Introduction. Myth 1: Sweetness. Myth 2: fun/no fun. Myth 3: age. Myth 4: Labels. History. The rise of Cuba. The business of rum. Sugar production. Molasses and cane-syrup rums

RUM

- THE MANUAL –

This is a book about how to drink rum of all kinds. It’s about classic rums and new-generation rums, about rhum agricole and premium aged rums, about rums from all over the world. It’s about rum enjoyed with cola and ginger beer. About the best rum for a classic daiquiri. About rum cocktails that ooze style and personality. Above all, it’s about enjoying your rum in ways you never thought possible.

 

- DAVE BROOM –

 

INTRODUCTION

When did it start? Maybe the Halloween game involving treacle scones, dipped in more treacle, suspended from the kitchen pulley. We’d try and eat then with our hands tied behind our backs. The swinging splatter of sticky blackness on face and lips was the first time I tasted molasses: sweet but bitter, the taste of iron and blood.

Rum world come later, in a fishermen’s pub in Lochaline, drinking a mix we christened Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. It wasn’t exactly pleasant; bit it made the motorboat ride home interesting. Then came venturing into Cadenhead’s shop and buying something old from Guyana and being blown away.

Memories: drinking JB in beachside bars in Jamaica, avoiding cursed shopping bags in La Reunion, molasses adhering to my feet, the smell of muck pits, whirling machetes. I’ll tell you the stories one day. You’ll not believe most of them.

What they all involved was a combination of laughter, people, and a passion that showed how this drink was the pulsing heart of a culture. As my journey continued, so rum’s complex tales of pleasure and exploitation became ever more fascinating. No spirit is as sticky with moral contradictions. Rum’s story is as sweet and enlivening as a drop of syrup, as bitter as a treacle slap. It is punchbowl filled with possibilities.

 

 

Entering this world is to sit at a domino match with opinions rather than flying tiles slamming onto the table, a place where things are debated long, loud, and hard. There will be laughter at the end. This remains a spirit with the ability to make everyone smile.

What have I learned? Rum had quality control when other spirits were in short pants. It was the benchmark for quality – not some inferior junk coming out of the Caribbean. That hasn’t changed. It’s time to appreciate this and redress the myths that have sprung up around rum. This is not just a world spirit; it is a world-class spirit and has been for longer than any of us realized. It’s time to celebrate rum’s diversity and versatility. Charge your glasses. Let’s fathom this bowl!

 

 

EXLODING MYTHS

 

Rum is such diverse category that it’s no surprise some myths have build up around it. Let’s try and disentangle some of them.

 

Myth 1: Sweetness

History shows that rum was sweetened from the start, so you can argue that this is traditional practice. My problem is that sugar levels in some rums are at quasi-liqueur-like levels. People may like it, but the downside of sugar doping is that any again in popularity is a loss in complexity and character. Sugaring increases homogenization at the precise time when rum’s diversity should be celebrated.

       The practice is unfair to producers who don’t, or are not allowed to, add sugar. Ideally, added sugar levels should be declared on the label and capped in the same way for Cachaca or Cognac. There has to be honesty and transparency. However, given the problems over trying to legislate such a diverse category, it might be easier for producers who don’t add sugar or tint to say so on the label.

       And another things… If you want vanilla notes in your rum, use first fill casks. If you want to flavor-up a rum, then call it spiced. Don’t lie.

 

Myth 2: Fun/No Fun

People smile when they think about rum. It’s affability means it’s an automatic choice as a party drink, but don’t dismiss it as being only that. I was asked by a rum blogger if rum, in a bid to be viewed in the same light as single malt, should shed its fun image. “No!” I cried. Even now, in Scotch, new drinkers feel like they need a degree to start appreciating single malt. It’s not a binary choice between being fun and being “serious”. The former has to be retained while widening rum’s remit. Rum covers more bases that any other spirit. Don’t restrict it.

 

Myth 3: Age

           Scotch has created a model where a spirit gains credibility at 12 years. This puts rum in an awkward position as it matures more rapidly in tropical climes. A lust for “Scotch-style” age statements in tropical-aged rums will tend to leave you with extract of oak in your glass. Rums don’t get sweeter with age; they get drier.

       Also remember, that while solera ageing is a valid technique, it needs to be explained that it’s different to static ageing. It’s impossible to give the exact age of solera-aged rum as it’s a blend of different years. You can only give an approximate, average age. Solution? Don’t look at the numbers; taste the spirit.

 

Myth 4: Labels

There is no universal, overarching rum regulation. Would it help if there were? Yes. Will it happen? Unlikely, as rum is already governed by regulations in each of its producing countries. What is legal in one place isn’t allowed in another. Getting them to agree to another set of rules will be well nigh impossible. That means that reading a rum label is confusing at the very time that rum’s premium sector is growing and people want to know what’s in the bottle. It is detrimental to the spirit to confuse or obfuscate.

So, can we do a classification ourselves? Possibly. Luca Gargano of Velier has come up with a proposed classification system:

 

Pure Single Rum: 100 per cent pot (i.e. batch) – still rum.

Single Blended Rum: a blend of only pot-still and traditional column-still rum.

Rum: rum from a traditional column still.

Industrial Rum: Modern multi-column still rum.

 

If bars and retailers began to use something like this independently, then we’ll at least have made a start.

 

 

HISTORY

       It goes like this. Island are colonized, planters arrive, they plant cane, import slaves, work out what to do with the molasses, and start shipping rum as a way to maximize the return from their crop. The deeper issue is one of identity: the symbiotic relationship between place and product that emerges in different ways at different times in rum’s story.

 

SUGAR: THE SWEETES SPELL

 

In days before the time of humans there was sugar cane. One day, two bulges appeared in one cane’s stalk. They grew and grew until the stalk split and the first man and woman fell onto from sugar. According to Pacific islanders, we come from sugar. In chewing it, we taste our origins. It nourishes and supporting; it is our generation. Our stories start with it.

Cane was domesticated in New Guinea as early as 8,000 bc, reaching the Asian mainland around 1,000 bc. In India, blocks of sugar syrup called khanda (where our word “candy’ originates) were made around 500 bc. Sugar was heaven sent. Kamadeva, the Hindu god of love, intoxicates his victims with arrows made of flowers, shot from a bow of sugar cane. The Buddha was said to be an ancestor of legendary king Ikshavaku (Iksu meaning sugar cane).

