Going Deeper with Denizen Merchant’s Reserve, and Dutch rum powerhouse E&A Scheer

I recently did a post about three Dutch rums, including the new Denizen’s Merchant’s Reserve, a blend of aged Jamaican and Martinique rums. The Merchant’s Reserve has a bit of buzz around it from Tiki wonks as it’s been promoted as being a good facsimile of the rum used to make the original Trader Vic’s Mai Tai back in the 1940s and 1950s. After acquiring my bottle of the Merchant’s Reserve, trying it out, and reading as much as I could find online, I still had questions beyond what I was finding. I emailed the founder of Denizen Rum and he graciously agreed to talk with me in more detail about the Denizen Rums.

First, a bit of back story to help frame what I learned. Citizen Spirits and its Denizen rum line was founded by Nicholas “Nick” Pelis in 2006. Nick had worked in the finance part of the spirits industry with major companies for a few years before forming his own company, Citizen Spirits in New York. One of Nick’s motivations for going into rum was that the Daiquiri had been butchered over many years, becoming an unrecognizable fluorescent green slushy drink made with inexpensive, flavorless rums. A real Daiquiri as consumed by Hemingway and JFK is a simple, robust cocktail made with rum, lime and sugar. The rum in those daiquiris, while clear, was still robust and flavorful, unlike silver rums today that aspire to compete with vodka in their lack of flavor. The first release from Denizen was an aged white rum, a blend of rums from Jamaica and Trinidad. It’s a relatively inexpensive white rum, around $18, and well regarded from what I understand.

While the Daiquiri was the inspiration for the Denizen Aged White, the Trader Vic’s 1944 Mai Tai was the target for rescuing via Denizen’s next rum, the Merchant’s Reserve. As the story goes, Victor “Trader Vic” Bergeron originally used J. Wray and Nephew 17 year aged rum from Jamaica in his original Mai Tai, but the Mai Tai’s popularity eventually dried up the stock of that rum, wherein Vic switched to the 15 year Wray and Nephew. When that supply dwindled as well, Vic switched to a blend of younger Jamaican rum and rum from Martinique. These days, the J. Wray and Nephew 17 year rum is a bit of a Holy Grail for Tiki and rum experts, and if any bottles were available they would command a very steep price. Thus a blend of rums is realistically what modern Tiki aficionados have to work with in pursuit of the Original 1944 Mai Tai.

There’s an important detail here that’s easily overlooked and which deserves emphasis. Some modern recipes for a “1944 Mai Tai” specify a mix of Jamaican rum (for the fruity “funk”), and Rhum Agricole, which has a grassy, vegetal flavor because it’s made from raw sugar cane juice rather than molasses like most rums. While a Jamaican rum and an Agricole rhum play nice together, a Tiki expert (and I’ll say who in a moment) contends that the Martinique rum used by Trader Vic wasn’t an Agricole style, but was instead cheaper and molasses based, termed “Rhum Industriel.” This type of rhum isn’t common on Martinique, as most distilleries focus on the Agricole rhum style — considered more refined.

As previously mentioned, Nick wanted to release an ideal rum for a Mai Tai. After consulting with Martin Cate, renowned Tiki expert and owner of Smuggler’s Cove in San Francisco, Nick selected a blend of rums as close as possible to the mix Trader Vic used after the J. Wray and Nephew 17 and 15 were no longer available. Thus, the Denizen Merchant’s Reserve isn’t simply a more aged version of the Denizen Aged White rum. Instead, it uses a different blend of Jamaican rums as well as Martinique rhum industriel, as opposed to the Trinidadian rum found in the Aged White.

To actually produce the Merchant’s Reserve, Nick continued his prior collaboration with E&A Scheer, a Dutch company with a long history going back to 1712. Originally E&A Scheer was a merchant trading company with ships sailing the “Triangle Trade” route between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. Eventually the company focused their efforts on bulk rum shipping and blending, and today their storage facilities hold around 20 million liters of rum, Batavia Arrack, and Cachaça for various customers, which will be blended and sold as drinkable spirits or used in the flavor and fragrance industries. E&A Scheer has extensive experience working with distilleries and transport logistics so they’re a natural choice for a company like Citizen Spirits to partner with.

