Rum Revelations Best Of 2024

When looking back at my website activity I always wonder if I could have done more. I mean, this year I only wrote 16 articles. My goal is to do two a month, so I’m quite far off. This is mostly because I took some time off writing in summer to focus on a few other things in life. These articles might not seem like hard work, but to me they are somewhat. It should actually be fun, so if it’s too much hard work, a break is needed.

That might also be the reason why I didn’t write about my Martinique distillery visits. They take even more time than regular reviews, especially the photo editing. In my 2023 end of the year article I promised to write about them. But alas, here we are a year later….and still nothing. I’ll try again in 2025, maybe just do something more photo based than text.

I’ve reviewed and written about 25 rums in 2024, which is one more than last year. Only one distillery article this year, but at least it’s about a great one. What an experience it was to visit Mhoba in South Africa! Will never forget it. The sugar list has tons of new entries and will continue to grow. I’m actually working on a whole new setup for this list, as I don’t like the way the current one works. I can only add new entries to the bottom of the list, which means you always have to sort it to get it in the right order. The sorting function doesn’t work well, so something new is needed. This is quite a lot of work, but should be ready in about a month I hope.

I’m not a super talented writer. Which is one of the reasons why all my articles take so long to produce. There are the odd moments that things just flow, usually when I’m slightly frustrated about something. Those articles tend to get the most views for some reason. I guess people like pissed off Ivar more than Mr nice guy Ivar. That showed last year in the viewing numbers of my "Plantation and their misuse of the word terroir" article and the one about getting banned from the Ministry of rum on Facebook. This year’s most viewed post is about El Dorado. That seems to be a popular brand to write about anyway, but I guess including my opinion about influencers made it a little more interesting for some. Initially I only wanted to do a bottle comparison. However at some point I got to describing some of El Dorado’s shenanigans in misleading us consumers, which led me to think about some of the “influencers” who are defending and promoting all this nonsense. That was a rare flow moment.

I mentioned Matt Pietrek and Bryan Inman, who I think could be qualified for the influencer label. I found it interesting to see their difference in responses to this article. Someone sent me a screenshot of what Matt wrote somewhere on FB, can’t remember exactly what it said. Something about me writing an article to show I’m the only one that can be trusted? That actually wasn’t my intend. Most of the time I think nobody will take my rum writing seriously, so there is that part of my personality. More importantly, it’s about the fact that everyone has biases. We all try to deal with and minimize them as well as we can, but they are there. As a consumer you have to figure out what this means in regards to how much you can trust an opinion. Once someone gets paid for an article or social media post though, all alarm bells should start ringing. At that point it’s just brand marketing. If that’s super clear then it’s no issue at all. But in most cases it isn’t clear. There are many examples to be found within all of Matt’s struggles with his conflicts of interest.

Bryan responded in a much better way in my humble opinion. He didn’t respond. What he did do is add a page to his website to describe the work that he gets paid for. A clever move. I have to applaud the effort to try and be more transparent. It doesn’t change much overall though. I’ve seen so many influencers come and go. A lot of them want to be seen as rum enthusiasts at heart who happen to get paid for a few things here and there. “Trust me, I’m a rum consumer, just like yourself”. They all have one thing in common and that is that they only ever criticize brands they’d never get to work for. Think Captain Morgan, or on the other side of the spectrum, a tiny brand that means nothing to them. They know they can’t be too critical, as it would potentially make some brands wary of working with them. That conflict of interest is like a permanent cloud that overshadows everything they communicate about rum.

As always, I’d like to thank everyone for following my little website from all over the globe. The views and comments are always appreciated and a motivation to continue this hobby. It’s humbling. Happy new year! May 2025 be a healthy and rummy year for you.

Ivar