Inner Circle Grey Dot 75.9%

Spirit Type:	Rum
Score:	80/100
ABV:	75.9%
Region:	Australia
Body:	Medium-full
Intensity:	Very high
Texture:	Medium
Balance:	Superb
Best served:	Neat, with ice, with water, in a cocktail, mixed
Theme(s):	Dry, raisin, vanilla, dark chocolate, refined sugar, coffee bean
In a nutshell:	Piercing alcohol strikes the nose with vanilla and cocoa that develops into a quarter full cup of espresso laden with brown sugar and raisins. This character then moves to the palate and ignites like a firecracker with lingering sugar crystals and prune developing later.
Likes:	Complexity and smoothness despite being 75.9% ABV!
Dislikes:	Slightly too sweet on the finish
Price:	$67

Nose

Around the piercing creamy alcohol is the soft perfume of vanilla, raisins and dark chocolate layered with coffee beans and caremalised brown sugar/burnt toffee. It has a lovely earthiness, and reminds me of the brown sugar that is left over in my morning espresso.   

Taste

Superbly smooth for a rum of such high alcohol content, this rum ignites on the tongue like a firecracker which releases big juicy raisin and the aftertaste of sweeter refined brown sugar. It is slightly sweeter in this sense than the Holey Dollar Platinum Label 75.9%, because the sugar crystals seem to linger on the tongue with that earthy ground coffee and cocoa.It is very hard to pick between the two because each offers excellent quality, remembering from my review of Holey Dollar Platinum that its sugary character conjured memories of the less sweet panela. 

Finish

Wonderfully long, the taste of subtle dried prunes replace the raisin and linger gently as the dry alcohol radiates off the tongue with those sugar crystals. This shows some great distilling, because the distillate has retained that lovely sugary earthiness while the wood plays its park with the delivery of spicy dry wood and cocoa/coffee bean.