80% of Denizen Merchant’s Reserve is comprised of rum from Jamaica, sourced from four distilleries:

• Worthy Park
• Hampden
• Clarendon
• New Yarmouth

The Hampden distillery might be familiar to Jamaican funk aficionados as the source of Smith and Cross rum. The New Yarmouth estate is owned by J. Wray and Nephew, who produce not only the Appleton line but also an  essential Tiki rum, Wray & Nephew Overproof. Worthy Park sells rum domestically within Jamaica and is the source of the Hamilton Jamaican Pot Still rums. Some of these distilleries are relatively small and are working hard to stay afloat in a world of much larger competitors. Nick said he intentionally selected rum from the smaller distilleries to obtain a particular flavor profile as well as to help support and keep them operating.

Of the Jamaican rum in the Merchant’s Reserve, 60% is aged for eight years in used American oak barrels. Another 20% is aged for four years and the remaining 20% is fresh, un-aged distillate. All of the aging is done in Jamaica.

A natural question is: Why not use an even more aged rum? There’s a few reasons: First if aged too long the funk that’s such a great part of Jamaican rums starts to diminish. As I described in my post on Lost Spirits distillery, the barrel aging process converts shorter, fruity esters to long chain “honey” style esters. Second, it’s hard to commercialize a rum older than 8 years. Distilleries need to make predictions many years in advance about anticipated demand, and then distill/age towards those targets. Nick says it’s a challenge for distilleries to do this more than 8 years in advance.

The 20% of the Merchant’s Reserve that’s not Jamaican comes from the Le Galion S.A.E.M. distillery in Martinique. It’s the last remaining sugar factory in Martinique that produces brown sugar, and they produce a rum called “Le Galion Grand Arome.” The rum from Le Galion is molasses-based rather than starting from cane juice, so by definition it’s not an Agricole rum. [Update: Be sure to see Martin Cate’s notes in the comment section about the alternative to the “industriel” designation as well as about the fermentation and flavor of “Grand Arome” rum.]

Given all the moving parts of putting together a blended rum like this, I was wondering about its long term availability. Should I be snapping up bottles of the Merchant’s Reserve? Nick says he’s got enough in reserve to expand production and make it an ongoing commercial release. The initial bottling of Merchant’s Reserve was just 700 cases and targeted primarily at the New York/New Jersey, California, and Chicago markets. However, it’s available at online stores that ship nationally.

With two well received rums released, I asked Nick what’s next for Denizen rums. He indicated something more “allocated,” to use his words. By that he means something rarer, for example a single barrel rum, aged longer, perhaps in the 15-year range. I strongly encourage this sort of thing. In Europe there are a number of independent bottlers such as Rum Nation that have limited runs of bottles from a single still or barrel. Unfortunately these sorts of bottles are relatively difficult to come across in the United States. I vividly remember visiting a whisky store in a Glasgow cellar and coming across the whole set of Bristol Classic rums, then agonizingly choosing one as I only had room for one more bottle in my overstuffed luggage. I really hope the U.S. based Denizen can help supply the US market with exotic rum treasures like what are available in Europe.

During my conversation with Nick I was surprised at how open and forthcoming he was with details about his rum’s background. His reasons for sharing boils down to the fact that rum is relatively unregulated and big producers will play games with it to lower costs and/or sell more. For rum to rise in respectability to where Scotch is today, provenance and traceability are key. I’ve seen traceability taken to an extreme with Ed Hamilton’s rums, where you can enter a number from the bottle into a web site and see photos of the actual barrels containing the rum, shipping manifests for the barrels and much more.

Back to Denizen Merchant’s Reserve, the label design is similar in concept to the earlier Denizen White rum, reminding you of an “old school” rum label you might find on a bottle that floated up on a beach somewhere. The label’s orange color is a nod to the Dutch role in its creation.  The lions at the top symbolize courage, while the crown symbolizes being the king or queen of your domain. The “Merchant’s Reserve” name is a tribute to the Dutch West Indies trading company – They discovered that during the long sea journeys, the taste of the barreled rum improved. They selected the best of these rums and sold them for the highest premium.

While Denizen rums are still mostly available in a small number of US states, the set of distributors signed up is growing. If you can’t find it locally, check out online sources.