Dear friend
Cheramie Rum
Sipping tips: When you pick these up, I implore you to chew your food before swallowing. Most spirits taste harsh if you down them immediately (shots): you’re blasting your palette and taste buds with high-proof alcohol. Take a small swig, let the liquid sit in your mouth, and hug every crevice for 4-5 seconds (open the taste buds). Down it. You’ll pick up all the flavors and truly know what the beverage tastes like. Once you do that 1-2 times, your palette is ready. Drink away. And to my NY’ers, I am sorry for all that wild language.
As briefly noted in my last piece, r(h)um, tafia, and other cane spirits have a longstanding (even if not widely discussed) imprint in the Pelican State. If New Orleans operated anything like their Caribbean counterparts, which is rhetorical in many respects, then there were probably colonial merchant bottlers who got their juice from southern (cane country) Louisianans producing spirits. And did what city folks operating in one of the major port cities (of the world) would do: drink or sell the stuff.
History aside for a second, which you may (fairly) think I’m incapable of putting down, what we have above is Cheramie Rum out of New Orleans, led by Jason Zeno. Note: The French term “cher ami” translates to “dear friend.” As far as I can tell, the dear-frienders are the only ones in Louisiana distilling their full expression line-up with cane juice as the source material.
When I began typing up this piece, I intended to talk about a few of their expressions, like I did with Rhum Depaz, how good they are, etc. However, I’ll take a more direct, less academic approach this go round. Cheramie knows what they’re doing, and I would encourage anyone to blind buy their juice. Don’t even second-guess it, purchase. Zeno is a damn good distiller as far as my non-technical brain and taste buds can tell. That much revealed itself in every glass, of which there were plenty.
Besides that, and this is what’s most important, there aren’t enough aroma, taste, and finish notes to highlight what mattered most while sitting down with the Cheramie folks. Which is, that good old Louisiana hospitality rained in like a summer thunderstorm, tearing down on the Big Easy. The dear-frienders truly made me feel at home. The hospitality was, as most things are in Louisiana, in a category “unto itself.”
And that really is the takeaway. Because rum tastes good when it tastes good, yes. That is not a moot point, by the way! But rum tastes even better when you’re surrounded by good people, with good hearts, who talk plainly. Or simply just having a good time.
While I’ll always be in liquid solidarity with the rum family of all ages, stripes, and walks of life, the sorts of people who sit with their rum and a notepad, or those who really tear into the technical specificities of the rum, trust me when I say that the rum won’t ever taste as good as when you’re sloshing it around with others. When you allow the rum to serve its social purpose of lubricating the good times.
When I brought a bottle of the unaged (Blanc) back to the East Coast…
…I fulfilled that purpose of only sharing/drinking it with friends in a very social manner. I even gave my barber some right before my haircut, which is only a risky move if your barber has shaky hands. All in all, you can imagine the responses I received when people tasted (yet again) another thing out of Louisiana’s food/beverage landscape that sings on the taste buds. The rum went a little further because, well, unfortunately, it’s not as well-known as it should be. Must’ve felt like having something that others aren’t privy to – a familiar rum feeling.
Dear friends, until next time.
Cheers and #rumresponsibly
