Armogan Gold – Found in 2018

He said, “…leave things the way they are.”

Money and an internet connection can buy a person any number of rare bottles, but even in tandem those two tools cannot buy a trophy for a hunter.

In the world of bottle collecting there are drinkers, shoppers, obsessives, and hunters. The last group rarely gets an invite to the cool kids club- the secret handshake known only to Caroni drinkers, Demerara River in-jokes by people with bunkers full of private label rum releases, the Freemason pantomime handed down to owners of Foursquare 1998- the hunters, dusty and dingy from excavating sketchy liquor stores for unopened artifacts, are often excluded.

My hunting trips have taken me to some wildly beautiful and dangerous places. From the Rocky Mountains to San Juan, Puerto Rico; from high society in Francophone Canada to the lingering gunsmoke on the streets of Newark, New Jersey, the hunter changes his camouflage and stalks anew.

In February of 2018 I set out to find a bottle of pre-2009 Mount Gay Extra Old. I had read threads of debate regarding the blend of aged rums in the pre-2009 Extra Old, the 2009-2013 Extra Old, and the 2013-present XO expression; from these threads I wove and intricate plan. A unicorn in the wild will be found where people won’t notice unicorns, and a decade-old bottle of rum will exist under similar conditions. The environment must support rum, but to live long and age into being forgotten about the residents must not value rum. I needed to find liquor stores that were open when the old Mount Gay Extra Old was sold, still sold rum, but sold rum in far less quantity than say, Thunderbird and 24-ounce cans of Natural Ice. It’s basically like searching new constructions in Pakistan for cathedral ceilings to accommodate a comparatively tall international terrorist. Don’t look for the target, look for the building most likely to contain your target.

The New York City Metro Area was not ready for four nor’easters in 3 weeks. Snow is awesome because the first letter in snow looks a lot like a dollar sign, and when there’s snow on the ground I get paid to not go to work, hence dollar signs. Money, I feel like I’m going to score. Unicorns frolic in the snow, it’s one of those lesser-known facts, like how Tigers hate cinnamon, that you learn from American adults who were homeschooled and weren’t vaccinated as children. It may not be scientifically sound, but for a moment, it’s fun to believe these things.

2 p.m., I load a three shots of Brugal 1888 into a flask- medoc to draft as I navigate the bottle-lined catacombs of ancient stores.

I don’t wear camouflage, but I dress to fit in. No matter what hood you’re in, if you’re dressed blue collar and dirty from work, the most trouble you’ll get is tough looks and mean mugging. I suited up in snow pants streaked by engine grease, thick socks, and mud-crusted waterproof boots and began my walk. I would walk the next 10 miles and visit 30 liquor stores.

Where do I go hunting? Lately you would think I were having a midlife crisis. I go hunting in liquor stores where people sell drugs out of abandoned cars parked on the corner. I go hunting in places where cat calling and public urination are so prevalent that the only women who come around are the female police officers investigating their repeat offenders from the group home. I go hunting in places where a lot of barely living store fronts are nothing more than fences for stolen goods and laundering money through ATM machines. I go hunting where buskers are openly hawking Viagra and Cialis in front of the cell phone stores that they manage. There are cold stares and steely glances for the outsider who walks in like he’s the motherfucking landlord, poking around dark and dusty hiding places as if he had a court order and a big gun.

The first liquor store that I would enter was a full two miles from my house, that’s because I have already been inside every other liquor store within that radius a dozen times already. The ends justify the means. My first score of the day happened in the first minute of hunting, and I felt that it was a better find than my intended target- Myer’s Golden Rich Puerto Rican Rum, tax strip intact, early 1980s. Sticker price: $9.99. There is a bottle of Martel Cognac next to it, tax strip dating to the early 1980s. $19.99. Yeah, you’re mine now too.

Lightning struck in the same place twice, but I’m chasing the winter tempest with an aluminum baseball bat and daring Zues to use thundersnow to stop me. Must be the medoc murmuring within me. Eight miles to go.