For Chinese Buddhists, sugar was both food and medicine, while in its making – the removal of impurities – could be discerned as a metaphor for enlightenment. In the seventh century, Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty sent expeditions to India to discover the techniques of sugar refining. Whoever tasted sugar fell under its sweet spell.

 

India – Home of the First Cane Spirit

 

    Fermented “sugar wine” was made in both India and China, but there’s no evidence that it was being distilled in China. In India, however, there are historical references to a sugar-based spirit. When Sultan Alauddin Khilji (1296-1316) forbade the sale of wine, his subjects made a beverage out of readily available sugar, then distilled it.

       Predating this, in Book II, Chapter XXV of the Arthashastra, an ancient Hindu treatise on politics and statecraft, is a list of the responsibilities of “The Superintendent of Liquor”. Among the list of permitted beverages is amlasidhu, a spirit distiller from molasses. Although the original texts were written around 375-250 bc, it’s likely that this reference comes from a later addition, but no later than 300 ad. Whatever the case, it would appear that cane spirit’s origins lie in India.

 

Persia

 

       By this time, cane was spreading westward. It was first mentioned in 327 bc by Nearchus, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, who wrote of “a reed in India which brings forth honey without the help of bees from which an intoxicating drink is made”. This could be sugar wine.

       Full-scale sugar-cane cultivation only began in the sixth century, when the plant was taken to Persia after the emperor Darius invaded India. While sugar was extravagantly used in cakes and pastries and as a medicine in Persia, there is no historical evidence that it was distilled.

       When Islamic civilization spread across North Africa into Sicily and Spain in the seventh century, sugar cane came too. Egypt was a major Centre of cultivation, while Spain would eventually have 75,000 acres under cane.

 

Cane and the Caribbean: the Early Days

 

       The siren song of sugar is potent. It follows civilizations, helps found empires. This white gold was captivating, addictive, and expensive. Controlling production became increasing important.

 

Portuguese Influence

 

       In 1425, Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator took sugar cane to Madeira and onward to the Cape Verde Islands, while the Spanish, also in expansionist mood, planted it in the Canaries. It was Canary Island sugar cane that Columbus (whose wife’s family were sugar traders) took to the Caribbean on his second voyage in 1493. In 1552, Governor-general Tome de Souza reported that slaves were drinking cachaco (today’s Cachaca): the first record of cane spirit being made in the New World.

       Every plantation had its own still, and over the next 40 years sugar and spirit spread a ross Brazil. By 1640, it had reached the “Guianas” (now known as the Guyana), where the Dutch had began to cultivate cane.

       They weren’t the first to see the area’s potential. Sir Water Raleigh had sailed to “the large and bewtiful Empire of Guiana” in 1595 and 1617, reporting that “the soile besides is excellent and so full of rivers as it will carry sugar, ginger, and those other commodities which the West Indies hath”. The age of the sugar colonies had started.

 

British Influence: the Enchanted Isles

 

       On February 20, 1627, 80 colonists and 10 slaves stepped onto the empty beaches of Barbados. After the initial crops failed, they turned to cane, probably supplied by Dutch planters in Brazil, who also supplied still and, possibly, distilling expertise.

       Within two decades, Barbados became home to 75,000 planters, servants, and slaves, and by the end of the century it had become Britain’s wealthiest colony. It was a place of fascination for visitors such as Richard Ligon was, who wrote a detailed account of his time spent at William Hilliard’s plantation between 1647 and 1650. Ligon was dazzled by the island’s beauty, amazed at its fecundity, but knew that where was a worm eating at the rotten heart of this enterprise.

       The British were to use cane to forge a new empire based on trade and exploiting. By the end of the seventeenth century, sugar planting was more advanced than any agricultural enterprise in Britain. For it to grow, the planters needed workers. Many were Irish and Scottish prisoners of war, or men press-ganged (Barbadosed) into service. The island was a microcosm of British society, with a landed gentry building grand houses such as St Nicholas Abbey and Drax Hall, a working class, and, in time, an underclass of slaves.

 

       Rum was being drunk but, tellingly, Ligon places it as seventh on his list of the 10 beverages most widely consumed in Barbados. It was still a booster, a medicine, a salve to the paint of toil.

       The maniacal desire to make as much money as possible out of sugar resulted in Barbados quickly becoming a monoculture, one that was totally dependent on imports, even for fuel, from the American and Canadian colonies, The currency? Molasses and rum.

       The English (as it was then) empire was based on commodities made in English colonies being sent to the mother country, where they could be sold on, or refined. All profits were centered there. The colonies, for their part, could only trade with England.

       Sugar and rum became the empire’s fuel. Planters began to move from the already tired soils of Barbados to St Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, Antigua, and Guyana, and, from 1655, to the fertile island that would become sugar colony Number One: Jamaica. The plantocracy had arrived.

       Rum was becoming increasingly important to the colonies’ economies. As Jamaica’s governor, Sir Dalby Thomas, wrote in 1690, “We trust consider the spirits arising from Melasses… which, if it were all turned into spirits, would amount annually to above $*500.000 at half the price the like quantity of brandy would cost.”

 

 

THE PIRATE MYTH

The importance of pirates to rum’s story is wildly overplayed. Pirates were social rejects, stateless wanderers, guns for hire, licensed by their governments to harry the Spanish and assist an overstretched British Navy. As Ian Williams points out in Rum: a Social and Sociable History, Cognac was apparently the pirates’ favoured tipple. As rum improved, so it would have been punches all round, nut everyone was drinking rum punch – not just pirates. The link was only made strong in 1883 by Robert Louis Stevenson in Treasure Island.

 

RUM COMES OF AGE

 

       The eighteenth century saw Britain becoming a rich nation, thanks in part to the Caribbean. It also became a rum-drinking one. In 1697, a scant 100 liters (22gallons) of rum were docked in England. By the final quarter of the century, it would account for 25 per cent of the spirits consumed.

