Cockspur 5 Star Fine

Good taste and smooth on ice. A good rum for the price.

Bought a bottle of Cockspur 5 Star Fine Rum while vacationing in Guadeloupe. Nice old school bottle and label design. Super dry rum with nasty vanilla and strong oak to the nose and palate. Very strong burn at the end being so dry. Nasty even when mixed.

A very cheap rum, and I think it justifies the pricepoint. A very dull, weak rum, not much too it at all. Weak caramel flavours come through and while it is not horrible, it is really nothing special. Only to be utilised as a mixer and even then, it only serves purpose to make a drink alcoholic rather than to make a drink that is enjoyable.

Rum lacks a bite. To get the taste through when drinking with a mixer it requires double the slug of more potent brands.
Not obnoxious but not great either.

Nearly no nose perceptible, weak taste in addition. Maybe good for mixing, because there is no annoying taste and the rum is soft.

It has been about 30 years since I tried this dry rum from Barbados, probably because I have always preferred sweetened rums up until now. I had also refused to buy any rum with a name like Mount Gay until recently. This one has little or no added sugar. Heavily sweetened rums are not only bad for one's health, but they don't hold their flavor for more than 3-4 months. I finally broke down and bought this bottle after seeing it on the shelves for months. Checking here first for any really bad reviews also convinced me to give it one more try.

What a pleasant surprise this one is! The aroma is of vanilla, tropical fruits, and a faint whiff of nutmeg. The taste is even more pronounced than the aroma without being overwhelming, and it almost can be sipped neat with a natural sweetness. There are no oak flavors from barrels. I chose to add a few cubes of ice made from Icelandic Glacier Water because glacier ice seems to mellow out any bad flavors in rums. At only $17 per bottle, I will continue to buy this one. Why have I waited so long to go back to this old friend!

Update March 18, 2020: I must have gotten a bad bottle this time and I wound up ranking it lower than Cruzan Gold and lowering my rating from a 7 to a 6. What have they done to this one?!!!!

Something about the bottle, and then opening it up and tasting it, I thought I didn’t like it, wouldn’t like it, but as I’ve mixed with it, a complexity and playfulness I wasn’t expecting started to show through.

Sherry, Sweet, Spicy, smooth.
I enjoy neat or mixed.

Wow, to start off with.

I'm not 60. I don't regularly buy $100+ bottles of liquor. I don't have tons of experience, but I have a fair amount. I hop around brands constantly and I think I've only repeat purchased one brand at this point, I've bought 2 bottles of Captain Morgan in my life, when I was younger. Everything else has been a new purchase for me because I love exploring brands.

Well, this review is about the rum, not myself, I just wanted to get that out of the way. This rum is the only liquor I've ever been able to tolerate neat. I don't drink it that way regularly but I try it with each bottle of liquor once or twice to get an idea of how horribly offending it is to the mouth. So far there was nothing I drank straight that made me think "I could see myself consuming this neat regularly", incredibly it came in the form of a $15 bottle of rum.

It might help that I always imagine my vacations when I was much younger in the caribbean when I drink rum, but Cockspur Fine is extremely drinkable regardless. That said, it doesn't get a 10/10 because it's not huge on flavor. It's a little sweet and of course just plain "tastes like rum", if that makes sense. But it has no big, bold, special flavors like other rums I've tried, which is perfectly fine in my opinion.

The harsh alcohol burn is almost non existent in this one, and that's high praise from me considering even higher ABV beer starts to burn my tongue significantly and unpleasantly.

I first had this rum in Barbados in 1987. I was my first rum. I like the color, the aroma is a bit too much alcohol but the taste is fine. I can have several in an evening,but usually mixed. If I have a cigar, I usually have the 12 year