Pusser's Rum
The Royal Navy’s rum, bottled commercially to the Admiralty blend from 1979 and paying a royalty to a sailors’ charity. Pot-still and unsweetened, it reads noticeably drier and woodier than most dark rums of comparable colour.
Quick Facts
About Pusser's Rum
Flavour Profile
Primary Flavours
Tasting Notes
Dense and dry for a dark rum: molasses and oak with a woody, faintly medicinal edge that comes from the pot still rather than from sugar.
The Purser’s Rum
Pusser is naval slang for the purser, the officer who ran a ship’s stores, and the rum took the nickname of the man who issued it.
The Royal Navy served a daily rum ration for something over three centuries and ended it on 31 July 1970, a date the fleet marked as Black Tot Day. Sailors wore black armbands, and some ships held mock burials at sea for the last tot.
Bottled to the Admiralty Blend
Pusser’s Rum was established in 1979 to bottle the Admiralty blend commercially, and it pays a royalty to a Royal Navy sailors’ charity, which is an unusually direct line between a bottle on a shelf and the institution that made it famous.
The blend is pot-still and unsweetened, and that is what you taste. It reads drier and woodier than most dark rums of similar colour, so a recipe written for a sweeter bottle may want a touch more syrup rather than less.
The Painkiller and the Trademark
The Painkiller is generally credited to the Soggy Dollar Bar on Jost Van Dyke in the British Virgin Islands, so named because there is no dock and customers swim ashore.
Pusser’s registered the name as a trademark and has enforced it, most visibly against a New York bar trading under it in 2011. The position is the same as with the Dark ’n’ Stormy: a trademark the owner defends rather than a law about what may be poured, so the drink is a specification and anything else is a good rum punch under a different name.
Gunpowder Proof
The higher-strength bottling sits at 54.5% and is named for the old test in which rum was poured onto gunpowder and lit. If it burned, the spirit had not been watered down, which is where the naval fixation on proof comes from.
It is genuinely useful rather than a novelty. In a punch, where a standard bottling dilutes away over an afternoon, the extra strength survives the ice and keeps the rum audible in the glass.
It is not simply a stronger pour of the same thing, either. The higher strength carries more of the pot-still character through, so a Painkiller built on it tastes of rum further into the drink rather than only at the start.
Using Pusser's Rum
Usage
The Painkiller first, where the trademark requires it. Beyond that it is a heavy, characterful rum for tiki drinks that need weight, for punches where a lighter rum would disappear, and anywhere a recipe calls for a Navy rum and means it.
Top Tips
- The Painkiller trademark names Pusser's specifically, so a version built on another rum is a different drink under a different name.
- Gunpowder Proof at 54.5% is worth having for punches, where the extra strength survives dilution that flattens a standard bottling.
- It is drier than most dark rums, so recipes written for a sweeter bottle may need a touch more syrup rather than less.
Possible Substitutions
- For a Painkiller there is no substitution: the name is trademarked to this rum.
- In other drinks, a dark pot-still rum of similar weight gets closest, though most are sweeter.
Storage & Handling
Upright, away from light. Indefinite once opened.
Production Method
A blend in the style issued to the Royal Navy for three centuries: pot-still rum from the Caribbean, aged in oak, with no sugar or flavouring added after distillation. Bottled at standard strength and at the higher Gunpowder Proof that recalls the strength a sailor could test against gunpowder.