Lugger Spiced Rum Review

I’m developing a taste for spiced rums. I’ve tasted several excellent ones in the past year or two, and here’s another, from the Lyme Bay Winery in Devon.

Lyme Bay Winery

As the name tells you, the company isn’t a specialist spirit producer but rather an all-round drinks maker – winery, cidery, distillery. They make English wine, fruit wines like cherry and blackberry, ciders, cider brandy, meads, a range of liqueurs, several delicious-sounding gins, and now this Lugger Spiced Rum.

The company’s based in the Axe Valley in east Devon, a little inland from Lyme Regis, which is in west Dorset. If you don’t know it then it’s an absolutely beautiful part of England, one of my favourite places to visit.

What is a Lugger?

A lugger is a type of fishing boat that’s common here along England’s southwest coast, and it’s also a craft that was very popular for smuggling. One of the most famous smugglers in Devon was Jack Rattenbury, more commonly known as Jack Ratt, and also called the Rob Roy of the West. The Lyme Bay Winery has several ciders named after him, and he certainly used one of the luggers you see on the label for this spiced rum. The boats were fast, agile, and often painted black so that they were hard to see at night when bringing contraband ashore.

Lugger Spiced Rum Review

Lugger Spiced Rum is a small-batch rum that’s a blend of rums from Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago. The rum is then aged in Devon using charred ex-bourbon barrels, adding even more to the flavour profile. The rum is then spiced with nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, orange peel, clove and vanilla, and it’s already won a Gold Medal at the 2019 International Spirits Challenge.

Sampling the Spiced Rum

Just by opening the bottle I was immediately hit by the scent of cinnamon. It was very powerful, though when I poured some of the spiced rum into a shot glass, the spicy and smoky cinnamon stepped back a little. There’s nutmeg and orange swirling around on the nose, and a touch of vanilla too. This wasn’t overly done as is often the case with rums, where they can end up smelling just a little too sweet. This one seemed to me to be a little more banana than vanilla, so it’s still sweet and with a tropical touch.

On the palate the cinnamon reasserts itself in this wonderfully smooth rum, with flavours of honey, strong orange, and dark chocolate too. The orange and chocolate notes are there on the finish, so if you like rum and chocolate oranges, this is definitely the spiced rum for you. It certainly worked for me.

Serving Lugger Spiced Rum

You can definitely drink this neat, or on the rocks, before or after dinner. It should also be good in a cocktail, and although it’s not cheap it isn’t so crazily expensive that you’d be wasting it in a cocktail. There’s a classy video on YouTube that shows you how to make a Spicy Lugger rum cocktail: