El Dorado rum

Make mine a single barrel rum please!

January 26, 2010 - 8:43am | by Daniel Priseman
When I hear the word ‘single barrel’ I usually think bourbon. So I was quite surprised when I was invited to Hix in Soho, to sample some single barrel, single still rums from El Dorado. I have to confess that I was a little perplexed by the idea, as for me the artistry in rum production has always seemed to be in the blending, so the concept of a single barrel rum seemed like an oddity, but not the sort of oddity I was going to miss out on trying.
 
 
I’m sure a lot of you know El Dorado rums already, the range that we normally see includes the 3yo white, 5yo and 8yo golden rums and of course the more premium 12yo and 15yo rums. Every now and then you see a bottle of El Dorado 21yo or even the 25yo on a back bar. All of those are fine blends of aged rums coming from a selection of the different stills that El Dorado own.
 
 
El Dorado are a bit unique when it comes to stills; they have 9 in operation, including a number of wooden stills and this gives them a huge range of possibilities when it comes to producing rums with different flavour profiles. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to sit in on one of Stefanie Holt’s (El Dorado brand ambassador in the UK) training sessions you get a good insight into the different styles that the stills produce and what they add to each blend. That being said nothing can compare to actually tasting the single still, single barrel rums to get a real idea of how very different they are from each other.
 
 
Tags:

Ladies and gentlemen we have a winner!

October 16, 2009 - 2:42pm | by Daniel Priseman

I was really surprised at the response to our competition to win a bottle of El Dorado 12yo and 2 tickets for RumFest. Actually scrap that, with a really good bottle of rum on the line and forty quids worth of tickets I guess there was a reasonable incentive to send us a recipe. I was really happy to have so many excuses to drink autumnal rum cocktails! Admittedly the B&T drinks cabinet is now running a little low on El Dorado rums but it was all in a good cause.

 

After much sipping, and comparing of notes we finally managed to narrow the entrants down to just 10 that we thought were worthy of being added to the Bitters & Twisted drinks database, and the creators of those drinks had their names thrown into a hat so that a winner could be drawn at random… and the winner is…. You’ll have to read on to find out I’m afraid.

 

The whole point of this competition was that the weather here in the UK has definitely taken a turn for the colder and the leaves are changing colour as we speak. While I am a big fan of sunshine I am also a big fan of all those autumn flavours especially when you throw them at a good bottle of rum and see what sticks! I am pleased to say I have a few new autumn drinks that I will be turning to over the next couple of months, and one that might just see me the whole way through winter. Sadly Rob Poulter didn’t win the competition, but his autumn drink definitely deserves a mention here especially as it helped propel him to Theme’s Bartender of the year recently:

 

Tags: