There was a brief period, somewhere around my sophomore year in college, when I drank a lot of Captain Morgan spiced rum. Looking back, it's not hard to see why I fell in love with the stuff: I've always been a big fan of root beer and cream soda, and Captain Morgan was like an alcoholic cross between mulled cider and cake frosting. It was sweet and spicy, and when I mixed it with cola, it tasted like a cream soda with overtones of lighter fluid.

After about a year, the love affair was over. Part of this was the fact that my tastes had wandered away from rum, and part was the fact that Captain Morgan's had gone from refreshingly tasty to cloyingly sweet. Mostly, I think, I had learned to enjoy the flavor of liquor and was no longer interested in drowning it under a mass of sugar and spice. With tears in my eyes, I bid farewell to the Captain and shifted my focus to other shores.

My thoughts returned to the Captain recently when I tried Rogue Spirits' Hazelnut Spice Rum. The "spiced rum" moniker, combined with the fact that Edward Teach is prominently featured on the bottle, led me to anticipate an aggressively seasoned, supersweet flavor; instead, I found a delicate, mild rum with a hint of vanilla, the slightest touch of spice, and the smooth, rounded flavor of hazelnuts. To put it mildly, this was a whole other ball game.

Having now tried and retried the Rogue rum, I don't really know how to characterize it. My tastes tend toward golden rums, notably Appletons Estate, and Rogue seems mild, almost delicate by comparison. Moreover, most of the hazelnut-flavored tipples that I've consumed have been hyper-sweetened, artificial, and aggressively nutty. Rogue, on the other hand, is subtle and sly, with a flavor that tastes very natural. It's odd to describe a flavored rum as "pure," but that's a pretty good description of this spirit. Basically, it's a spiced rum for grownups, as oxymoronic as that may sound.

The downside of Rogue's delicacy is that I could very easily see the flavor getting drowned out by mixers. The distillers suggest combining it with buttershot liqueur for a "butternut," or mixing a "fuzzy nuts" with Irish cream and Amaretto. While these sound interesting, I find it hard to imagine the flavor of this rum remaining intact when combined with stronger-tasting additives. Personally, I think I'm going to stick to the occasional shot on the rocks, slowly sipped to enjoy the complex blend of flavors!