Is castillo’s bad rum?

Recently became a bartender, with no drinking or customer-at-bar experience. Knew 0, only had one shot in my life of captain Morgan’s spiced rum and I enjoyed it. So I’ve been exploring at home, developing a palate.

I’ve explored vodka and whiskey a ton, and decided it was time to move over to rum. I was in a kind of short of money and decided to buy castillo’s as a cheap test run just to get an idea of what rum is and should taste like. Castillo’s gold to be exact.

It was truly repulsive compared to what I’ve tried of whiskey and vodka. Maybe because I have a Korean background, so the spicy burn of whiskey reminds me much of spicy Korean soups. Rye whiskey is perfect. But my god, it just tastes so absurd and putrid to me.

I know the history of rum and the molasses and all that, but I couldn’t taste any of the flavors that I read about, just strange and gross like a high abv beer (to be fair I don’t like beer)

Is castillo’s a marker at all of what rum should taste like? I recall my CM spiced rum being A+, but castillo’s gold had me feeling disgusted