Fragments – Silvio Carta Amaro Bomba

Usually, I reserve tropical cocktails for Tropical Month. Yet, I sometimes crave exotic cocktails the rest of the year, too. In this case, I built the drink around an Amaro, but apart from that I also used a special blend of rums. In addition to a sherry barrel finished rum, I also used a personal rum blend I made for colleagues at my former work. I guess, this means that no one can mix this drink, but I guess the point here is to find your own individual rum mix.

The Silvio Carta Amaro Bomba Carta! is a special Amaro crafted to reflect the herbs and spices of Sardinia. On top of that, Silvio Carta use botanicals grown in their herb garden. The list of botanicals consists of cotton lavender, everlasting flower, mugwort, St. John’s wort and thyme. Furthermore, strawberry tree honey is used to round off the flavour of the liqueur. In the end, the Amaro is bottled at an ABV of 33 %.

Herbal with honey notes

To be honest, I never even heard of most of the botanicals used in the Amaro Bomba. Nevertheless, the Amaro still tastes familiar. It is quite pleasant on the palate with a medium bitterness. You can taste some herbs, most prominently thyme. Apart from that, you can also find some honey notes. In the aftertaste, the liqueur becomes more Fernet-like with quite a long aftertaste.

Blending your rum is fun

Yes, I could have just used any high-quality rum in this drink. However, I wanted to use two rums I blended myself.  I used a sherry barrel finished rum I did with friends a while ago. Additionally, I also added a rum blend I gave my colleagues as a farewell gift. You can find the exact proportions of that blend below the recipe. Since the inspiration for the drink was my Augustine-Bar Rum Barrel, I also added a few other things besides the Silvio Carta Amaro. Furthermore, I used a blend of Angostura Bitters and Pedro Ximenez called Ango Ximenez. I got this idea from Matthias Soberon when he used it in the Tio Pepe cocktail competition.

*B|N Dark Rum Blend:
2 l Plantation Original Dark Rum
0,7 l Plantation Ile of Fiji Rum
0,7 l El Dorado 8 Years Rum
0,4 l Chairman’s Reserve Forgotten Cask Rum
0,05 l Plantation Guyana 1998 Rum

A multiplex flavour combination

When you are sipping a really good tropical cocktail, the different ingredients blend together. They form something bigger than just the sheer combination of the individual ingredients. Luckily, I achieved exactly this with the “Fragments” cocktail. I guess the combination of an almost uncountable number of rums helps, but the combination of Amaro, pineapple, grapefruit and honey always is a winner. Apart from that, it does not hurt that I used two “cheater” ingredients dark overproof rum and grapefruit juice either.

*The fact that I received a product reviewed in this article for free, did not – in any way – influence the rating of said product. The bitter was provided by Silvio Carta.