THE DEEP-CUT RUM
Clairin Casimir
If you want to go straight to the bottom of the rabbit hole, Clairin is a good way to do it. It’s usually unaged, so it has more in common with white whiskey than bourbon proper, and it’s made with local wild sugarcane and “dunder,” which is a bit like the sour mash of the rum world, but far less frequently used than its whiskey counterpart. It lends Clairin a deep funkiness that blends with the base spirit to invoke whiskey, mezcal, natural wine and rum all at once.
Rum offers more: more varieties; more flavors; more production methods; more eccentricities; more bottle diversity — and, critically, more availability.