Ak Zanj White Rum

The white is sold as San Zanj — "without angels" in Haitian Creole, because nothing's been lost to evaporation — the unaged counterpart to the ex-Cognac-cask Ak Zanj range. It comes from Berling S.A., one of the oldest rum houses in Haiti, co-founded in Port-au-Prince in 1862 by Labbé Barbancourt and still run by his great-grandson Herbert Barbancourt Linge, a central figure in Haitian rum and the sourcing and blending of some of the world's best-known clairins. The blend is the point: clairin — rum distilled from fresh local sugarcane juice and fermented with wild yeast — sourced from two separate producers around Port-au-Prince, married with an unaged cane-juice rum from a third distillery, all run on Creole column stills and bottled at 43% ABV. Expect a shimmer of hogo up front, then fresh green olives, grassy cane, roasted cane, a hint of tar and licorice, and a lingering finish of saline, fermented plantain, lime zest, and a little chili spice. This is not a rum for wimps, as one RumRatings taster put it — he mixed it two-to-one with pineapple juice and the aroma still prevailed. Several drinkers prefer it to the aged expressions precisely because the clairin character is fully intact, and one ranked it above Barbancourt 15. Built for the Ti' Punch, a funky daiquiri, or any tiki drink that needs real Haitian personality.

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