The next stop is a 10 minute walk north. It’s a safer section of town, people have jobs that let them work from home in inclement weather and there are families playing in the snow outside. Enterprising teenage boys shovel sidewalks and driveways for cash and the opportunity to innocently flirt outside of school with the young ladies on the other side of the door. Drivers are polite and understanding because the roads are too dangerous to be anything but zen and focused while driving. The falling snow gives life here in this moment the effect of a faded postcard in an antique shop. I hate it. I want to go where the wild things are.

I refuse to let  the calm and bucolic feelings turn the hunter romantic. I am Ahab in the heart and Montressor executing a plan with cunning precision. Another draft of the medoc as I ascend into the faux pallazo of a liquor store more-upscale than  the others on my journey.

And I almost score again, the big one, but I realize quickly that I’ve come along its progeny. Cases of Mount Gay Extra Old Rum, the 2009 to 2013 edition, cases upon cases, bottles more numerous than the stars in the sky.

Right now, as I tell you this story and take you around the city with me, you’re standing next to me in an attractive building with a well-curated  selection of high end products, but let me tell you how the seedier side of life exists just one layer under the surface. Mount Gay put the date of manufacture on all of these bottles. Every single bottle in the store, hundreds of them, have half of the manufacture dates wiped off, the same was done to other identifying marks and codes on the bottle as well. Make of that what you will, but I’ll make of that what you should- It’s 2018, these are old, likely stolen, and have been sitting in storage for years. From the bridge to the bay there are people who work off the grid and their means of getting by is doctoring stolen goods so they can’t be traced. Sometimes, if dated styling or the threat of the product perishing don’t prevent it, stolen goods sit in an undisclosed location until the statute of limitations expires. The victim received his or her insurance money and the thieves get to sell their goods. Maybe the victim and the thief are the same and everyone is getting paid twice.

After 10 minutes of looking around the store and enjoying it’s wonderful heating system I head back out into the wild. After many more uneventful stops and four miles of snowfall it was starting to get dark.

Unicorns are rumored to be diurnal and crepuscular. Metal things, often poorly aimed, go boom in the dark here, but the hunter’s gun won’t bust tonight. As I begin to round out the last three stores on my map for my return trip home, I don’t lose any confidence in my tracking skills. As I pass by abandoned lots dotted with burned out and boarded up buildings I see the glow of light pollution and commerce ahead.

Thus far, I have not told you where I am. I have spent this afternoon trekking through the depressed areas of Jersey City. The high-rises are invisible from the streets that I’ve been walking. The riches of Wall Street West simply don’t exist to the people I have walked among for the last 4 hours. This is an area of failing schools, gang territory, and newly arrived immigrants with large families and huge amounts of love, heart, and work ethic but pennies to their name after the bills are paid and the kids are fed with food from corner store bodegas. Equally controversial is the gentrification I see a couple blocks ahead of me. I’m walking into The Heights. Years ago, this is where the working people a shade above the poverty line lived, and today some do call this home. Outsiders with deep pockets have bought up entire blocks of apartment buildings. In three years time, when everyone’s leases are up and the renovations are finished, none of the people who I will lay eyes on for the next half hour will be here.

There’s still hope for old bottles in these conditions, but once the rum and bourbon enthusiasts with their parent’s money show up, it will be too late. The first store I walk into has a foreign name, and an older gentleman with failing teeth, yet impeccable clothes, chain-smokes behind his cash register. This is a practice I haven’t seen in 30 years. I have asthma, but I am going to stick around and hold my breath for a couple of minutes to look for the Unicorn.

There’s nothing to be had and I take a gulp air the moment I leave, the stores that I pass as I walk two blocks to my next stop are all newer than the one I just walked out of. Fresh paint, new windows, fancy lights, speakers playing pop songs, college students in groups, young families going to evening yoga sessions. This could be the b-roll for any of the millennial and generation-Z-aimed television shows that will come out in the fall.

******** Liquors. At first I was going to share the name of the store because I picked it clean- but upon realizing the consequences of what I found- I won’t name the place. ********* Liquors maintains its original styling from decades ago and it remains in contrast with most of the neighboring businesses, which have been revived into ventures newer and more upscale.

