The oldest and most expensive rum? | Hacker News Reader

The oldest and most expensive rum?

harewood.org

30 pointsthunderbong39 comments

I think this article is simply wrong about the "most expensive" part.

> The last 16 bottles sold for a total well in excess of £100,000 making Harewood Rum officially not only the oldest, but also the most expensive rum in the world.

That only works out to 6k or 7k pounds sterling per bottle. Meanwhile:

> Jamaican distiller J. Wray & Nephew is also recognised for producing one of the world’s most expensive rums, a 17-year-old expression priced in the region of £40,000 (US$52,000) and used to create the first Mai Tai cocktail in the 1940s.

https://www.thespiritsbusiness.com/2019/05/wray-nephew-presi...

And the other bottle they mention is more expensive than this as well.

This “article” actually seems like content marketing. It’s hosted on harewood.org. Incentivized to embellish.

Thank goodness the spirit was already bottled. I was a pretty serious single malt scotch fiend for a while and from tasting the very impressive collections of others I found that anything cooperage aged (wooden barrels) just doesn't get better beyond about thirty years or so.

By year forty, each sip was akin to chewing on a toothpick.

So, spirits can definitely be aged too much (at least with scotch whisky, ime).

I'm a connoisseur of American whiskeys (mostly bourbons) and it's just as true there. Most bourbons I've tasted hit their sweet spot around 15 years in a barrel, but once they start getting around 20 years, they're much less enjoyable. The overwhelming wood and tannins start masking what made the whiskey interesting and unique in the first place.

Agreed, if solely based my one vertical Pappy tasting.

I got a chance to try a 100 year old port once. It tasted like a really good 20-year-old port which had been aged in the bottom of a Weber barbecue grill.

7 to 10k a bottle doesn't seem so much to be honest, there are several wine producers that sell bottles for much more than that.

I think a Romanée-Conti Grand Cru will set you back around $20k.

A 1945 vintage sold for something like $550k iirc.

For some reason, rum doesn't have nearly as much snobbery around it compared to drinks like wine, whisky or even sake. Maybe it's because it was associated with sailors and the mass production when sugar plantations become common.

Huh. I had no idea there was a lot of snobbery around sake, but I guess it's one of the few alcohols that aren't super commonly consumed in the US.

$7 to $10k for a bottle is a lot of money, and anything more expensive than that is even more expensive than "a lot of money". However, this isn't 7-10k for a bottle of rum. It's 7-10k for a piece of history. As an antique, 7-10k not strange in any way, but as a bottle of rum, put in the same category as a bottle of wine, it'd be absolute nonsense.

These bottles with the aged rum inside them are best seen as rare antiquities with historical value.

It's highly unlikely that anyone will ever drink that rum.

And academic value, it's interesting to see the composition of food and beverage from decades (centuries?) past.

However, I found an article where the purchasers drank the rum. It's natural curiosity.

> the purchasers drank the rum

People never cease to surprise me -- and prove me wrong!

lol, I'd drink it, if I found a couple more people to split the bottle cost with me. Might even grab two, one to drink and one to display. Thing is, I bet is not very good. If it were, I think it would be a lot more expensive.

If I were a multimillionaire spirits enthusiast, I'd absolutely drink it. Either someone will drink it one day or someone will accidentally break the bottle and seal and it will lose its contents. Might as well knowingly use it than unknowingly waste it.

I drank an unopened bottle of 120 year old scotch I found buried in sand at the beach. Planned to donate it to a museum but the cork fell out on its own so I tried it. Was pretty awful tasting TBH.

How did you come across this? Were you digging with the intention of finding something?

Just walking on a beach, and ran across it randomly.

If the cork fell out on its own, what possessed you to even try it? That bottle had been interacting with the environment for years, if not decades.

To be fair, all the interactions were sanitized with 40% alcohol.

It fell out after several months of drying out, I think it was sealed until then. I made a mistake of storing it vertical when it sat horizontal for a century.

It was drinkable, just not very good.

Liquor doesn't really age in the bottle. Learned that the hard way from a 100 year old bottle of 5 year whiskey a buddy found at an estate sale.

> Liquor doesn't really age in the bottle

I know this is the industry answer, but I don't buy it. For one, anyone who has stored liquor or wine vertically knows that the cork is constantly drawing out moisture. So at the very least, an older liquor in a corked bottle will be dehydrated compared to a younger one.

That's more like (very slowly) spoiling. "Ageing" is usually used for when it changes the flavor in a desirable way.

> more like (very slowly) spoiling. "Ageing" is usually used for when it changes the flavor in a desirable way.

I've tasted whiskies bottled in the 1940s and 50s. I rather liked whatever they were doing in comparison with fresher bottles. Over shorter intervals, sealed bottles of Chartreuse increase in complexity with time in a manner I find difficult to describe as anything but aging.

It’s just straight up wrong to suggest that liqueur doesn’t change in glass and I don’t think anyone in the industry would say otherwise. They are really talking about imparting the aging vessel on the spirit when they say aging. And glass doesn’t impart anything.

Whiskey breaks down over time even if store really well. Sometimes that results in a good outcome, sometimes not. It also could be you just like the recipes from back then.

