Review: Mad River Distillers First Run Rum

One of the hazards of this job is that you can never really go on vacation — even when you’re traveling, you’re still on the lookout for an interesting spirit and something you can’t get at home. Such was the case on a recent trip to Burlington, Vermont when we came across the Mad River Distillers, a local distillery in the northern Vermont area with a great tasting room in downtown Burlington. Three bottles followed me home for review, and we’ll start with the first bottle I tasted: their First Run Rum.

History

As with most distilleries, this one’s history starts with someone getting restless. Maura Connolly wanted a change of pace from her day job and dreamed of opening a vineyard in upstate Vermont — a notion that her friends quickly helped dissuade her from, since the weather wasn’t exactly ideal for growing grapes that far north. The dream didn’t stop there, though, as her helpful husband and apple brandy enthusiast John suggested they try their hand at a distillery instead. The couple partnered with Brett Little, a fellow apple brandy enthusiast, and together they founded Mad River Distillers.

The facility opened its doors in 2013 and started by producing rum, but has since expanded into a wide line of craft spirits including apple brandy, single malt whiskey, rye, and a couple different versions of that original rum. While their facility is a bit off the beaten path, my wife and I ran into them at their tasting room in downtown Burlington, where their helpful staff was more than happy to share their enthusiasm for the product.

Product

• Learn More: What Is Rum?

The First Run Rum is named that way because it was the first kind of spirit that came off their still back in 2013, and remains one of the mainstays of the distillery’s product line. It also serves as the base spirit for a number of different finished spirits they make, including maple cask and sherry cask finishes.

While the distillery generally prides itself on using non-GMO locally sourced ingredients, sugar isn’t something that is native to northern Vermont. For this spirit, they start with fair trade certified all-natural cane sugar sourced from either Texas or Malawi (depending on the season) which is then added to pure spring water from the farm where their distillery is located and fermented with yeast to create a mildly alcoholic liquid. They then run this concoction through a still, selectively capturing the flavors that they want and concentrating the alcohol content to the desired level.

Once distilled, the spirit is then placed into new charred American oak barrels, the same maturation process used for bourbon whiskey. There’s no age statement, so we don’t know exactly how long the spirit is matured, but eventually it is blended with other barrels of the same batch, proofed down, and bottled for sale.

Packaging

There’s not a whole lot of chances being taken here on the design, but I think that choice makes sense for this distillery.

For the bottle, they’ve gone with a standard design for modern distilleries: cylindrical body, rounded shoulder, medium length neck, and capped with a wood and cork stopper. It’s a design we see commonly, since it’s difficult and expensive to get custom made glass bottles. This design tends to look cleaner on the shelf and (probably more importantly for their tourist-y Burlington location) has a tendency to survive transport either in checked baggage or long drives.

I love that they haven’t gone overboard with the label. The paper is a clean design with some rustic touches like the font and the yellowed paper, but it isn’t going overboard either with the size or the embellishments. They made the decision to let the color of the spirit shine through and be the star of the show, and that’s exactly what I like to see in designs.

One thing I do want to note is the border along the top of the main label. At first I thought this was a lazy way of making the label look a bit aged, like it had frayed or ripped somehow. But looking at the product line across multiple different versions, you’ll notice that this irregular line actually denotes the category of spirit that you’ve got through the color of the ink used. It’s a neat trick to visually group the spirits together and add a bit of flair.

Neat

On first glance, this looks like a traditional lightly aged rum, like you’d expect to see from a bottle of Smith & Cross. There’s an amber hue to the clear liquid, but nowhere near as dark as something like a traditional rye or bourbon. Taking a whiff, the aromas coming off the glass nicely blend the components you’d expect from a whiskey and a rum — there’s the marshmallow sweet sugar coming through clearly, but it’s supplemented by a significant hit of vanilla, cinnamon, and brown sugar.

What first piqued my interest at the tasting room was the depth of flavors in the spirit. It doesn’t just pay lip service in the aromas to a skin deep maturation — those flavors really penetrate to the core of the experience. The oak-y notes of cinnamon, clove, allspice, and dark chocolate are the very first things I’m getting, elevated by some of that marshmallow sugary sweetness. On the finish, some of the vanilla shows up with a bit of brown sugar and caramel to round out the experience. But all the while, that dark chocolate note is providing a grounding base for what you are tasting.

It’s a surprisingly deep and rich flavor experience, one I don’t normally expect from a rum.

On Ice

What we’ll typically see with some added ice is that the lighter aromas will drop out of the running (usually those from the raw materials and the distillation process) and what’s left behind are the meatier maturation-related flavors. That’s definitely happened for the aroma, where that light marshmallow note has disappeared, but I don’t think the flavor of the spirit has actually changed all that much.

I’ll say that the depth of the dark chocolate is reduced, but there’s still a rich tone that underlies all the rest of the flavors in the glass. The brown sugar has moved to the front of the queue along with the marshmallow, but the cinnamon and clove as well as the vanilla are a large part of the later flavor experience. There’s also a bit of a tone that develops like the toasted brown sugar on top of a creme brulee, which adds some interesting character to the drink.

Cocktail (Old Fashioned)

Normally, we only review a rum in the cocktail form of a dark & stormy — but given how the flavors in this spirit have performed, I took a gamble that an old fashioned would actually be an appropriate test here. And I gotta say, the result is pretty good.

Spoiler alert for a future review, but the Maple Cask Rum was the stand-out star when I had it in an old fashioned that they made in their local tasting room (and is probably the reason for why we ended up bringing home as many bottles as we did). But this First Run Rum works as a solid old fashioned choice as well. There’s a good balance of the darker flavors of the dark chocolate and cinnamon with the herbal notes from the bitters, and while I think this could still go a little bit further with layering in some additional flavors, it remains a solid choice.

My recommendation is to add a maraschino cherry or two to the mix for the best results.

Fizz (Dark & Stormy)

I think this might be the first instance in which this bottle isn’t a stand-out example of a great rum. I can see the dark chocolate and brown sugar in the mix, and it does add some balance, but it isn’t as good as we’ve seen with other versions of this cocktail. There’s some complexity missing that makes it slightly too bright and cheerful when what I really want is something with a bit more richness.

That said, this is still a great poolside sipper. I wouldn’t be mad if I had an endless glass of this at hand on my day off (although the next day might hurt a little if I did that).

Overall Rating

Of all the places to find a good rum, northern Vermont wasn’t on my list. Yet here we are.

In this case, in my opinion, the base spirit is fine. It’s a good well-executed rum without any bells or whistles. But where this really starts to shine is the maturation process. Normally, aged rums use previously used bourbon barrels, which are cheap and plentiful to find on the secondhand market (since bourbon requires a new barrel each time, and distilleries want to recoup their costs somehow, selling them onwards is an easy income stream).

For the Mad River Distillers, they instead choose to use new barrels — and it shows. All the delicious flavors in this bottle, like the dark chocolate and cinnamon, are a direct result of the new barrels and really make the difference. What you have here is a spirit that blends the sugary deliciousness of a rum with all the richness of a good bourbon.

All reviews are evaluated within the context of their specific spirit classification as specified above. Click here to check out similar spirits we have reviewed.

Overall Rating: 4/5
A well executed rum that is deliciously finished in charred barrels, giving the best of both worlds.