The moment I walk in my senses are alerted. I lock my eyes on it the moment I see it, it is not the Mount Gay Extra Old I was looking for, no it is much different. It is much more important.

Gold Reserve Armogan Demerara Rum.

Produce of British Guiana.

The hunter slowly slides his finger off of the trigger.

Do you see how that’s spelled?

Guyana received its independence from Britain, which called their colony British Guiana, in 1970. I know that one company owns all of the stills in Guyana today, DDL, also known as Diamond. This is either a very old bottle from that company or a bottle that predates the conglomeration of the industry.

“Excuse me sir, can you hand me that bottle?”

He’s a happy and rotund little fireplug, teetering from side to side as he walks forward and grabs the bottle.

Oh no, this is of much greater importance than a bottle of Mount Gay from 15 years ago, this is old enough to demand inspection and appraisal. I’ve seen private labelings and independent bottlings of Demerara rum, they are all museum pieces.

“Why you look at that bottle?” the clerk asks me, “Try this,” he says, handing me a bottle of Captain Morgan, “It’s what everyone comes in here to drink for rum.”

No, no, I tell him. He’s surprised by the hunter’s indifference to a ship captain.

I swirl bottle to see if anything has settled at the base, and there are particulates that I watch fall to the bottom. If this bottle is old as I think it is, is it safe to drink? Oh I’m drinking this bottle, because there are four of them and I’m taking all of them home with me.

“How much is this bottle, man?” I asked.

He passed the bar code underneath the infrared scanner. Nothing came up. He examined  the bottle, he wiped off the dust, and he looked at me. This is no Bacardi, this is no Captain Morgan, this isn’t that good. I’ll sell it for $10 each.

I didn’t argue, I paid cash. I thought that I would have to break out the plastic for four bottles in an area that is being invaded by self labeled creatives with no discernible job skills and artisanal mushroom cultivators in polyamorous public performance art marriages, but to my surprise the prices were consistent with the era in which these bottles probably arrived.

The next and last store was two blocks ahead. I almost forgot to go in. I had eight bottles banging together in two bags. I was worried about the bottles exploding from hitting and clanging against one another as I walked.

In the cruelest irony of the day, I found the Unicorn, three of them. Three bottles of Mount Gay Extra Old, in boxes dated 2003 no less at *********  ******** Liquors, but I couldn’t carry any more bottles.

I went home full of ideas. What did I really have in those Armogan bottles? Where did they come from? When were they made? There are all kinds of stills that I’ve read people name drop, exotic stamps on their passports to single-barrel society.

There was nothing to be found on Google, short of a watch maker and some people with the last name Armogan in Guyana. I found one sentence without any information but enough content from which to infer a new idea.

—

What is becoming clearer as I do these reviews, is that while independent bottlers take care to keep track of and list every one of their offerings — including from which country, from what year and at what strength — more commercial “country-based” makers (like DDL, Barbancourt, Mount Gay, Angostura, St. Lucia Distilleries, Flor de Cana, the Travellers, the Jamaicans etc etc) who keep a single line of rums stable for many years, never really bother.  That’s why Carl Kanto could mourn the passing of older DDL rums marketed in the pre-El-Dorado days, of which no trace, no list, no photograph, no profile, and no sample remains.

– The Lone Caner

—

If this bottle is really from British Guiana, it is likely pre-El -Dorado and it may be a pre-DDL rum at that.

Previous to this revelation I was thinking in terms framed by cliches and memes this whole time. Hunting, unicorns, and the like. What I lacked in the matter at the time was the gravitas and reflection of The Lone Caner. When a hunter comes across Ishi on the edge of civilization, he puts his gun down and offers him a home.

In search of a Unicorn I instead found Ishi– Ishi and his three brothers, really- natives of another time, the last of their kind in a bush world shrunken and tamed by the manifest destiny of commerce, real estate development, and multi-national rum producers.

