This pot column blend from Appleton Estate in Jamaica gave us strong notes of caramel of chocolate, with hints of vanilla, brown sugar, ethanol, bitterness, and molasses.

Blackwell Fine Jamaican Rum is a molasses based pot column blend distilled at Appleton Estate. Named for founder of Island Records Chris Blackwell (whose name I learned in the process of reviewing this rum), and bottled at 40% ABV, it seems from the outset this isn’t a rum-nerd’s rum. It’s rating of 7.1 on RumX seems to corroborate this hunch.

In the lab we measured a density of 0.947g/cc, not indicative of any added sugar, which honestly, from the general positioning of the expression, I was a little surprised by.

On the nose there’s caramel, banana, chocolate, vanilla, and a bit of a solvent note. On the palate the banana turns into banana bread, and the chocolate is salted. There’s also some coffee-like bitterness. The finish is fairly weak, but indexes on toasted sugar and oak.

In our blind taste test Blackwell got 6.8/10 as a neat sipper, and 7.8/10 as a mixer. Overall I found myself pleasantly surprised by this rum; it’s not particularly interesting, but it delivers a more classically (if not exciting) Jamaican profile than the standard release Appleton Estate lineup, and is a pretty easy way to inject some banana and chocolate into a cocktail, or to introduce a new rum drinker to Jamaica.