I think the the rating is generous. But if you don’t like cachacas then obviously you need to try more of them! Cabana doesn’t do well amongst the 15-20 other cachacas on my shelf. There are some truly great ones out there.

I think you should use the following criteria and rate each out of 5:

Nose
Flavor
Smoothness
Emotion (or, does it take you somewhere)

Overall Score (either out of 20, or average of the four criteria)

The cachaca separation only devalues the overall score. Just mention in your review if you have any comments about its superiority as a cachaca, but not necessarily its superiority as an overall rum. That’s why you have the blog part, silly. To explain yourself.

Anyway, that’s my two cents.

Comparing apples to oranges is interesting, but not terribly helpful in my opinion. Comparing a range of apples or a range of oranges against a reference standard inside each range is helpful.

I like apples better than oranges. That does not mean I cannot recognize a superior orange when I taste one.

The same applies to tasting rum or cachaca. You need to rate inside a defined range. This will lead to clarity, not confusion in my opinion.

I enjoy your writings.

I think that Scribe has the right idea.

I think you should rate within cachaca and within rum as a whole. As long as there is an overall rating system, I think you can go as granular as you like, since there is still an overall rating.

I think that if you are going to rate anything on a scale, you should rate it within its own world. If you feel, correctly IMHO, that Cachaca is a different beast from, say white rums, then rate them within the Cachaca continuum.
To be useful to me, the reader, I want your ratings to help me choose between products I have a use for. If I want to Caipinaras, I want Cachaca. I don’t need to know if Pussers is “better” or not. They are not equivalent products.
Of course, it’s your damn blog. Do what answers your own voice, and what you do will work just like what you have done in the past, which is to say: Well.

I think cachaca should get its own scoring system, as people generally consider the category separate from rum. However, it’s a slippery slope. Should rhum agricole, also apart from standard rum, get its own rating? Then what about Oronoco and 10 Cane? And what about aged cachacas, which might be closer to aged rums than they are unaged cachacas?

I rescind my suggestion. This is your can of worms. Good luck getting it closed