Google was a wash, the only real value gained was finding Peter’s Rum Labels at Rum.cz for later research, and if you haven’t used this site you’re missing out, but there was nothing related to Armogan here.

I turned to the Ministry of Rum on Facebook, some noticed what I noticed- the spelling of Guyana in its colonial form, and agreed that the rum was from the late 1960s to early 1970s. The esteemed and revered Richard Seale even made an appearance to explain the origin of the particulates in the rum, but alas, no information on Armogan or the still which produced these bottles.

I had two small tasks ahead of me. I have been drinking and collecting rum since my mid-20s. A decade ago a coworker put me on to rum, he was determined to diversify my palate and untether me from my mantra of “Hennessey, Hennessey, and more Hennessey please.” We had the same background, urbanites with Dickensian upbringings and taste for dark skinned women and a talent for drinking and smoking the finest on someone else’s dime. We are 25 years apart in age, so he would stop me from making short-sighted decisions and I would introduce him to things I thought he was missing out on. He birthed my love of rum with a bottle of Brugal Anejo and a bottle of Diplomatico 15.

“One of these will tell you if you’re man enough for more rum, the other will tell you if you should stick to Hennessey. Report back tomorrow.”

I chose the Brugal and here we are today. I took a ride over to his place a few days after I discovered the Armogan bottles, I brought two with me- one for him to have and one for us to drink. He’s traveled all through South America and the Caribbean. Maybe he’ll know something about this bottle, maybe he’ll tease something out of Ishi’s brother that I couldn’t.

No, didn’t happen, though the sight of the label cured him of his usual blarney- his brain was firing on all cylinders. After a few moments he looked at me and broke out into a smile. You’ve stumbled on to something special. I don’t know what this bottle is, but it’s old. He called his wife over, also a rum drinker from the Caribbean. He showed it to her and pointed to the particulates. Mira, he said, pointing to the shavings that lulled slowly down to the bottom, par la processa.

He had all sorts of ideas. Maybe the ship design on the logo is the key. Maybe different brands own certain ship designs. He discovered that the bottle that contained the rum was Jamaican. Hmmm.

After circling back from our dead ends I decided that it was time to open one of these bottles up. I offered him a drink but he declined. That would be a solo mission.

***

My first impressions were positive, but over the last decade I’ve learned that one can’t properly review a rum after one dram. I spent the next 6 months having a dram here and a double there, sipping, dissecting, and analyzing the taste. Here’s what I’ve found Armogan to taste like over that time.

On the nose:

Molasses

Butterscotch

Dust/Books/Library

Slight trace of alcohol (43%/86 proof)

Over ten minutes the alcohol scent is gone and the bouquet evolves into  a mélange of butterscotch, caramel, and banana.

No hogo or diesel fumes.

Tongue:

Dry

Wood/Arbor- not sure if it’s oak.

Sweet, along the lines of dark chocolate and espresso toward the end, spice before the fire as it goes down.

I have enjoyed this rum a few times now. Being a “gold label” rum, most would not drink this straight (though I do). The first impression that I get is light molasses. The very next sensation is spices and something arboreal. When I first opened and tasted this bottle I felt that Armogan Gold had the rough edge of a whiskey on the finish- more on that in a moment. I like it with Coke; the rum takes the restlessness of the carbonation up a notch. I can imagine enough Armogan Gold leading a man to rediscover his youth and later tell a story involving a hospital and being sentenced to community service. For mature audiences and well-developed palates only; but remember, pirates had drunk enough rum to have well-developed palates of their own.

Over time, the character of the rum in this bottle does change. It becomes smoother and sweeter without having a watery finish. It is something that I sip as opposed to mixing. This is the first older “dusty” bottle that I’ve opened and drank. I’ve opened two others and noticed that those rums settle down and become just a bit more mellow in the bottle after opening (those being Old St. Croix Dark, an early 1980s bottling, and an older Meyers bottle from the 1970s).

She’s just sweet enough for a second date, but she’s intriguing enough to keep around for a while on the side.

