Ron Los Valientes 10

Avocado is tasty, healthy and lately pretty in fashion. You'll find avocados naturally in the store, but earlier they took a long journey; for instance from Mexico the world's largest exporter.

Mass cultivation requires a tropical climate and consumes gigantic amounts of water (1 kilogram needs 500 liters water). Popularity pumps up demand, while supply is rushing to catch up. So the prices are soaring and the local gangs force producers to pay protection money. Nothing surprising in certain parts of the world, but this time the price of heroin has dropped dramatically due to the spread of synthetic opioids in the US. So the gangs diversified their revenues; they are currently actively cultivating avocados. May I point out that boycotting avocados won't hurt cartels as expected. Instead it will undoubtedly affect sweat-worn farmers who will have to pay off their unlawful creditors in other ways.  🥑

Los Valientes is a rum originating from a country associated mainly with tequila and mezcal. The producer - Licores Veracruz - produces a whole range of high-percentage alcoholic beverages, although I really don't know why it doesn't mention among them our today's hero. Therefore, I will share a moderately brilliant observation that the Los Valientes series bottle design resembles a rifle bullet, which perhaps could be placed into the cylinder chamber of some the Mocambo series rums. Yeah, I warned you. 🙄

Sugar cane occupies the second largest cultivation area after maize in Mexico (670,000 hectares). Half of the farms are smaller than two hectares, which truly inhibits any investment efforts. As a consequence, the sugarcane is traditionally cut down with a machete and the fields are burned. The state of Veracruz processes the most sugarcane in the country and has half of the domestic sugar mills.

Natural yeast is used to ferment the sugarcane juice and molasses. The blend consists of 70% pot-distilled rum from sugar cane juice and 30% multi column-distilled molasses rum. The rum is charcoal filtered and aged in charred oak barrels. Los Valientes is a blend marked as 'solera 10'. The only thing known for certain is that the ingredients are certainly not younger than 8 months. Note, it's a half-liter bottle.