This pot column blend from Foursquare in Barbados gave us strong notes of vanilla and oak, with subtler hints of caramel, dried coconut, and baking spices.

Close your eyes and picture a bottle of rum. What does it look like? For me, it looks a lot like Doorly’s 12. And not without cause! There is something indescribably standard about this rum, and I mean that in both effusive and mildly derogatory ways. Drinking it you feel safe in Richard Seale’s capable hands. You feel confident it will taste exactly the same as the last time you had it. You feel reassured by its strong oak tones that rum can, in fact, be a very grown-up drink. And you feel relieved when you look at the bright Hyacinth Macaw emblazoned on the bottle that rum is still allowed to be fun.

Coming from Foursquare Distillery in Barbados, although this 12 year expression was first released in 2015, the Doorly’s brand has a long history. In the early 1900s, Barbadian distillers weren’t legally allowed to bottle and sell their distillate to consumers, which left a massive opportunity for so-called “merchant bottlers” who bought in bulk from distilleries and sold by the bottle to consumers. Martin Doorly was one such merchant bottler who began selling under the brand in 1920s, shortly before he died in 1925 (way to go out with a bang, man). 70 years later the brand was purchased by RL Seale, meaning it was now part of the same business as the distillery whose rum it bottled.

Like many of its siblings from Barbados, Doorly’s 12 is a pot-column blend that is primarily defined by its woody notes. It’s spent 12 hot, tropical years aging in primarily ex-bourbon casks, and the extractive aging elements of oak and spices make themselves known.

On the nose, you get strong woody oak, with clear vanilla notes. A less pronounced caramel joins the profile. If you try hard, you can get a little dried coconut. On the palate the wood continues to dominate, now showing up more like a sawdusty workshop—less oak and more cedar. Stronger caramel joins the already strong vanilla, accented by a variety of subtler baking spices, and hints of baked apple. The finish is strong, leaving your palate aerated with spicy oak, vanilla, and burnt sugar.

It’s most at home neat, or in spirit-forward cocktails (an Old Fashioned or Manhattan, say), and makes a subpar compliment for fruit juice in most contexts due to it super strong oak.

We tasted it blind alongside three of Foursquare’s more pedigreed Exceptional Cask Selections: vintages 2008, 2009 and 2010, and on the whole it compared very well. While it was edged out as a neat sipper (7.5 compared to the 2009’s 8.6) and as a mixer (6.4 compared to the 2008’s 7.5) it was up against rums that retail fore more than 3 times it’s price.

And I think that probably has to be the last word on Doorly’s 12: it’s quality rum aged for a long time and offered at a consistently great price. It isn’t particularly interesting, and it can’t be all things to all people, but for the value it’s offering, what it can be is pretty incredible.