Review: Planteray Hogo Monsta

Truth. I’ve been sitting on Hogo Monsta for… awhile. Though it arrived in a tiny 25ml bottle, it came with a pipette and a story. It’s not a rum intended for you to drink. It’s intended to be used to enhance cocktails, one drop at a time. It’s only sold in 200ml bottles for this very reason.

Why the mystery? Planteray‘s Hogo Monsta is conceived as one of the world’s “heaviest” rums, heavy in the sense of esters and other aromatic compounds, not actual weight. Crafted at Stade’s West Indies Rum Distillery in Barbados, it contains a whopping 2,029 grams per hectoliter of these compounds. The idea is to use a few drops as a rinse or as a float — in just about anything, from a Mai Tai to a martini.

Reviewing Hogo Monsta is, to say the least, difficult. Naturally I had to taste it in its native state, unadulterated and without anything to temper it, but also in cocktails. So here we go.

Planteray Hogo Monsta Review

On its own, Hogo Monsta is a force of nature. Intense beyond belief, the rum smells of camphor and fruit so ripe it’s nearly rotten, the hogo underbelly thick with aromas of barnyard and dry, scorched earth. It hits the tongue with the force of a perfume factory, bricks and all, impossibly racy but also surprisingly heavy with notes of hazelnuts and charred meat. It’s surrounded by fruit and flowers — but never in the way you think possible.

As expected, reviewing the rum in this fashion was a fool’s errand, so I quickly switched gears.

After adding just three drops to a daquiri, the power of the Monsta in a cocktail is immediately evident. For up to 3 minutes, its estery punch is all you can smell, so I recommend dosing your drinks one drop at a time and instructing drinkers to sit with them for a bit. Baby sips until things settle down. Eventually they do, and the impact is much like you get with a dash of high-quality bitters, elevating the cocktail with intense sweetness plus more exotic elements that include coconut and florals. That funky hogo influence, overripe but a huge delight, is less than you might expect, though that will obviously depend on how heavily you dose your drink.

If you like to experiment with your mixology, I highly recommend picking up a vial to keep on hand — one drop at a time.

113.2 proof.

A / $55 (200ml)

The post Review: Planteray Hogo Monsta appeared first on Drinkhacker: The Insider’s Guide to Good Drinking.