A blog post. A competition. Rum.

Since I haven’t won anything in a very long time (think FBLA in high school) and I’m looking to bolster my resume, winning Rum Dood’s May Mai Tai Madness would fit nicely between my master’s degree and my work experience at a minor league ballpark working the scoreboard.

There were two rums I have been wanting to write about: El Dorado 15 and Bacardi. If you read some of the finer cocktail blogs, you’ll find many mentions of El Dorado 15 and even a few mentions of Bacardi, but rarely will you find both being discussed on the same blog. Both bottles are filled with the spirit known as rum, but they couldn’t be further from each other in taste. Sure, they are also separated by more than a few dollars (which might help explain the difference in taste and quality), but the truth is that most Americans think that Bacardi is the “nice” stuff when they should be thinking of El Dorado 15 as the nice stuff.

This post is mostly about education and evangelism. How do you get people to step outside the boundaries of conventional wisdom? How do you get them to try a rum like El Dorado 15?

I don’t even recall where I heard about El Dorado 15, but I think it was on a blog. Living in Washington State, it is difficult to get a large selection of liquor in our state run stores, but on a trip to Portland, OR I went to the liquor store and found a single bottle of El Dorado 15. That was my second bottle of rum.

I went from Bacardi to El Dorado 15. After the first sip, I was in heaven. My immediate thought was how could something like El Dorado 15 and Bacardi both be called rum? El Dorado 15 was surprising with each sip. Bacardi just reminds me of a rum and coke. One is harsh. One is smooth. One is white. One is brown.

I personally find El Dorado 15 to be superior to Bacardi in every way (and I think most who have tried both agree), but you don’t want to disparage what a person considers to be the “nice” stuff. Just offer it as something different. Let your pupil discover for themselves why they like it. Don’t be condescending, be helpful. Be friendly. If they don’t like it, great, more 15 for me please.

With lots of love,

Windward Wino

PS. A win will keep me from going back to my bottle of Bacardi. I almost got rid of it by making a punch for a party of people who think it is the “nice” stuff. Didn’t work out, and now it sits in my cabinet.

My planned punch was going to be:

• lime juice
• simple syrup
• Bacardi
• passion tea