New Waves – Chairman’s Reserve Rum
After the short detour from Tiki month with last weeks Finest Spirits article, we are back to Tiki drinks. This time I built the “New Waves” cocktail around a mango purée my sister brought back from El Salvador. While I had a few ideas on my end, I decided to again use the Foodpairing website. This way I made sure that I ended up with a great and balanced flavour profile.
First, I would like to talk about the rum I used in the Neon Experience. The Chairman’s Reserve Rum from St. Lucia often gets overlooked. While the last sugarcane plantation closed on St. Lucia in the 1960s, the St. Lucia Distillers Group uses Guyanese molasses for their line of Chairman’s Reserve Rums. The standard bottling is a blend of column and pot-still rums with an average age of five years. The blending and finishing is done in other oak casks.
Well balanced mixing rum
Despite the reasonable price, Chairman’s Reserve Rum offers a fairly balanced taste experience. You will get classic molasses rum notes like caramel and vanilla. Apart from that, there is also a hint of esters notes which reminded me of burned wood. All of this makes it a great rum for mixing. However, I was missing a more complex notes to really enjoy it neat, but this is absolutely ok.
Exotic fruit cocktail
While the recipe might not sound like that much, the flavour combinations in the “New Waves” cocktail really work beautifully together. First, the combination of grapefruit and cinnamon is a no-brainer. You can basically add any brown spirit to a sweet and sour mix containing those two ingredients. Second, the split base of bourbon and rum also goes well with Tiki drinks as the Tropical Itch shows. The only question was: Does all of this really work with mango?
3 cl Chairman’s Reserve Rum
6 cl Pink Grapefruit Juice
2 Bsp. Mango Purée
1,5 cl Cinnamon Syrup
Float 0,5 cl Giffard Cassis Liqueur
Song: Júníus Merivant – New Waves;
The simple answer is yes! While the cocktail probably also would have worked with only simple syrup instead of mango purée, the purée not only adds exotic fruit flavours, but also a great silky mouth-feel. You just have to keep in mind that jams or fruit purées are not as sweet as syrup and you should adjust the sweet and sour balance in a cocktail with a little bit of syrup for a well-balanced drink.
*The fact that I received a product reviewed in this article for free, did not – in any way – influence the rating of said product.
