If there’s one thing I appreciate in a spirits brand, it’s a sense of balance. Building a brand around super-premium price points, for instance, is all well and good, but it’s bound to leave a huge portion of the potential marketplace–the majority, if we’re being honest–sitting on the sidelines. The most successful brands typically find a way to make an appeal to different types of consumers at a variety of price points, and increasingly this is what we’ve come to expect from the independent rum bottlers at Holmes Cay. Born as an experiment in bottling extra-mature, pricy bottles of single cask rum from around the globe, and producing some of our favorite recent rums in the process, the company has increasingly found ways in new series to offer less expensive, more accessible products. The launch of the Single Origin Edition series featured an excellent $49 bottle from Fiji, which was a far cry from the price points Holmes Cay had established in the past. And now, with their Heritage Blend, the Holmes Cay Esotico Edition, the brand has truly conceived an endlessly adaptable, everyday rum blend that could easily serve as a multipurpose flagship. Price tag: $39, something you wouldn’t feel like you were wasting in a daiquiri.
Conceptually, Holmes Cay Esotico is a tribute to the three major rum traditions of the Caribbean, which rum geeks will often refer to as English, Spanish and French-style rums. Esotico is a blend of all three, featuring lightly aged rums presented at the expected lower proof point of 43% ABV (86 proof). Where so many of the Holmes Cay releases of the past are cask-strength bruisers, this one is meant to be an approachable everyday sipper or mixer. As for the rums, they hail from the following:
— Molasses-based Barbados rum (likely Foursquare), blend of pot and column still.
— Molasses-based Venezuela rum (ron), column still
— Cane juice-based Martinique rhum
The label bears those three terms–Rum, Ron, Rhum–in order to drive the point across, that Esotico is a melding of different traditions and styles of production. Like all Holmes Cay releases, the final product is then bottled without any additional sweetening, flavoring or color added. Just a straightforward blend of rum styles. So with that said, let’s get to tasting it!