       Bristol was the first major rum port, trading initially with Barbados. Throughout the eighteenth century, almost 60 per cent of the city’s trade was from the Carribean, peaking in the 1780s, when a reluctance to dredge the narrow Avon Gorge meant that ships reach the port. By then it was playing second fiddle to London.

 

The Rise of Middle-class Imports

 

       The eighteenth century was a time “modern” society started to develop, and imported goods were the beneficiaries. In terms of spirits, this gave the new middle class three options: French brandy, Dutch genever, or west Indian rum.

    The first suffered from high import taxes and outright bans. The image of genever was tainted by the cheap gin flooding the slums of London. Rum, however, was clear of all such negative associations. As Frederick Smith writes in Caribbean Rum: “The strategy of French wine and brandy makers… was to regard rum as the drink of slaves the British Caribbean interests attempted to market rum as an exotic drink of the nouveau riche.”

       Rum was everything gin wasn’t: imported, aged, expensive, and made by the richest men in the land. All of the 40 major planter families had one family member in Parliament, resulting in a powerful lobby. The “Gin Craze” of 1720-60 played into their hands. In 1733, a pamphleteer wrote: “I believe all mankind will allow that scarcely a wholesomer Spirit can be distilled than that call’d Rum.” By the middle of the century, aged Caribbean rum was more popular than cheaper alternatives, such as Medford rum from America.

       Poor grain harvests in the 1850s also played into rum’s hand. William Beckford, whose family were the most powerful planters in Jamaica, was also an MP and Lord Mayor of London. With his sugar lobby colleagues he successfully got a bill passed outlawing grain distillation. People turned to rum, and consumption rose, especially in Ireland which, between 1766 and 1774, drank more rum than England and Wales.

       Although the bulk of rum in Britain was from Jamaica (Barbados still traded primarily with the American colonies), from the 1740s a wider selection from the other sugar colonies was beginning to trickle in. In 1744, British Guyana (aka Demerara) had seven plantations. By 1769, there were 56. The Seven Years War (1756-63) saw the British temporarily take Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cuba and start commercial distilling in all of them.

       The Sugar colonies were economically vital for Britain. By the end of the century, Jamaica’s sugar plantations made $*15m ($21,250,773) a year – five times more than any other colony – and the average (white) Jamaican was worth 20 to 30 times more than his equivalent in Britain.

       It wasn’t to last. The next generation of sugar barons had a laissez faire approach to their holdings. Plantations were placed in the hands of factors and began to fall into decline.

       The problem was also cultural. The sugar barons were British, not Caribbean get-quick opportunists. As Matthew Parker writes in his fascinating account, The Sugar Barons, “The West Indies had none of the things that sustained and nourished the northern colonies: a stable and rising population, family, long lives, and even religion. Instead there was money, alcohol, sex, and death.”

       The exploitation of the colonies was becoming entirely unsustainable.

 

Rum and the Navy

       The British Navy was more significant than pirates to rum’s development. When at sea, drinking water turned to smile and beer went sour Drinking drams of neat rum soon became an accepted part of the sailor’s daily routine in the west Indies. It also led to ill-discipline. In 1739, Vice-Admiral Edward Vernon took command of the West Indies station. On August 21, he ordered that “the respective daily allowance of half a print… be every day mixed with the proportion of a quart of water to every half pint of rum… in two servings a day”. He also recommended that the ration be augmented with fresh lime juice (to help combat scurvy) and sugar, “to make it more palatable to the crews’. Should the Daiquiri be called the Vernon?

    Much of the industry’s early growth came as a results of the Navy’s increasing requirements. Purchasing was centralized at the Admiralty in London via a preferred supplier, ED & F Man, which bought either direct or through brokers. The rums were transferred to linked blending vats in the Royal Victoria Yard, Deptford, whish operated as a sort of solera system.

       What started as a Jamaican or Barbados-based rum was, by the nineteenth century, predominantly a Demerara-based rum, with some lighter rums from Trinidad and Barbados. This in turn gave rise to the “dark” or “Navy” brand that was made by British blenders.

       By the 1970s, it was felt that a daily draught of run didn’t exactly chime with the running of a modern navy and on Friday, July 31, 1970, 230 years of tradition ended.

 

 

RUM IN THE NORTH AMERICAN COLONIES

 

       Rum was America’s first spirit. Almost as soon as imports from Barbados started, molasses was being distilled, first in 1640 in Staten Island, New York, then in Boston three years later. By 1750, there were 25 distilleries in Boston and Rhode Island, 20 in New York, and 17 in Philadelphia.

       The incentive to distil was strong. Imported brandy was expensive and grain was needed for bread. Molasses could be bought for one shilling a gallon, while rum sold for six shillings a gallon.

       Rum fed the fur trade, was used as currency, and helped to subjugate North America’s First Nations while preventing them from allying with the French. It was also consumed in large quantities as a bracer or “antifogmatic”, and as a social drink (sex box, left). As Wayne Curtis comments in And a Bottle of Rum: a History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, if London had Gin Craze, then America wasn’t far off having a similar one for rum at the same time.

 

“No Taxation Without Representation!”

 

       More manufacture meant an increased need for molasses. The colonies were meant to trade with British Caribbean, but in 1713, France banned the importation of rum and molasses, resulting in a large cheap supply of the latter. American distillers, now led by those based in Medford, Massachusetts, leapt at this opportunity to make their business more profitable. To counter this move, in 1733, the British introduced the Molasses Act, placing a high tax on the raw ingredient – and consequently, finished rum.

       Rum was now entwined within an increasingly febrile political landscape. The colonists – who, unlike the sugar barons, didn’t have representation in British Parliament – felt they were being unfairly targeted and ignored the Act. Smuggling increased. In 1735, only £2 of duty was collected.

       The sugar Act of 1763 made things even worse. While duty fell, the sugar barons wanted their trade back, and Britain needed cash to pay for the Seven Years War. The colonists watched as the Navy and domestic authorities aggressively enforced an Act that would have bankrupted the American rum industry – which by then was making 18,169,977 liters a year in 143 distillers.

       Rum was now a focus for dissent. Drink rum and you resisted the colonial master, drink rum in a tavern and you met like-minded folk. The “bowl of liberty” was being fathomed.

