interesting thing.

Unfortunately is this site not consistent in this case.

interesting question,

example for plantation i d like to see on the label

distilled barbados, matured in both and bottled in france

the problem here is that barbados do not allow sugar addition

but they can do it in france, so they write barbados on the label, but every true barbadian

rum have not sugar added (same for jamaican plantation rum)

ok there are also very good bottlers, and i remain with the idea of what to put on label

1. country distilling/producing the rum

2. country where rum is aged

3. country where the rum is bottled

this is transparency, and not hard to do, some bottles have whole stories on them,

so why not adding names of 2 countries ?

I don't think it matters where the rum was bottled. It would be more important for me to have a reference to the distillery, which is often missing because the bottler cannot use the name. I find that disturbing. Then there is only "true Barbados rum" or some like that. Or you need to know the secret codes like "Great House" or "HD" for Hamdpen. It just has to be transparent whether sugar, coloring or other additives have been processed. It is also very interesting whether the rum has been filtered, as it can affect the taste. You can google the bottler an than you know very quick whether the rum was bottled in Denmark, Germany or France. Here it is also more importand if the rum was stored in his HOme Country or was matured in the Country of the bottler. So tropical or continantal. It is much more important, because that are things that make the rum taste different. I think that there is a lot of exciting information, such as Angel Share, that many bottlers still don't include. I think good would be: 1. Country of the Distillery, 2. Name of the Distillery, 3. Style 4. How was the rum stored - location and type of cask, 5. Are there any additives or not, Is the rum filtered or not. And then of course ABV and everything that is known like barrel number. I think PLANtation is quite transparent there. even if Richard Seale certainly sees it differently; P

 

 

SGavin - The country of origin of the rum itself. Where/by whome it is bottles is interesting too, but if you've gotta pick one or the other, that is secondary in my opinion.

Country where the rum was distilled. 

Another idea is the style of rum. Jamaican style, barsbados style, Spanish style, Asian rums (sort of have their own style). But county/distiller of origin should always be noted on bottles. I know that is not within your control but just worth mentioning.  

As an FYI, historically the RR country categories have been associated with the company - making it impossible to categorize each individual rum by country in cases like Plantation or a bottler like Velier.

I recently took the first step in 'improving' the country categories by introducing a 'Multiple', which means the rums from a company come from more than 1 country OR the origin country is undefined (eg some rums say 'Carribbean')

Next step is to associate rums under 'Multiple' country companies with a specific country when possible. My guess is this will mean hundreds of rums being more easily found by search.

That still leaves hundreds more from places like the UK  or Denmark. The challenge with consistency is most bottles don't include the country of origin. Happy to change any that need updating, but it probably won't make a dent on the wider problem of transparency unless we have some real detectives willing to track down origins that aren't widely known.

Andy,

It's of course a great job to change this.

Some of the Independent bottlers (IB) like Velier, S.B.S. etc always write what distillery it comes from and others keep it secret.

 I checked how RumX does.

They always start with the Distillery and thereafter the IB if applyable.

If Distillery is unknown they write that. If there's more than one they sometimes write Multiple distilleries or write out the distilleries, for ex Long Pond & Clarendon.

With this system you will find all Foursquare's if you search for Foursquare and don't need to search for more than 10 IB's to find them all.

RR has always been tough to balance being easy for relative beginners to use and find information and enough data to keep advanced folks satisfied.

I've heard RumX has taken the more advanced route. That's probably a little too far for RR at the moment - it's just a lot of data work/time vs making RR easier to use and building new features.

Andy,

First of all, I really don't want RR to be a copy of RumX.

You know that I've put in lots of effort to reduce duplicates and temporary images on RR which RumX is full of.

But I believe most members should like to see distillery and country of origin more than the country of the IB and you know it's not consistent right now on RR cause there's lot of IB releases that right now is to be found below the origin brand and that depends probably (among other things) of that when members adding a new rum they don't know that it's an IB release or they don't know the home country of the IB.

Either where the sugarcane grew or where it was aged. Where it got distilled or put in a bottle is irrelevant.