Bardenay Boise Rum

[Ron de McDonald]

Passing through Boise recently, I had a chance to sample the rum made at the restaurant and micro-distillery known as Bardenay. I had a neat pour and it was pretty good--better than I had expected, really. It seems to be made from cane juice/syrup rather than molasses (unconfirmed, but this is what it seems like), and it reminds me most of Barbancourt or maybe Papagayo, for those of you who have tried that. It's rather thin and has a clean, fresh sugar taste that I have come to associate with artisinal rums. You cannot buy it by the bottle at the restaurant but local liquor stores apparently sell it for about $12, according to my waitress. It is certainly worth $12, though I didn't have time to go looking for it.

[Edward Hamilton]

I believe that rum, like a growing number of US rums, is made with sugar cane sugar as opposed to molasses. Fresh cane juice is difficult to source, unless you have a distillery next to a sugar mill. Syrup isn't practical to transport, though some distillers tell you that they are using sugar cane syrup. All of the distillers in the US that I know that are using sugar cane syrup are making their syrup out of cane sugar. Syrup sounds a lot better, or so they think, on marketing literature and websites.