This 15 year old pot still rum from Long Pond balances heavy cask notes with moderate Jamaican fruit, and is a neat exemplar of the distillery's juice before The Fire™.

Throughout my journey towards falling in love with Jamaican rum Long Pond has always stuck out as a blind spot; I hadn’t tried many expressions from the Clark’s Town distillery (one or two at Rumba over the years) and it didn’t have a clear identity for me like Hampden, Worthy Park or Appleton.

Eventually I found the story that eked out a spot for Long Pond in my brain: The Fire™. In 2012 Long Pond temporarily stopped production for renovations; the closure lasted 5 years, but only a year after they resumed production a fire that started in a cane field spread to the distillery and destroyed not only a lot of equipment, but also a lot of rum. The key for me here is that the long inactive period followed by the destructive fire creates a really massive temporal divide in rum production; all LP rums are either “pre-fire” or “post-fire”.

Which brings us to the star of the show today: Holmes Cay Jamaica ITP 2007. This is one of the lucky 100% pot still rums that survived the fire. Distilled in 2007, aged for 15 years old and bottled at 56% ABV, this rum looks pretty good on paper.

We measured a density of 0.915g/cc and a refractive index of 1.3606 indicating no added sugar (duh) which lives up to the back of the bottle’s aspiration of rums released “unadulterated and at full strength”.

On the nose there’s a lot of cask character. The oak sticks out, but is mediated by dried fruit—specifically raisin, leather, something floral, and toasted sugar. The palate has a lot going on: a broad spice profile leads, followed by dried berries, cocoa, pineapple, and some tannic astringency (it’s not an oak bomb by any measure, but the cask is really showing up). The finish is long and strong: oak, leather, black tea, and coconut.

In our blind taste test we thought it was great as a neat sipper (8.4/10) and incredible mixed in a daiquiri (9.1/10). Holmes Cay knows how to pick casks that not only taste great, but say something interesting about their pedigree, and to me it’s really neat to have this snapshot of pre-fire Long Pond. We don’t have anything from post-fire Long Pond this old yet, and while I’m tempted to keep a little sample to compare with the first long aged post-fire Long Pond I can get my hands on, given how delicious this one is that’ll be a tall order.

Fun fact: I used the word “long” 10 times in this review! (If you count the occurrence in this fun fact)

The Superficial: I’m partial to Holmes Cay bottles; they put the rum’s pedigree front and center, and the rest of the package gives me nothing to complain about. I appreciate the reverse-side dictum that it’s “Best enjoyed neat, with a small splash of water”, and in general all the copy feels very thoughtful. It has one of the nicer wooden tops I’ve seen—though tragically just as I was writing this review the wooden top separated from the synthetic cork. I’ll just take that as a sign I’ve been popping it open frequently for small indulgences.