       A rum-induced psychological shift had taken place. By the 1770s, Britain was “The Other”, while America was home. Unlike in the West Indies, in North America there was an identity with place. Rum fuelled rhetoric. Its taxation was one of the sparks that lit a war of independence, and when Britain had to decide whether to keep its sugar colonies or America, it chose the former.

       This was rum’s high point in the New World. Shortly afterward, in 1790, US First Secretary to the Treasury Alexander Hamilton imposed a tax on molasses and British Caribbean imports (who said Americans had no sense of irony?). Rum was immediately seen as the drink of the old regime. A new country deserved a new drink – made with its own produce, by its own people. It needed whiskey.

 

 

HISTORICAL PRODUCTION

 

       A study of rum’s detailed early production records shows a spirit that was far from being an afterthought of sugar - making, but one for which deliberate quality choices were being made from considerably earlier in its timeline than most other spirits. Rum was not only already at Spirits University, it was writing the curriculum.

       Richard Ligon’s diagram of a rum distillery in seventeenth – century Barbados shows a room with space for two stills and a cistern, which probably acted as a fermentation vessel. On the island of Martinique, things seem to have been even simpler, if du Tertre’s drawing of a vinaigrerie with one small pot with spout and worm, is accurate. Rum was precocious, however, moving rapidly from being the rough drink for slaves, to punch for planters, then a desirable export product, whose sale could offset the running costs of the plantation.

 

Eighteenth – century Rum: From Scum to Specialization

 

In 1707, botanist Hans Sloane reported in A Voyage to the Islands… that rum was being made from “Cane-juice not fit to make Sugar… or of the Skimmings of the Coppers in Crop time, or of Molossus and water fermented about fourteen days in Cistern”. In other words, early rums were distillates of the scummy froth taken off the sugar pans. Molasses would in time become part of the fermenting ingredients, but skimmings would always also be there, with more being used at the beginning of the season. When sugar - making was over, more molasses would be used.

There was on other ingredient in this mixed wash that first appears in an account of rum distilling given in 1707 to the London distiller William Y-Worth by “a Person of ingenuity”: “…in Barbados… they take the Molasses, foul sugar and their canes and ferment them together with the remains of the use former distillation….” This is the first mention of the use of dunder.

The eighteenth century is full of tracts and instructions to planters that illustrate how quality was as important in their distilleries as it was in their sugar estates. This second generation of planters ­_­wanted to make money, and that meant a forensic understanding of what was happening and how it could be, in that great eighteenth – century term, “improved”.

A key text was written in 1754 by Antiguan planter Samuel Martin, whose Greencastle estate became a quasi – university college of sugar cane. Martin’s An Essay Upon Plantership is both a summary of best practice and canny advice. Cleanliness is key to his approach, along with cooled, filtered, dunder, (“less”) used “as yeast or barm” to start fermentation, temperature – controlled fermentation, and slow cool distillation. Much of this comes from his research into Barbadian planters, “the best distillers in all the sugar islands”, who were producing a double-distilled “cooler spirit, more palatable and wholesome” compared to the higher – straighter spirit made in Jamaica (possibly by triple distillation), which was “more profitable for the London marker because the buyers there approve of a fiery spirit which will bear most adulteration”.

By this time there was also an understanding of what we now call terroir. In his 1774 The History of Jamaica, Richard Long reports that the rich soils of Jamaica’s north coast produced syrup “so viscid, that it often will not boil into sugar; but these estates produce an extraordinary quality of rum. The south side lands, on the contrary, produce a less proportion of rum, to a large quantity of sugar…” Specialization had begun.

By 1794, Bryan Edwards writes of a new “improved” method of rum – making in Jamaica, which upped the dunder levels to 50 per cent. Without dunder, distillers would have to add “most powerful saline and acid stimulators” and risk over – souring the ferment. What his and Martin’s work show is an understanding of dunder that predates. Dr. James Crow’s use of sour mash in bourbon by 30 years.

 

The Nose D’Void of Funk

 

       The battle with rum’s odour started early. For Hans Sloane in 1707, it was “an unsavory Empyreumatical scent” while Y-Worth talks of how rum “carries with it so strong an Hogo”. The solution was redistillation, - or, Sloane says, “mixing Rosemary with it.”

       Dealing with the funk, the hogo, the “empyreumatic” smell, the “stinkabus” was rum – makers’ greatest issue in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Y-Worth, the hogo was the result of “operators often using the remains of their distillations or wash… for beginnings instead of liquor” – i.e. it came from dunder. But as dunder made up most of the ferment in those days, the issue was how to control its effects.

       Taming the funk led to the concept of “light rum” which, in Cooper’s mind, would have been better “for common use of making punch… as the taste would be cleaner. In this state it would nearly resemble arrac”. Now there’s telling line.

       By the end of the eighteenth century, distilling consultants were arriving in the islands to improve rum further. One such was London scientist Bryan Higgins, who worked in the southwest of Jamaica for three years from 1797. His analysis centers on eliminating the “acetous ether”, which came across in the early running of a still. His advise was either to take a middle cut from the first distillation, or stop using those “tainting and oily products of the putrescent fifth”, because that’s where the problem lay. Using molasses, he decided, would be the best option – pretty much what Y–Worth had concluded almost a century before.

       Higgin’s conclusions weren’t taken on board – in Jamaica, at least. Only two years after his report, merchants in New York were still taking the bungs out of casks of Jamaican rum to try and clear them of the aroma.

       The armies of Sir Nose D’Void of Funk were “light” rum in the nineteenth century that would change the face and the aroma of rum forever.

 

The Nineteenth Century: Searching for the Grail

 

       In the nineteenth century, technology, a change in the consumer palate, and a desire to retain, or establish, terroir split rum into multiple camps. The first changes were, inevitable, linked to sugar. As the industry suffered, planters had to decide whether to stick with sugar or go with rum. While Jamaica stuck with dunder-rich styles, they were beginning to disappear elsewhere in the Caribbean as consultants’ advice began to be heeded. Now that distilleries were starting to operate independently from sugar mills, skimmings were no longer available. These differences were then amplified by the introduction of different types of stills.

