Appleton Special - A bottle which is no longer sold!
A bottle that is no longer sold?
Perhaps a slight exaggeration, this bottle is no longer available to purchase from Appleton. In March of 2020 it was announced that Appleton would be changing their product stack, and the formerly Appleton special rum would now be sold by another brand under the same corporate umbrella as "Kingston 62 Gold rum". As you can tell from the photo, this is an older bottle that my parents had from a Jamaican friend of ours.
Review
Sweet nose, bits of oak, banana, but also a little bit of paint thinner in there. Not incredibly aggressive, but definitely present. A little thin, a little abrasive in the mouth at first, particularly if your lips are as dry as mine, but it smooths out pretty quickly. I get notes of banana, maybe some sweet apple, brown sugar, a little something earthy, and a bit of wood on the finish. It's a shame that this bottle is no longer sold by Appleton. I have no reason to doubt that the Kingston rum that replaced it is any different, but I also have no way of verifying that. Had someone who was not a big rum person asked me "What rum should I get to sip on" prior to my research for this review, I would've recommended this rum. Now I have slight reservations doing so, knowing that, you can't get this bottle, and it might've been tweaked slightly with the brand reshuffle. I find this rum incredibly drinkable, incredibly easy to mix with, incredibly easy to savor, or to slam down, and I don't know how much the Kingston costs, but when it was an Appleton product, it was also pretty cheap. So while I can't 100% say to buy "Kingston 62 Gold Rum" as I've not been able to test it myself, the product that it came from is one I give high praise to. 9.5/10
Is it funky though?
ReplyDeleteNot very. Maybe a mild amount, but it's nothing comparable to some of the other rum's I've reviewed! For example, the Smith and Cross I reviewed here https://www.not-an-alcoholic.com/2022/11/smith-and-cross-traditional-jamaican.html is considerably funkier!
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