This barrel has been a year and a half in the making…
August of 2023 I braved the Louisiana heat on a birthday trip to New Orleans with a great friend, and not unlike most trips that I take, I found time to connect with my spirit-making friends and taste some fantastic juice. On this trip, the focus was rum - Marsh House rum.
Brand owner Chris Puckett and his family have a long history in the state of Louisiana, and after discovering through some inherited documents that his family had a past in rum-production, he decided to pick up where his forefathers left off and get back into the rum business.
Fast forward to that dense, humid august of ’23 where Chris now has [ex-Pinhook] barrels filled with rum waiting to be tasted and chosen.
Myself, my dear friend, Chris, and a couple of folks from NOLA-based Porch Jam distillery tasted through a series of Marsh House’s private barrel options, and I was so pleasantly surprised with what we found. That day, I picked a barrel with the expectation of it being bottled within the same year and perhaps released to you all by that Fall season. By a happy accident, that is not what wound up happening.
July of 2024, while back in NOLA for Tales of the Cocktail, I learned that the rum barrel that I had selected almost a year prior was still aging, and tasted even better than I remembered. It’s not too often that a barrel select sits for an additional year in-barrel before we receive it, and in this case we have zero complaints on the final result.
The nose is milk chocolate, caramel, dense medley of baking spices, toasted sugar, & stewed red fruits.
The palate is torched raw sugar, cinnamon, tobacco leaf, dark chocolate, stewed cherries, hints of minerality and terroir
It has a medium finish with lingering notes of mineral-rich terroir and dehydrated tobacco.
