Chairman's Reserve Legacy Rum

Legacy is the Chairman's Reserve Paste called impossible not to be impressed by — many of the same alluring notes as the wonderful 1931 at a fraction of the price. Released in 2020, it honors Laurie Barnard, the last founding-family chairman of St. Lucia Distillers, who transformed the island's only distillery in the 1990s by adding pot stills to a column operation and created Chairman's Reserve in 1999; he died in 2012, and his portrait is on the front label. Legacy is the blend that shows what he was after: rums from the Coffey column still and the John Dore and Vendome pot stills, with a larger share of pot-still rum than the Original and a touch of estate cane-juice rum, aged five to seven-and-a-half years in ex-bourbon barrels, bottled at 43% ABV. Paste found a slight wildness and earthy terroir balanced by traditional molasses richness and pot-still spice and esters — much more in the reviewer's wheelhouse than The Forgotten Casks, cheaper, and the one they'd be looking for in the store. Rum Ratings notes it's blended from four of the fourteen rums that make up the 1931. Expect a nose of cooked banana, dried fruit, tobacco, and a savory funk, opening into a rich, spicy palate of molasses, tropical fruit, pepper, and oak with a green, grassy edge from the cane, finishing long and warm. Honest note: the best value in the range. Neat, or a Rum Old Fashioned that tastes like Saint Lucia.

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