Action Figures & Their Boozes -- Sea Legs

by Beedo Sookcool
on 2023-09-19, 14:08:49

REDLEG SPICED RUM

It's International Talk Like A Pirate Day again, and I've been saving this review for this very occasion! For more information on International Talk Like A Pirate Day, you can click over to this article I wrote four years ago. But in the meantime, RUM!

Like many weird children in the early 1980s, the first pets I ever had were land hermit crabs. They’re small, cute, very easy to care for, don’t make a lot of mess or noise (they occasionally let out a few quiet, raspy chirps at night), and most importantly, our landlord would only let me have cage / terrarium pets after a previous tenant family got a St. Bernard which completely ruined one of his duplexes with its copious waste products.

Point is, I’m very fond of hermit crabs. I think they’re adorable. So when browsing the local Sainsbury’s shelves, I stumbled across a bottle of rum with a hermit crab on the label, and that’s all I needed to see.

The bottle label reads: “As rum lovers we wanted to craft the best tasting rum. We proudly created RedLeg, our award winning Caribbean spiced rum which we rest in oak barrels and infuse with warming ginger and sweet vanilla for a delicious smooth taste with a hint of spice.”

Further exploration on their website divulges: “Our rum is named after the native RedLeg Hermit Crab. Moving from one found shell to the next, this hardy little crab goes with the flow and embodies the spirit of laid-back island life without a pirate in sight.” And “It’s so tasty that it won Double Gold at the San Francisco Spirit Competition when it launched in 2013 and has claimed many awards since.” They also provide some cocktail recipes, which is thoughtful of them.

The label also calls this a “spiced rum spirit drink” which sounds unnervingly like the phrasing on cans of really cheap, mechanically recovered swine flesh, which are sold in the USA as “potted meat food product.” Tortuous legalese does not inspire confidence when it comes to comestibles!

Naturally, I just had to get out my Zoids Sea Panther to photograph with this drink, since as soon as I saw this bottle on the shelves, I instantly thought of the Sea Panther.

As with hermit crabs, I also got into Zoids in the early 1980s, but didn’t get very far with them: only the first three Unnamed-in-the-West releases (called Garius, Glidoler, and Elepantus in Japan) and the Giant Zrk, then I moved on to Star Wars figures after getting Greedo for Christmas. Zoids made several comebacks under various names over the years, and I picked up the occasional small piece (just the little wind-up ones) that caught my eye with either a cool animal mode and/or nifty engineering.

So when I found out about the Sea Panther many years ago, I picked one up in a special “Graphics” collector set off Amazon for what can only be called a “serious collector price.” Taking the Zoidification of its looks into account, it looks like the same species that’s on the rum label. The scarlet reef hermit crab (Paguristes cadenati), also known as the red reef hermit crab or the red-legged hermit crab, is a pretty little crustacean popular with the pet trade, and very useful as a tank-cleaner species. Functionally, the Sea Panther Zoid is run by a Tomy wind-up motor, and does an extremely good job of mimicking the leg movements of a real-life hermit crab, even though it's not actually walking on those legs – it's actually rolling on wheels while the legs move a millimeter or so above the ground.

But enough with the toystalgia and David-Attenborough-ing, and on with how the rum performs!

It smells extremely vanilla-y. It’s like smelling the oily, oddly slightly crunchy, hyper-sweet frosting on one of those dry, cheap-arse devil’s food supermarket sheetcakes that keep showing up at kids’ birthday parties in the USA. This isn’t a bad thing, you understand; I’m just trying to be evocative, here. It sounds nasty when written out like that, but I guarantee you, half the Americans reading this will be transported back to their childhood and get a wistful smile on their faces and know precisely what I’m talking about. Then it’s like someone mixed some booze into the frosting. And wood. For the first time since I’ve started to drink alcohol, I can really, distinctly discern notes of the wooden barrels the drink was aged in, rather than getting a mere vague suggestion of a hint. It’s a new and not unpleasant experience for me!

Why can I discern wooden notes in this rum? Because it’s as mellow as a sunny tropical Sunday morning, and as smooth as the back side of a chocolate bar. Yep, I get the vanilla, I get some ginger, I get the wooden notes, and I get the rum. It’s all there. But it’s like all the aromas and flavours are lying in a hammock together – not sleeping, just listening to island radio and chilling while a Caribbean breeze rocks them gently.

At 37.5% ABV, it’s not even in the running for most potent rum I’ve ever imbibed, but getting tanked is no good if it tastes terrible, now, is it? Happily, this stuff tastes great. So far in my life, I haven’t had any rums that beat any of the four really good Guatemalan rums I love . . . but this one is jockeying for runner-up and has already left nearly every other rum in the dust, let me tell you. And it goes remarkably well with spicy snacks, without having its low-key flavours overwhelmed.

Highly, highly, highly recommended. If you can find some, grab it!

Drink this if you also like: Smooth rums, excellent rums, spiced rums, vanilla rums, “birthday cake” flavour.