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Don Q Piña
Don Q Piña
Serrallés distillery in Ponce, Puerto Rico, producers of Don Q rum has released a new pineapple flavored product for their lineup. The product is rum that has been aged 12 to 18 months in used American White Oak bourbon barrels, then blended with “natural essential flavor and extraction of real pineapple” to 30% ABV firmly placing it in the flavored rum or rum liqueur category.
Appearance
The 750 ml bottle is the new staple design for the bottle. The liquid in the bottle has a light-yellow color in the bottle and glass. Agitating the liquid created a thick band that quickly disintegrated/evaporated, leaving residues all over the glass.
Nose
The aroma of the spirit is no surprise pineapple driven, but it has a bit more depth to it than I thought it would and lacked the over-the-top sugary sweetness I expected to find.
Palate
Sipping Piña neat, delivers the expected pineapple note, but instead of gravitating sugary, it is earthier, with a bit of a coppery twang in the profile. The aftertaste of the spirit is where you pick up the base flavors of the alcohol with the pineapple note slowly fading.
Review
Reading the bottle and reviewing the Don Q website it is recommended that the product be paired with coconut water (or club soda) and lime juice. I decided to mix it with lemon-lime soda (Sprite) and have a Piña spritz. I found that the flavors in the soda and the liqueur balanced and worked well together.
Overall, when evaluating any flavored spirit my criteria are simple: Do the flavors of the product capture the flavor the company wanted to achieve? This cannot be assumed to happen as I have experienced way too many mishaps over the past decade, but in this case the answer was thankfully, YES! Overall, a job well done by the flavor engineers at Don Q. As the temps are warming up and if you get the desire to mix up a Piña Colada you have a new product to work with.