***

Behind every intrigue there is a story. How did a rum from Guyana made in the late 60s or early 70s manage to come to America without a tax strip and pass unnoticed on a shelf for 40 years? Was it on the shelf for that long? Was it hidden? Starting a private liquor label is not the realm of the proletariat, yet here are four bottles of exactly that, hiding from their colonizers in a proletariat vice den.

Just under the statement of provenance there is one more clue for me to investigate:

Imported by T.W.R. Inc., Centerville, OH 45459.

Google may have more information on T.W.R. than it did on Armogan.

The Ohio Secretary of State Business Name Database brought me closer to the information that I was looking for. The T.W.R. stands for Trans World Reality . The paperwork that launched the T.W.R. business entity was filed on May 17th, 1977. The entity expired on the same date in 1982. The man who filed the paperwork was Aurthur P. Lambros of Fairview Park, Ohio. At some point Lambros must have moved the operation from Fairview Park, which is 20 minutes southwest of Cleveland, to Centerville, which is over 200 miles away, deep in the Southwest of the state and three hours away by car.

Does that make you go “hmmmmm”? When the rum was in Oho and when it was in New Jersey people were, seemingly, trying to hide it. Today Centerville has huge green spaces interrupted by strip malls and McMansions, which indicates to me that this was likely a farming community, and an affluent one at that, in the 1970s before the real estate developers came. Was Lambros, of Trans World Reality, one of the men who brought housing here? Trans World implies the company may have reality across the globe.

The geography so far is: rum from Guyana in Jamaican bottles, imported by someone in real estate (and who I think is actually a lawyer) in Ohio, rum probably cached in Ohio before somehow making its way to what was once a blighted working class section of Jersey City, New Jersey.

Why was it hidden? My guess is unpaid taxes or other illegalities such a fraud and theft. Mind you, every store in a three mile radius of ******** Liquors traffics in stolen merchandise, unless it’s a store maintained by scooter-riding gentrifiers. United States law until 1985 was that tax strips had to be on every bottle sold within our borders; this bottle, produced sometime before 1982, has no strip.

What if it’s not as complicated as I am making it? What if Lambros was a rich real estate developer who had a fine tipple in Guyana and brought back 50 cases because he was rich and excessive? Maybe the bottles are from the late 1960s and he sat on them until the 1970s because he had visions of bottle flipping long before the rest of us got into it on social media? I’d like to find out.

***

The hunting grounds shift from the pissy streets littered with empty 50 milliliter bottles to the comfort of my apartment and computer.

So who is Arthur P. Lambros? For years a trace of him could be found hiding in plain sight in the streets of Jersey City. Using the same Ohio business name data base I used to investigate T.W.R. I next ran a search on Arthur P. Lambros. Arthur kept the secretary of state quite busy. Searching by registrant name instead of business name reveals that Lambros registered 16 businesses in Ohio starting in 1954, all corporations for profit, save for one, many with humanistic and philanthropic names: Friends of Adult Education, The Cemetery Society for the Greater Hellenic Community of Greater Cleveland, and Energy Conservation Specialists, shared space with names such as The Reid Grill, Automotive Sealing Inc., and Cleveland Refrigeration Corp.

What is certain is that from 1984 to 1998 Lambros was a lawyer and he maintained his paperwork, the only registration among his 16 that wasn’t a for-profit entity, for that business every year until he formally dissolved it in 1998, an age when I assume he was preparing for retirement. This business is the only one that he formally dissolved, all of the others were cancelled by… the tax department, again pointing me in the direction of missing tax strips playing a role on these bottles being hidden or so long.

***

Someday I hope to add more to this story. Arthur Lambros died in 2003. I found a list of his surviving family members in an obituary and I found contact information for his one son and one daughter. His daughter has a web presence and she is an entrepreneur like her father. I reached out to her in 2018 via Facebook and I never heard back from her.

As for his son, I sat on his contact information for a year. He is in his eighth decade himself and I struggled with how to reach out to him. In February of 2020 I re-read what I had written here a year ago and I decided to finally make the call. A little after 1 in the afternoon I called and asked if the man I was speaking to was indeed the son of Arthur P. Lambros, formerly a lawyer based in Cleveland, Ohio. He confirmed his father was that man and I told him that I had some artifacts from his one of his father’s business.