       Up until this point, everyone used pot stills. In Europe, however, there was a movement to make distilling more efficient. Batch distilling was time consuming. A continuous system was the holy grail, where as long as a fermented liquid went in one end of the still, spirit would flow from the other. Engineers across Europe came up with a multiplicity of solutions, and most of their designs were shipped to the Caribbean.

       Edouard Adam’s still of 1801 placed two or three mini – stills between the pot and the condenser: the start of the pot and report system. This would be refined throughout the nineteenth century and remains the most common method of making pot – still rums today.

       Corty’s Patent Simplified Distilling Apparatus (1818) was adopted across the Caribbean, with most in Tobago and British Guyana (which also imported Coffey and pot and report system). Water – cooled plates in the neck of the still increased reflux and increased the strength, yielding a rum that “does not possess its peculiar aromatic flavor in an equal degree with spirit of 30-35 per cent overproof”. In other words, the funk had gone.

       Cellier-Blumenthal cracked the problem of continuous distillation with the introduction of a pot (patented 1813) that led into a column divided into plates. This was adapted in 1818 by Parisian apothecary Louis-Charles Derosne, then by Dutch sugar-trader Armand Savalle, whose design would become widely used in rum production, as would Aeneas Coffey’s linked column configuration.

       “The different kinds of stills now in use are so very numerous, that it is quite impossible for me to name them”, wrote Jamaican planter Leonard Wray in 1848. Politely rejecting Coffey stills for rum production he concluded: “I have never know any to surpass the common still and double retorts.”

       Significantly, all of these new lighter, rums were considered to be of a higher quality – and fetched a higher price on the European markets. Demerara’s stock was rising, thanks to the adoption of new stills. There, according to Charles Tovey, distillation had been carried to “a high state of perfection… to be as much prized in the American market as Jamaica is preferred in the English market”.

       Jamaican pot still, the dominant style for over a century, was under pressure. Its neighbors were becoming bolder, defining their rums as not being Jamaica. To establish their identity they had to be different. For Jamaica, the situation was existential: what are we? How do we define ourselves?

 

DUNDER

       Dunder is name given to the residue left in the still after distillation. It is high in acids and helps create an environment in which yeasts can more easily get to work. The high levels of acids then bond with alcohol to make esters (fruity compounds). The battle facing rum distillers was in controlling this acidification, as off-notes could easily be produced. Once an essential part of rum production, dunder is rarely used these days, although Hampden in Jamaica and Bundaberg in Australia still use it.

       Dunder is often confused with the high – acid residue of solids, waste, fruit, and other ingredients that are stored in muck pits.

Dunder Heavy Manners: the Fight for Jamaican Identity

 

       Leonard Wray studies sugar planting in Asia, Natal, and the Caribbean. His book The Practical Sugar Planter, written in 1848, is an invaluable source for how quality Jamaican rum was made in this period. He urges young distillers to let their fermentations run long and slow: up to 10 or 14 days. His recipe contained skimmings, dunder, molasses, and water – and the contents of the muck pit, “an exceedingly noxious combination, from which the most loathsome and unwholesome emanations constantly arise”. Yes, he had the funk, but he also filtered his rum post-distillation – and then sweetened and coloured it.

       More insights can be gleaned from the diatribes written in the 1840s to the “Jamaica Standard” by another planter, W.F. Whitehouse, which not only give a detailed explanation of rum production, but also a sense of the politics of the time. I’m indebted to Stephen Shellenberger’s www.bostonapothecary.com for bringing Whitehouse to my attention.

       Like Wray, Whitehouse was a defender of tradition, but also keenly aware that quality improvements were needed. Much of his writings were rants against a consultant distiller called O”Keefe, who had tried to impose a new system of “scientific” production. Whitehouse devised his own method, challenged O’Keefe to a rum – distilling duel – and won.

       Despite the Jamaican rearguard, by the middle of the century, quality in rum was seen as being higher proof, and funk-free. By the end of the century, light “Common Clean” rums were being made in Jamaica.

 

The Age of Science

 

       The nineteenth century saw changes in people’s palates, the arrival of cocktails, commercialization, and a new era for rum, with the building of a sense of identity.

       As America switched allegiance to its own whiskey, the rum trade focused increasingly on Britain. In 1806, the 115-hectare Rum Quay opened in London’s East India Docks. Rum merchants were now establishing themselves across Britain. Using their names as guarantees of quality, they blended marks from one or more countries. London had Lemon Hart’s eponymous brand; White, Keeling had Red Heart; and Alfred Lamb has his Navy Rum. Liverpool had Sandbach Parker & Co, Hall & Bramley and many more, while Dundee merchant George Morton’s Old Vatted Demerara (O.V.D.) and Old Vatted Jamaican Rum brands appeared in the 1830s and 1840s. Blending gave volume; it also provided consistency and complexity. The majority of these rum blends predate blended Scotch by 30 years.

       Jamaican rum still dominated the British trade, but sugar planters were having to deal with major changes, the most significant being the banning of trafficking in slaves in 1808, followed by full abolition in 1833. Amazingly, the sugar lobby managed to convince the British government to pay them £20 million “compensation” for the loss of their slaves. In order to get the bill passed, abolitionists had to agree that slaves were property after all.

       With sugar now becoming more expensive to produce, and cheaper beet sugar appearing, the older sugar islands began to look increasingly to rum. By the end of the nineteenth century, rum was more important than sugar for Jamaica exports, and the island’s producers were increasingly focused on what made their rums different: what, in effect, made them Jamaican.

       The only sugar colony to grow in importance during this period was British Guyana, thanks to the mass importation of indentured workers from China and India. Each of its 300 plantations had its own distillery, and by 1849 almost half of the rum imported into Britain was Demerara. People’s palates were changing.

       It was a Liverpool firm that changed the face of British rum imports. Josias and George Booker settled in Demerara in 1815 and began shipping sugar and rum to their home city in 1835. By 1866, Booker Brothers and Co. was called “the principal shopkeepers of the colony”. It merged with former employee John McConnell’s firm at the end of the century. Rums were shipped on the firm’s own “Liverpool Line” and sold to the brokers and merchants.

