Habitation Velier White Guyana Pure Single Rum (Port Mourant) 2015 – 59%

Blind Review: Habitation Velier White Guyana Pure Single Rum (Port Mourant) 2015 – 59%

Source: I recently did a trade with a fellow r/rum member who sent along a 1 oz mystery sample in his care package with nothing but a “?” on the bottle. Here are my notes.

Nose: Astringency, must, furniture polish, salted popcorn, pencil shavings, sea mist, coconut lotion, melted butter, motor oil, wet forest, pot still funk

Mouth: Thin, almost simple syrup-like sweetness initially hits the tongue before a little burn and monster funk comes into play. Heavy wood. Cigar. Dried fruits. Petrol. Beef jerky. Smoked meats.

Impressions: The combination of sweetness, funk and wood is very intriguing. This is clearly an unaged spirit that ran through a pot still. The level of wood integration leads me to believe it is Port Mourant.

Guesses: Unaged Port Mourant… or maybe a high ester Mhoba, around 60%.

Reveal: Habitation Velier Port Mourant White 59%

Final Thoughts: I’m excited to have guessed it correctly, although it seemed pretty obvious from the first sip with tons of wood and esters emanating from an unaged spirit. It’s a very interesting specimen indeed. It would be really eye opening to have a flight of unaged distillates from PM, Versailles, Enmore and Savalle. And taking that experiment even further, a comparison of unaged vs tropically aged vs continentally aged expressions from the same distillation runs from these stills to see how wood and climate impacts the raw distillate. Oh, if we could only be so lucky. Grateful for the sample and the fact HV brought this to market!

My Rating: 3

My Scale:
1 – I don’t want this in my mouth ever again
2 – Best used for mixing
3 – Decent sipper
4 – Very enjoyable
5 – I’m buying a back up bottle