“I don’t know where you’re going with this? Are you trying to sell them?”

He seemed suspicious. I had not yet told him what I found.

“No, quite the opposite. I’m trying to save them. Did you know that one of your father’s businesses imported rum from Guyana?”

“No.”

“And it’s a significant find. It comes from a time when things were very different in Guyana. This bottle is unique and worthy of research,” I told him.

He was indifferent and unmoved. There was a long pause.

“I still don’t know your purpose.”

“I am trying to uncover the origins of this rum and speak to anyone you know from that era in your father’s life who may know more about this bottle and how it got here.”

“No. There is really nothing to say about that.”

There was another long pause, he began to speak again.

“I think people should leave things the way they are,” he said to me. He was uncomfortable and I wasn’t going to put him through this any longer.

“Very well then,” I said, “thank you for your time this afternoon. Sorry to bother you, if any memories come back to you, feel free to call me at this number.”

“Alright.”

“Take care,” and we each hung up our phones.

The entire conversation lasted less than three minutes.

***

I would not be deterred.

Months later, bored during the coronavirus quarantine, I decided the look T.W.R. up again. This time I was presented with two results instead of one. The second result came back with a signature: Nelson S. Armogan.

Why didn’t this result appear the first half-dozen times I looked this up? It’s the same database. No time to waste on that question, forget it.

I looked up Nelson Armogan’s information and found his phone number. I called immediately.

A firm voice with the trace of a Guyanese accent answered. To my shock, and I knew it right away, I was finally talking to the man behind this rum. I introduced myself and got down to business. The call lasted an hour, and Nelson Armogan is among the most fascinating men I’ve ever spoken with. He’s lived a life where he’s had to tangle with the pirates of his generation- drug traffickers- except rather than fencing on the decks of the storied ships where pirates drank their rum, the pirates he faced were government functionaries, airplane pilots, and shady deal-makers.

Here goes the story.

Nelson S. Armogan was born in 1949. He left Guyana for the United States of America at around 19 years old. He comes from a well educated family with roots in the sugar industry. His father was a chemist in the industry, working at first for the government and then doing contract work in Guadeloupe and Central America.

The rum in Armogan Gold Reserve is Nelson’s formula. He is a man of many trades, as you will read here, but make no mistake- he knows everything about rum from cutting cane to how different islands cure with milk or beef, to evaporation percentages by line of latitude, to how age statements used to be fudged by citing the age of the wood used to age the rum.

He knows about the qualities that make rum from Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe, and the Demerara unique to their soil and people’s traditions. His knowledge may have contributed to two facets of the other two rum cultures appearing in his product. Armogan Gold Reserve is 100% Kittle Pot Still rum, Guadeloupe’s influence, and Nelson also asked for high quality raisins and currants from Del Monte be used similarly to that of Puerto Rico’s Ron del Barrilito in the process of making his rum. When I asked him for an age statement he was evasive, “I had drawn up two labels, one for ten years and one for five years, but it’s so tricky because you can fool people and different people in the process will pressure you to change the number.”

The paperwork for his company was completed in Ohio in 1986. By 1988 he had secured the licencing from the ATF to be an importer and distributor of alcoholic beverages. By 1990 he had labels drawn up for 5 and 10 year age statements for two containers of rum sourced from Demerara Distillers (which, come 1990, he had sitting in the Brooklyn Navy Yard awaiting inspection).

Demerara Distillers was having difficult time breaking to the American market at the time, and Nelson had to do much of their leg-work. He sourced bottles shaped in the Bacardi-style from Jamaica and labels from artists and printers in Canada.

What stopped all of this? Why weren’t these bottles in every store in America?Nelson, in his own words, was taming two elephants at once. As he was getting his rum business off of the ground, he was also starting an airline with six weekly flights from Georgetown to New York City.

That’s right. He was starting two mammoth tasks in two very difficult industries at the same time.