       As a result, Liverpool was fast becoming the most important rum city. It had expanded its docks throughout fees lower than those of London, which encouraged merchants to move there.

       British Guyana’s volume and varied marks made it a blender’s dream, and with increased investment in technology, Demerara rums grew in importance. By the end of the century, the Navy blend contained no Jamaican rum at all, and was predominantly Demerara based.

       Rum’s position was less secure in the US. Having fallen from favour, it missed out on the first flush of cocktails, while the Temperance movement used it as a catch - all term for debauchery, while the abolitionist movement inferred that rum drinkers were pro-slavery. Its image was about to change, however, thanks to a new rum country with a new style: Cuba.

 

 

THE RISE OF CUBA

 

 

       Cuba gave birth to what is now the world’s most widely produced rum style, the one that was behind the great rum cocktails, the rum that saved the category and changed it completely by consigning the older styles – Demerara, Jamaican, Barbadian – to walk – on parts.

       It tool 300 years for the country to get there. For mush of Cuba’s history, distilling was banned. The Spanish Empire’s wealth was to be build on gold, not trade. When no precious metals were found in Cuba, the Spanish foraged ever further into Mexico and Central and South America. Its holdings in the Caribbean became little more that staging posts.

       Cane was scarcely planted in Cuba, so distillation barely happened. Then in 1714, a Royal Decree ordered all rum – making equipment to be confiscated and broken up in order to safeguard the production and sale of Spanish brandy and wine.

       In 1762, the British captured Cuba and brought in 4,000 slaves, sugar – making and distillation equipment, and, just as importantly, experience. Although the occupation lasted only 11 months, it changed Cuba. When Spain regained control, it opened up trade and, in 1777, rum production was legalized. Spain’s isolationist stance was failing. It was time to join the sugar and rum club, though it took two revolutions – the America War of independence (1775-1783) and the Haitian Revolution (1794-1804) – for the momentum behind a sugar industry (and therefore behind rum) to start building.

       Cuba was ideally placed to supply newly independent America’s sugar craving, particularly after the world turned its back on liberated Haiti. Mass importation of slaves occurred (abolition only took place in 1886) and by 1820, there were 652 sugar factories in Cuba. By 1829, the island was out producing all of Britain’s sugar colonies. In 1860 the island had 1,365 rum distilleries.

 

Enter Bacardi

 

       A new wave of immigrants also arrived and modern distilleries were build in Havana, Matanzas, Cardenas, and Santiago de Cuba. It was to the last city, in 1830, that a Catalan immigrant named Facundo Bacardi Masso moved and started to sell rum for an English distiller called John Nunes. In 1862, Bacardi bought Nune’s distillery and began to bottle his own rums.

       The new Cuban distillers knew that they had to make a rum that was different. Slowly, distilleries became independent of the sugar factories, while improved technology allowed Cuban distillers to create a new, lighter, softer style of rum. Since its sugar industry was utilizing new technology, it was inevitable that Cuba became an early adopter of columns and pot – column hybrids. When filtration arrived, Cuban light rum was born and the island could differentiate its spirits from the rest of the Caribbean.

       With this came a shift in attitude on the part of Cuban residents. In line with the plantocracy in the British Caribbean, the settlers in Cuba had seen themselves as displaced residents of the mother country. They had been raised on imported brandies and wines, while aguardiente was for slaves.

       A refusal to drink what you make shows a certain detachment from place. Conversely, being proud of your own drinks show an attachment to that particular location. As the cause of independence began to gather pace, so the new Cubans begin to drink their new spirit. Rum became Cuban at a time when Cuba began to establish a true sense of self.

       After independence in 1898, rum production increased, initially as a way to generate capital for the new country. Demand boomed. By now, Cuba was ahead of its Caribbean rivals in another aspect. While most of them were still producing bulk rum to be shipped and blended abroad, Cuban distillers were establishing that nineteenth – century phenomenon: The Brand. Whether it was Havana Club or Bacardi, producers owned what they made.

 

Rhum: the Antilles and Agricole

 

       In 1635, the French settled Martinique, and in 1644, Benjamin da Costa, a Dutch Jew from Pernambuco, brought the first still to the island. The earliest accounts of distillation in the new French colonies come from Pere Jean-Baptiste Labat, who lived in Martinique and Guadeloupe between 1694 and 1706. He was a man of contrasts: priest, slave owner, adventurer, anthropologist, planter, and distiller. He is both the father of rhum agricole – rum made from pressed sugar – cane juice – and the bogeyman who would steal naughty children.

       Labat had seen how rhum could pay for a plantation’s costs, but it was to no avail. The edict of 1713, which banned the importation of rum and molasses into France, put paid to any serious distilling. Instead of making rhum, planters sold their molasses to America distillers.

       It took the British occupation during the Seven Years war for more advanced rum – making to be introduced to Martinique and Guadeloupe. By the end of the eighteenth century, there were 215 distilleries in Martinique, 128 in Guadeloupe, and 182 on St Domingue (which would later become Haiti). The smaller islands were already more oriented toward rum, while St Domingue concentrated on sugar. All that ended with the Haitian Revolution, the vicious Napoleonic backlash, civil war, mass white flight, and the collapse of its sugar industry. Haiti could have rivaled Cuba. Instead, it was shunned.

       Emancipation finally took place in 1848, raising the costs of sugar in France also impacted on the industry in Martinique and Guadeloupe. The islands drifted into a state of torpor, evocatively described in 1887 by American writer Lafcadio Hearn, in whose prose are echoes of the same romantic impulse that helped drive people in England north to the wild Scottish wastes. The remote was not to be feared, Hearn argued. The tropics were a languid, decadent paradise.

       In Martinique he encountered an island where white settlers were leaving “at a rate that almost staggers credibility” and a rhum industry fighting a seemingly losing battle. Rhum was, however, still being drunk. Hearn writes: “the mabiyage… is made with a little white rum and a bottle of the bitter native root beer called mabi. It is not until just before the midday meal that one can venture to take a serious stimulant – yon ti ponch – rum and water sweetened with plenty of sugar, or sugar syrup.”

       Rhum was saved by the introduction of new types of stills. Initially, distillers used the Derosne still, developed in France for distilling sugar beet. This was then adapted to suit molasses, with enrichment trays being installed at the top of the still. This became knows as the Creole column and continues to be used.

