If you’re anywhere near as lazy as I am, then this column is right up your alley.  First of all, let me explain how lazy I can be.  I have a stay at home job and still can’t get to work on time.  However, I do enjoy a nice cocktail with all kinds of goodies in it but hate all the prep work that goes into it.  That’s how I finally discovered the true reason for this recent rash of flavored spirits.  It seems that there are millions of people out there who hate peeling, slicing and dicing a lemon or lime or peach as much as I do.  Prepping almost any kind of fruit is just too much for us lazy types, and that is why virtually every distiller has come out with flavored spirits of all sorts.

Take the lowly peach for example.  You have to peel that fuzzy mess of the skin off of it, while it drips all that sticky sweet juice all over the place, and then slice it up into pieces around that gigantic pit. And what is up with that pit anyway?  Holy cow, if you accidentally swallowed that sucker you’d be in a world of hurt.  In the first place, you’d have to be a total retard to even shove that thing in your mouth, but if you were and you did, it would kill you one way or the other.  If it didn’t explode your esophagus going down or coming back up, it would get you another way.  It would either back you up so badly, you’d explode from the buildup of offal things, or you’d suffer irreversible damage from the roto-rooter man going in with his power auger trying to loosen things up and flush them out. Any way you look at it, we should all be grateful for flavored spirits sparing us from some form of agonizing stupidity, amputation or even death.

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OK, so let’s skip the stupidity and death and get on with the tasting and see if this stuff is better than losing all your fingers to a sharp knife.  Straight out of the bottle it certainly smells like ripe, sweet peaches, with very little alcohol to speak of.  It just might be a tad sweeter than the normal peach, and I can surmise that the extra touch of sweetness comes from the sugar cane that produced the rum.  Interestingly enough, in the snifter, the aromas flip flop and the peach sweetness takes a back seat to the sugar cane sweetness.  On the palate, it is thick and oily, and of course sweet, and almost has the consistency of peach juice.  I get just a little rum flavor and almost no alcohol.  I keep talking about all this sweetness, but I have to admit, it is well balanced and does not over power the senses; in essence, it is just right.  The finish is smooth and peachy and lasts a while, and there is no alcohol bite whatsoever.  I have sampled some peach flavored spirits in the past that tasted like they came out a test tube rather than off of a tree, but this taste is orchard fresh.

On the rocks, the sweetness gets diluted down to a very nice laid back semblance of a peach slice but retains the viscosity and oiliness. Throughout all of this tasting, there is barely any rum presence but subliminally, you know it’s there.  To my taste buds, this Cruzan Peach Rum is a bit too sweet to savor on its own and belongs mixed in with a few other things and should produce some very interesting cocktails like: Peach Mojitos, Peach Daquiris, Pyrat Passions, Peach Coolers, Fuzzy Navels, Sangria and about a hundred others.  So grab a bottle of this stuff and start stirring and forget about slicing off your fingers.  At around $14.99 per 750ml bottle it won’t damage your wallet too much.  Also, at only 21% alcohol by volume, it won’t hurt your head too much either.

 

 

By George Brozowski

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