Well well well… Richard Seale, gladiator for rum purity and transparency, has an offering of “spiced” rum with a “secret family recipe”. How the mighty have fallen! Stooped to the level of Captain Morgan and Kraken! Someone update the Foursquare Wikipedia page!

Eh, what’s this? Mount Gay, WIRD, and even St Nicholas have Wikipedia pages, but what about the best distillery in Barbados?

Well, as of yesterday, now they do! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foursquare_Rum_Distillery it’s pretty bare bones, but feel free to take a look and fix any issues or add any additional info that I may have overlooked. It would also be nice if you had a picture of the distillery that you’d like to donate to the public domain.

But don’t think for a second that I’m going to go easy on a spiced rum, just because I wrote the wikipedia page for the company!

Also, this rum was part of a sample shipment, so I don’t actually have pics of the bottle.

Review

Smell

It smells like an apple pie! Strong notes of sweetness, cinnamon, caramel, nutmeg, and not much of an alcohol smell.

Taste

First off, I feel like it’s really interesting that, unlike most spiced rums, that use a really neutral cheap rum and then bury it in spices, Foursquare spiced rum tastes, first and foremost, like rum. You actually get Bajan rum flavor, and the base rum itself is actually really tasty. But, I will also say that the spices themselves are rather bitter, and alcohol is bitter, and overall, there’s a reason why spiced rums are usually heavily sweetened. It just makes them taste better.

The nice part is, though, that I can just sweeten it myself! After adding a little bit of simple syrup, it’s much more aligned with what I was expecting. It’s actually a fantastic spiced rum. With a bit of sweetness, the spices really come together, and the base rum continues to just be a cut above most other rums. You can taste cinnamon, nutmeg, maybe some other spices, and they don’t completely overpower the rum flavor.

I have a bit of Kraken kicking around, and moving from Foursquare spiced to Kraken is like… how does this rum manage to be both too sweet AND too bitter at the same time?

Verdict 6.5/10

This is the best spiced rum that I’ve ever had, and, I fear, might be as good as it gets in terms of mass-market spiced rums. The only thing that I think can top this is if I maybe soak some spices in some Smith & Cross, which, actually, sounds like some interesting weekend plans. With that said, I don’t think that the spices really improve upon the rum. I think that, if I just had the base rum before it was spiced, I’d also think that it’s a 6.5/10 rum. I may even be conditioned to dislike the spices without the proper amount of sweetness, just due to how much Kraken I drank in college. On top of that, the base rum is good, but also, not really anything to call mom about. I am not a huge fan of spiced rum in general, so I don’t think that I’ll be buying the bottle.

Finally, I would like to thank /u/CocktailWonk , because the Wikipedia page was actually rejected for lack of notability, and when I appealed, the editors noted that the PUNCH article was so high-quality that it convinced them of the notability of Foursquare, and reversed the rejection. In general, it unfortunately seems that rum wikipedia is not as well maintained as some of the more respected wines and spirits.