       Outbreaks in France of the oidium mould in the 1850s and phylloxera vine louse in the 1870s devastated wine and brandy production, resulting in drinkers looking to the Caribbean. By 1896, France was importing 28,640,367 liters of rum and Martinique was the Caribbean’s top exporter, with Saint-Pierre the world’s rum capital.

       All of that changed in 1902, when Mont Pelee erupted, killing 40,000 people and destroying Saint-Pierre. What was left of the sugar industry went into retreat, major distillers closed, and smaller estates began to specialize in a new style, made from cane juice, which they called rhum agricole. The rum style map was complete.

 

Cuban Rum and Prohibition

 

       As Martinique recovered from the eruption, Cuba was continuing its rise in importance and had become America’s favoured producer. The main boost for Cuban rum – and Bacardi especially – came with Prohibition. Even if America was, ostensibly, dry, the “Great Experiment” would prove to be the boost that a still-struggling rum category needed.

       Thirsty Americans headed straight to Havana, where they stayed at new, American – owned, hotels: the Sevilla-Biltmore, the Plaza, the Bristol, the Miramar, and countless other. Bartenders arrived: Eddie Woekle, Pete Economides, Vic Lavsa, and George Harris joining existing resident such as Galician immigrant Jose Abeal Otero, whose Sloppy Joe’s bar was open for 24 hours a day. At the top of the tree was the Floridita, overseen by Constante Ribalagua.

       Prohibition changed rum-drinking. It created a new age of cocktails: the Mulata, Constante’s refined Daiquiris, El Presidente, and many more. Modern rum was forged here, the drinks shaken to the clave rhythm.

 

The Affordable Playground

 

       Havana was a steamy, erotically charged, crucible of creativity. As Louis A. Perez writes in on Becoming Cuba, “Cuba was constructed intrinsically as a place to flaunt conventions, to indulge unabashedly in fun and frolics in bars and brothels, at the racetrack and the roulette table, to experiment with forbidden alcohol, drugs and sex.” It was an affordable playground, with 7,000 bars, a racetrack, golf courses, boxing rings, an amusement park, nightclubs, cabarets, but not too dangerous and, as English was spoken wherever the tourists would go, familiar. Cuba was a projection of America’s base desires.

       Even after the repeal of Prohibition, travel remained cheap, with gambling taking over from booze as the American Mob sought out a new source of income. Chief among them was Meyer Lansky, who had first come to Cuba during Prohibition to secure a supply of molasses to distil back home. Even after Prohibition was repealed, Lansky and some associates were behind the Molaska Corporation, which operated huge illegal distilleries in Cleveland, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; Chicago, Illinois; Zanesville, Ohio; and Elizabeth, New Jersey.

       In 1934, Lansky flew to Cuba with a suitcase full of money and did a deal with dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista got $3-5 million a year, and the Mafia got the monopoly on casinos. At least 178,000 Americans headed to Havana in 1937. That’s a lot of rum drinks.

       The lure of Cuba continued after the Second World War, with tourists heading to the island and rum being exported, along with “Cuban” dance crazes like the mambo and rumba. It could never end… could it?

 

 

MEANWHILE, in the British Caribbean…

 

       A virtual collapse in the British Caribbean sugar trade in 1901 focused estate owner’s minds on rum. Science was now at the disposal of rum-makers, and Jamaica acted, creating the Sugar Experiment Station in 1905, rum by H.H. Cousins and building on the work of Percival Greg and Charles Allan on fermentation and cultured yeasts.

       The German market had also opened up, and with it, a new style. Germany had developed a taste for heavy rums, but in 1889 its government raised the duty on Jamaican rum. The response, proposed by Finke & Co. of Kingston and Bremen and assisted by the Experiment Station, was to create a new style of super – concentrated, high – ester rum. This could be blended and then diluted with neutral spirit in Germany to achieve the same result – but with less tax.

       In 1907, Jamaica’s 110 estates were producing three grades of rum, showing the taste preferences for its three main markets. “Local trade quality” was a quick-maturing, light rum for the domestic drinker. Fruity, heavy, pot-still, dunder-influenced “Home Trade Quality” went to the UK, and “Export Trade Quality” was destined for Europe.

       Despite this, not all Jamaica’s estates would survive. The twentieth century was, as for all rum – producing countries, one of consolidation. By 1948, there were 25 distilleries in Jamaica and outside investment was coming in, most notably from Canadian distiller Seagram, which needed a supply for its Captain Morgan brand and came to own Jamaica’s Long Pond Estates and plants in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, and Hawaii.

       Guyana was taking a different tack. The major supplied to Britain concentrated on short-fermented, pot – and column still rums; there simply wasn’t the vat capacity to run extended ferments. Though consolidation happened, rum sales were healthy. Barbados, however, was struggling. In 1906, distillers were barred for selling direct and all trade went through local merchants such as Alleyne Arthur, Martin Doorly, R.L. Seale, and Hanschell Innis. The trade shrank and became concentrated on the domestic market.

 

 

Rum and Coca-Cola

 

 

       For the rest of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the task was simple. Catch up with Cuba and exploit the ever-lightening US palate. Puerto Rico was well set until 1917, when, along with signing the Jones Act that extended US citizenship to its resident, citizen also – bizarrely – voted in favour of Prohibition, killing a rum industry worth $70m a year. It would take until 1935 for run distilling to restart. Even then, most “Puerto Rican” rums were blends of other islands, rums with added flavors, wine, sugar, molasses, prune, and other fruit juices.

       This wasn’t unusual. Post-Prohibition and throughout World War 2, many distillers were simply filling pipelines. Rum had become a low-priced alcoholic hit. A fascinating report on rum styles from 1937, written by Peter Valaer from the US Treasure, shows that light, column-still Cuban rums were “fruity, or slightly like the taste of molasses”, while the four St Croix distilleries were using cane juice, a mix of inoculated yeast, or wild ferments; and pots and columns.

