I can only second what Oliver explained. The scores must be seen as relatively high, the rums are still really good - but they are not the peak of the Caronis. This was a consistent result shared by the entire group which was full of Caroni expertise - and I doubt that we still had too many disturbing factors that could have had a significant impact on the results of one single tasting flight.
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Thanks for sharing all these impressions, this is truly a once in a lifetime experience! 
It’s quite hard for me to state with certainty what my personal bests are, since most of them are tasted on separate occasions and there are a lot of variables (experience, Tagesform, other tastings that day, etc), as we have stated in other topics in this forum.
Memorable ones (in random order):
- Warehouse (RX1670)
- Guyana stock (RX147)
- Tasting gang (RX392)
- 34th release (RX249)
- 35th release (RX468)
- No smoking (RX558)
- 1992 HTR (RX1179)
- Cadenhead’s TMCG HTR (RX2818)
- Berry bros 1997 (RX9822)
- TasTToe 1998 (RX13378)
Thank god for the app that I’m able to see all tastings 
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Personally, I am not a big fan of caroni… at least for the moment, I am still waiting to find the caroni that will make me understand such a craze and why pay so much…
To be clear, I liked overall (almost) what I tasted but they never made me feel such an emotion, like rums from Guyana or Jamaica or even Martinique did.
Contrary to what I read everywhere (or almost everywhere), Velier’s Guyana Stock 94 is a minty wet wood juice for me, really. So it’s a big bof… This was the first caroni I ever bought for myself and it was a such big disappointment that I sold almost the entire bottle.
What I find quite funny is that I opened it one night in a tasting with some friends, who love spirits but don’t keep up with the hypes and market values at all. That night, they put this rum last in the tasting (there was the Enmore 92 from Corman Collins and some good Jamaican ones). They found it ultra minty, completely passed through the wood. Somehow, this reassures me, I’m not the only one who felt that way… 
The caroni blog at roger was my second purchase: I liked it a lot at first, but to be honest, I think it was for partly due to : wow, I put 300€ in the bottle. With time, and much more hindsight, I liked it less and less. So I sold it at the end.
@mto75 introduced me to the 98 RX7165 from Corman Collins and I remember liking it much more than the 97 Blog à Roger. Much more pleasure, not too much “dirty side” or too much wood.
Lately, on my share of 96 from L’esprit, I found it very very good. It’s a bottle that I clearly could have bought at its starting price (200€). So currently my best Caroni experience. I would be curious to see this kind bottling in the middle of the Velier in a blind test.
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Ah, I wish more people would think like you, then these bottles wouldn’t be so bloody expensive… 
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I would really like to believe it but I am not sure unfortunately.
I am not an expert and Steffen will certainly be able to correct me, but I believe that Caroni has been on the market by lot of others bottlers since before Velier… He is not among the first to have bottled them if I’m correct.
But LM&V have done a great job of marketing and promoting the product and we can see that they have clearly succeeded. Certainly also thanks to the quality of what was proposed (at least initially).
So today, even if there were thousands of us like me who didn’t necessarily find Caroni great, the prices offered wouldn’t necessarily be so different because there is money to take…
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I’m also not a Caroni-crazed person. Ok, I didn’t have many of them but the blends from Velier were quite boring for me. I remember I liked the 23yo HTR from That Boutique-Y Rum Company the most so far. On the other hand, a CDI 1994 Caroni I tried was one of the worst mismatch between expectations and reality in my rum journey so far.
It might be quite a personal thing, though. There were several of you at the tasting, were your favourites unaimous?
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I‘ve just tried a few so far but I liked that one the most. Can’t wait to try RX38 however
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