There’s no bigger or more random roll of the dice in the alcohol industry than sampling any given band’s branded spirits. From the ubiquitous bourbon brands owned by seemingly every country star, to the tequilas of Hollywood royalty, branded liquor is the ultimate mixed bag, because there’s rarely any way to know in advance whether those originating the brand care even a little bit about the quality of the product that will bear their name or likeness. Many are happy to simply slap their name on a bottle of young, sourced bourbon and be done with it. Others are surprisingly involved in the creation, selection and even flavor profile of their spirits, but it’s always difficult to know what to expect. I mean really, when you’re presented with the idea of Kiss-branded rum, how high do you get your hopes up?
Yes, Kiss rum. From the very conception, it might seem a little random. Does anyone especially associate rum with the rock band Kiss, the group of face-painted men who have been tearing up arenas for almost 50 years at this point since 1973? The band was founded in New York City and is sometimes associated with Detroit, thanks to songs like “Detroit Rock City”—and neither locale has much association with rum, especially Caribbean rum. And yet that’s what Kiss has chosen to build its liquor brand around, via partnership with the online retailer Brands For Fans, which offers similar alcohol brands for rock bands such as Motorhead and Ghost. At some point you can only shrug, and move on to examining what they’ve actually put in the bottle.
Kiss has not one but three rum brands via Brands For Fans, which range from this flagship “super premium dark rum” ($45 MSRP) to a well-aged Dominican rum ($55 MSRP) and a luxe, well-aged Jamaica/Guyana blend that retails for a rather shocking $250, far more than I would have expected for just about any music-branded spirit. We only have Black Diamond available for us to taste today, which is described as “a blend of carefully selected 3-15 year old rums from Barbados, Guatemala, Guyana and the Dominican Republic.” My personal expectation is that this likely implies the younger rums are from more sought-after destinations such as Barbados, while the older distillate in the blend is likely Dominican, which is typically less expensive.
And then there’s the “dark rum” label to mention. As we’ve written about previously, this is a term that is widely understood but functionally meaningless in the U.S.—there is no age requirement for “dark rum,” nor is the color of a rum indicative of its age. In fact, many bottles labeled as “dark rum” in the U.S. are primarily that way because of the use of caramel coloring, and some haven’t been aged in oak at all. That obviously isn’t the case with Kiss Black Diamond, and there’s nothing wrong with “dark rum” in general, being popular among bartenders for the color it can help give to mixed drinks—it’s just something that every rum drinker ought to understand about the style. With that said, let’s get to tasting Kiss Black Diamond.