Dear reader and fellow Rum connoisseur,

Single Cask Rum is now a 5YO – still full proof, unadulterated and at best a small batch!

Some might say we are getting more mature, but come on, what are the notable five year old Rums out there!? I bet you cannot name many. It just doesn’t seem to be a popular age statement. Nevertheless, I think five years is a small accomplishment, at least for a wee little nerdy blog like this. I know that there aren’t that many people like us, so our readership is naturally limited. That said, the Rum community is growing very quickly and we can definitely notice this!

Before we launched this blog, we’ve been taking sketchy notes just for ourselves and occasionally shared them in the active online forums. You did read correctly, five years ago that was still a thing and indeed the main platform to exchange views with like-minded people. While the platforms and topics have changed, the majority of the people that have been there five years ago (and beyond!) are still the same today, and some have even become friends. I’d like to take this moment to thank everyone out there that has been on this journey with us during the last couple of years, no matter if we are in regular contact or if you are a passive reader. Without you, this hobby just wouldn’t be the same!

Anyway, we digress. So we did take all of these notes and eventually figured that we could also make them available to everyone, perhaps a few people might be interested in the Rums we’ve tasted and what we thought about them. While it weren’t that many at the beginning (with most of them coming from only a few countries), the audience has increased to a few hundred unique visitors a day, from all over the world. Sure, that’s not a huge number by many standards, but I think it is quite respectable when judged by the amount of people that actually are into unadulterated, full proof Rum (read: the really good stuff). After the launch of the blog, we naturally wanted to write new tasting notes of course; after all, tasting Rum is fun. Given the speed with which our sample library has grown over time, the only way to reduce that increasing sample pile was to taste and review all of these Rums (spoiler: the pile is still growing), which meant that we didn’t release all of those notes that we have taken earlier. You can imagine how dull it is to write down/ digitalise all of that hand-written scribble, at least when comparing it to the much more fun activity of tasting new Rum. Eventually the inevitable happened: We moved in to a new apartment, and I just couldn’t find my good old notebook anymore. Even though we originally only took those notes just for ourselves, it kinda hurt twice: For the personal loss and for the sake of releasing them on the blog. To a large extent, those are the Rums that you can find in the Bottlers and Countries sections that have been released prior to 2017; we tasted them, but never published the corresponding tasting notes. But hey, here ware are, five years into the game and stronger than ever.

A thing we realised at some point was how expensive this hobby (buying samples, sure) and running the blog (actual and “hidden” costs) really are. At the beginning we were relatively selective with what we bought and what we presented, but as the blog started to grow, we felt an increasing pressure to review more and more Rum, also Rum from outside of our loot scheme, stuff that we maybe wouldn’t have bought otherwise (nope, we don’t complain, just stating the facts). Since we are absolutely independet and cruelly honest at times -something that still haunts us from time to time, but haters gonna hate-, we are having to pay for about 99% of all samples ourselves which, as you may realise, is no small feat. Of course it is still our hobby and we enjoy what we do, but it would be nice to cover the running costs of the page at least. Alas, if you love what we do and want to support us financially so that we can proceed with this journey that started five years ago, you can now do so by subscribing to one of our memberships on Patreon. Think about it as subscribing to our magazin, or buying us a wee dram so that we can continue what we do until we fully fall in love with Armagnac. To learn more, simply click on the following image:

Anyway, a big thanks again from my side for your support. Let’s make those next five years even better than the last!