Chartreuse is famous for “aging” in glass. My hypothesis is it’s just such a wild flavor profile muting it (which is what most often happens as spirits breakdown) makes for a more complex taste.

> are really talking about imparting the aging vessel on the spirit when they say aging

This might be popularly misunderstood, then. A number of people I know believe that whisky doesn't change once it goes into a bottle. (This is how the term aging is used for wines, after all. One doesn't age a tannat to get more glass and cork flavor.)

If it were on the beach and exposed to the sun and wildly varying daily temperatures, I imagine that there would be some chemical reactions still going on in the bottle.

I'm not a chemist or an alcohol connoisseur though, so I couldn't tell you what that would be, but to my reasoning it would explain why valuable alcohols are kept away from sunlight in temperature controlled rooms or at least underground where the temperatures don't change much.

I was definitely using "age" as "chemically changing in a desirable manner" when I wrote that. Liquor can definitely go bad in new and surprising ways stored poorly.

It was likely buried in the sand and only just uncovered when I showed up - probably nearly ideal storage conditions of stable cool temp and no light

It wouldn't be anything special, anyways. Liquor ages in barrels. Once it's bottled, best case scenario it stays the same. The best you could hope for is learning "ah, so this is how Rum tasted 300 years ago"

That's pretty impressive to think about though; there are few foods I can think of where it is possible to taste something as it would have been centuries ago. I believe there are also reports of people trying honey from Egyptian tombs, but I'm not aware of any other foods that are able to be preserved indefinitely.

People have.

https://cocktailwonk.com/2018/09/drinking-the-harewood-house...

Spoiler: it wasn't impressive.

"The Harewood gives the impression of a lightly aged rum, perhaps a year or two. Letting it breathe a bit more, I was surprised to pick up cucumber – admittedly a most unusual rum flavor descriptor. With more time, I picked up spice notes, but not much vanilla. All in all, an extremely interesting rum, unlike anything I’ve ever encountered. But if had to choose one rum as my one desert island selection, it wouldn’t be the Harewood, much as I enjoyed it."

I tell this story often, when I was first out of college and at my first job, I was able to go on a business trip to a customer in a big city. A coworker joined me, he was around 30 years older than me, and had been at my company for about as long. It was looking like a long trip, our product wasn't performing well at the customer, so we were at the hotel bar and were looking at their extensive bar and he was explaining the ins and outs of expense reporting, "As long as you buy food, you can expense your drink", he said.

The shelves behind the bar housed hundreds of different bottles of liquor. One set caught our attention, there was around 30 bottles with the same label, but pretty obviously from different years. The oldest one's label was torn and visibly brown. The bartender wasn't around, so we consulted the price book. We found that these were a brand of Armagnac, and the bottles spanned the years from 1980 to around 1870 with prices that went from $20 to $450. $450 was an interesting number, it was also our hotel rate.

We hatched a plan, we'd buy just one drink, and put it on our room bill. Then we'd 'add' an extra day to our stay when we did the expense. My peer was confident that he had known our expense person for 20 odd years, and was sure that this would pass. There was a problem, we had no idea what Armagnac tasted like, how would we know if what we were going to drinking was any good?

The solution, we'd buy a 'decent' Armagnac ourselves, pay cash, then buy the expensive one. By this time the bartender asked us what we'd like, so we asked for a 'good' Armagnac. The bartender reached up and grabbed some VSOP bottle and poured us a glass each, then left. We were curious as the relative cost, and we saw in the book that the cost was $50 a glass. That was a shock, it was a lot to me, as much as I would spend in a weekend of drinking, but in our minds we got our drink and we had to drink it.

It tasted incredible, so smooth, just one of the best drinks I had ever had. I could only imagine how much better the $450 one would taste. My coworker agreed, which meant a lot to me, given the age diff. However, the bartender came back, asked "how is the drink?". We said, "Its incredible, however, I know we asked for a good one, but the book says this is $50". The bartender was put back, "Sirs, I would never do that to you!" And went over and punched it into the til, it was $4.50. and to drive in the fact it was cheap, above the til it said that 'well' highballs were also $4.50.

The very next sip I had, it might as well have been a dusty plastic bottled, no-name whiskey from the bottom shelf of a CVS. It was harsh, bitter, and tasted horrible. My colleague felt the same. We never did get the $450 drink.

This is why I buy cheap olive oil and transfer it to an expensive bottle

While not as old or perhaps storied, I can recommend the rum from St. Nicholas Abbey as a more affordable alternative, at probably a few hundred dollars for their most rare bottles - which they will engrave for you when you buy one. Barbados also had some exceptional cigars from the Royal Barbados factory in Bridgetown as well.

According to the auction listing, the 1780 dark rum actually sold for GBP 8,225 per bottle on 13 December 2013.

https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5757070

to save you some time, here is the summary of the article:

The story begins over 300 years ago with the Lascelles family, who made their fortune in the West Indies through various businesses, including the production of rum. In 2011, Mark Lascelles and Andy Langshaw found mysterious, ancient-looking bottles in the cellars of Harewood House. These turned out to be bottles of rum, which were auctioned at Christie's in London in 2013 and 2014. The last 16 bottles sold for over £100k, making Harewood Rum the oldest and most expensive rum in the world.

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