In late 1990 Nelson went to the Brooklyn Navy Yard where his rum was stored. It was opened and inspected. Nelson’s dreams were dashed after the first container was examined. Wood chips from barrel aging were in the finished product. He had paid for it to be charcoal filtered, it wasn’t, and he was so displeased with it he had it all poured off the side of the pier.

“I didn’t want my name associated with that,” he said.

Two containers, gone. Today rum purists prefer to keep the evidence of non-filtration, but in that era the attitudes were different. It was seen as unsanitary and the hallmark of bottom-shelf neutral spirits with additives.

If all of the rum destined for bottling and distribution was poured into the ground or off of the pier, how did I get the four bottles that I found?

Back in Guyana some powerful people in the airline industry wanted a bribe from Nelson. Nelson refused to pay and, as a result, his airline was permanently grounded- a second dream dashed. The dirty tricks didn’t end there. Somehow the leftover product from Demerara Distillers in Guyana ended up on the airline that was eventually awarded Nelson’s route, and that airline smuggled the leftover bottles of Gold Reserve Armogan Rum to the United States of America. Even though Nelson refused to pay the bribe, whoever he was dealing with took his airline route and his rum.

Pilot is the new pirate, y’all. Is this why Aurthur Lambros’ son didn’t want to talk to me about this rum? I never asked Nelson, but if Lambros was his lawyer and some powerful people were trying to bribe, extort, or threaten me I might call my lawyer and ask him to make sure my affairs were in order. Full transparency- I never asked either man about this and I didn’t link the two bits of information together until well after I spoke with Nelson.

Extraordinarily, I am not the first person to call Nelson about finding his bottles.

“It’s been 12, maybe 15 years, since someone has called me, about this. But, no, you’re not the first. I used to get calls from Rockaway, Sunset Park, Brooklyn, ‘Hey, we have your rum, can you believe it?’,” he told me with a laugh.

This, confirmed Nelson, is why there is no mention on a distributor on the label. “The bottles were definitely smuggled here,” he insisted, “It all goes back to the airline.”

When the whole venture started, Nelson lived in Ohio and it’s more than likely that Arthur P. Lambros did his original paperwork. By time time his rum importation business ended in the early 1990s, Nelson S. Armogan found himself in Teaneck, New Jersey, forced out of both the rum and airline industries and looking at relocating to Africa to work in the mining sector.

He hasn’t set foot on Guyana’s soil since 1991.

Today Nelson S. Armogan no longer drinks but he works on a formula in his head. It’s for a new liquor but I dare not share his idea here, for it is his creation and his creation alone. He speaks fondly of his rum, he had plans to roll out a 151-proof version after his Gold Reserve, but Nelson’s experience was equal parts hard work and broken dreams and we never had the chance to see the 151 brought to market.

It was a fascinating conversation, and I thank Nelson again (if he’s reading this) for taking the time to tell me everything about this bottle.

Too long, didn’t read:

Gold Reserve Armogan Demerara Rum

Private Label by Armogan to help get Demerara Distillers into the USA/various USA state-markets

100% Kittle Still Distillation

Likely a blend of 5 to 10 year old rums

Company formed 1986

All Gold Reserve Armogan Demerara Rum was discarded, poured off the pier according to Nelson Armogan in 1990.

My bottles pre-date 1990, were intended for the Guyanese market, and were smuggled here by pilots and airline staff who smuggled whatever they could out of the country.

These bottles were sold in New York City and Northern NJ, specifically Rockaway in Queens, Sunset Park in Brooklyn, and in The Heights of Jersey City.

***

There is thrill in the kill but the it’s the hunt that wrings adrenaline from my kidneys. Hunting, waiting, and delaying the gratification of tasting prolongs the feeling of victory. Armogan Gold, two trophies on my shelf, provisions for a friend, and the confidence to continue safari hatari. I will outsmart other white whales and spear them with casual indifference, I will discover more Ishis in the wild and give them refuge in my country home, and I’ll win the Freedom Barrel from Ron del Barilito in a dice game all because that’s what hunters do.

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