You know life is good when you find yourself with a free pass to hit some of Notting Hill’s most swank-o-rific cocktail bars with a bunch of folks you probably would’ve been hanging out with anyway. Or at least, that’s the rum-happy epiphany I had a few hours (and cocktails!) into last night’s Rum Do with Elements 8.

What’s a Rum Do? A Rum Do is when ya get a gaggle of bloggers together, load ‘em up on some premium rum and then send them on their way to blog about how wonderful an evening they had.

A good measure of the success of a Rum Do is how long it takes the bloggers to recover from the event and actually post something about it (the longer it takes, the more successful the Rum Do – and, no, microblogging on Twitter and Facebook doesn’t count). Almost 24 hours after last night’s Elements 8 Rum Do, it appears this piece here is the first post to mention it. A resounding victory!

As for a Rum Don’t, that’s when – after enjoying a few rum-based cocktails – you find yourself telling dirty jokes or sharing opinions that, well, you probably should have just kept to yourself. Bad news. Fortunately, there wasn’t much Rum Don’t-ing to speak of from last night.

And Elements 8? It’s a super premium rum distilled and aged in the oldest distillery on St Lucia. Their rums (the Gold and the Platinum) are awesome and among the tastiest I’ve ever had. What makes ‘em so tasty? Well, Elements 8 uses premium grade sugar cane from Guyana, takes advantage of St Lucia’s microclimate and ferments their rums with “pristine water” from protected St Lucian rainforests. The Elements 8 fellas reckon their “own three unique strains of yeast” and four stills (including a Kentucky Bourbon pot still) as well as tropical aging in “#1 select American wood barrels from Kentucky” have a lot to do with their rums’ yum-factor too.

Needless to say, last night’s Rum Do with Elements 8 was indeed a special affair. And Notting Hill (we hit the Portobello Star, E&O and Montgomery Place) was just the right locality. All three bars (there was talk of popping into Trailer Happiness but it just never happened – shame) were quality establishments within stumbling distance of each other, and it was easy enough to flag a cab at the end of the night.

Yes, life is good and rum is wonderful … and anytime Elements 8 wants to throw another Rum Do, I’m definitely game!

tikichris
visit my Tiki Chris blog for some of Montgomery Place’s delish cocktail recipes using Elements 8 rum.