       Puerto Rico’s rums were mostly molasses-based, while “quick ageing” techniques such as in a while oak barrel and treated with calcium permanganate and hydrogen peroxide” were used. While it would seem that Jamaica’s quality was untouched, all of the rums profiled by Valaer were coloured or adulterated. According to him, Demerara rum producers “added French plums, Valencia raisins, spices, and other flavoring ingredients” before coloring and ageing. He also claimed that “some… have a unique custom of placing chunks of raw meat in the cask to assist in aging, to absorb certain impurities, and to add a certain distinctive character”.

       Barbados was now using modern column stills and adding flavor through the use of “sherry, Madeira or other wines, often spirits of niter, bitter almonds, and raisins”.

       Despite this, rum had a good war. The American whiskey industry had closed down (again) in order to make industrial alcohol for the war effort, and people were thirsty. There were also large bases on the Caribbean islands and in World War 2 where the troops went, so did Coca-Cola, which ensured that there was a bottling plant close by any major military installation.

       The mix first made famous during the Cuban War of Independence, the Cuba Libre, was now simply “Rum and Coca-Cola”, immortalized in song by the Andrews Sisters: the biggest hit about prostitution until “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town”.

       Postwar, things changed fundamentally in Puerto Rico with creation of the Rum Pilot Plant under chief chemist Rafael Arroyo, whose papers remain essential reading for rum geeks – especially his analysis on how to make heavy rum. His conclusion? Don’t take it from the first column: “… a carelessly distilled light rum is not a first-class, genuine, heavy rum”. In 1943, Puerto Rico exported more rum that Cuba to the US, where it was now being drunk in a very different way.

 

 

Enter TIKI

 

       In one corner, an extravagantly named former teenage rum runner Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, aka Donn Beach, aka Don the Beachcomber. In the other, Vic Bergeron, aka Trader Vic, a wooden-legged salesman/hustler from Oakland.

       In 1934, Donn Beach opened the Polynesian themed Don the Beachcomber restaurant in L.A. Decked out in his own Polynesian props, its specialty was wild new rum drinks. He called them tiki, and tiki was to become a major postwar craze in America. Tiki was fun, vibrant, exotic. It was everything that the grey flannel life of the 1950s wasn’t. It also allowed rum to do what no other spirit does as well: make people smile.

       What was forgotten until American tiki historian Jeff “Beachbum” Berry (whose work has helped immensely with this section) revealed the truth, was that for all the kitsch, there original drinks were good. Ok, they were somewhat rococo, but they worked. Donn and Vic knew their rums.

       Donn loved Jamaican pot-still rum. He blended rums in his drinks; he blended juices and spices; he took punch principles and turned the volume up to 11. Vic had been quick to spot Donn’s success, and in 1937 offered to partner him. Donn rebuffed him, so Vic, always the smarter entrepreneur, headed to Cuba to learn from Constantino Ribalaigua Vert, aka  Constante. In 1838, the first Trader Vic’s opened, complete with Vic’s Daiquiri riffs. In 1944, he went one step further, inventing the Mai Tai. At its peak, his chain had 20 restaurants.

       Things went less well for Donn, who lost half of his empire when he divorced his wife. He left for Oahu to continue his tiki life.

       Rum was now miles away from its origins. For an American drinker, it meant potent fruity drinks. In the Caribbean it was white, drunk with water, or a simple mixer. In Britain, it was a heavy, dark spirit, taken neat or with toxic syrups.

       There was another drink, and it was ubiquitous. It was called Bacardi, but by the 1960s, certainly in the UK, it wasn’t thought of as a rum. It was simply “Bacardi”, and it was a glorious success for the firm which had managed to do what no other brand had: transcend the category.

 

The Business of Rum

 

       Rum’s story in the latter part of the twentieth century becomes a tedious litany of consolidation, nationalization, and mergers. As the tectonic plates of alcohol shifted, so rum became the collateral part of multinational deals. There was little talk of the spirit. By the 1970s, sales were on the slide. In Cuba, meanwhile, the industry had been nationalized and export ceased. Elsewhere, it was kept afloat by tax breaks, such as those given to Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands by the US, or duty-free quotas handed out to the Caribbean producers by the EU. The quota system saved rum production, but it did little to help develop brands. Rum was bulk, or it was Bacardi.

       In 1997, the quotas and preferential tariffs for UK/French rums were dropped. It took a $70 million EU package in 2001 to help stabilize the market, with grants given to assist in promotion, production, and the development of distiller-owned brands.

       Another battle was underway. In 1976, the Cuban government took the lapsed Havana Club trademark and began to market the brand once more. In 1993, Pernod-Ricard entered into a joint-venture agreement giving it global marketing rights. The possibility of a global, premium, aged rum brand had become a reality.

       Bacardi – which had its Cuban assets seized in 1960 – saw things differently. Thus began a prolonged legal battle over the rights to the Havana Club trademark, which is still continuing. Absurdly, despite the Cuban embargo being on the verge of finally being lifted, Bacardi is still blocking the sale of Havana Club in the US.

 

 

RENAISSANCE

 

       It was 1993. The bar was still a building site, offering glimpses of what it would become – the Atlantic Bar & Grill, shrine of a new cocktail age for London. In a side room we gathered. Oliver Peyton, Dick Bradsell, wine writers, myself, and a small selection of something new: “gold” rum.

       There were pioneers like Mount Gay, Appleton, and Cockspur and the recently launched El Dorado 15-year-old: for me, the brand that was the first to create a premium rum category and one whose producer proudly stated “We make this.” The mind-forged manacles of colonial thinking were loosening.

       We left enthused, converts to a cause, convinced that rum’s accession to center stage was inevitable. It took longer than rum-lovers around the world anticipated, but every year since has seen more rum bars open, while tiki’s recent revival has increased the momentum. Globetrotters like Ian Burrel and Velier’s Luca Gargano tirelessly spread the word. Bacardi’s re-establishing of its rum credentials gave things an additional boost, as did Havana Club’s Cultura initiative. The West Indies Rum and Spirits Producer’s Association generic campaign, rum festivals, blogs, books, and magazines all added their voice.

       Most importantly, the producers kept faith. They talked of history and place. They spoke of Guyana or Jamaica, of Cuba or Guatemala, of Barbados or Nicaragua. They spoke of flavor and heritage. They spoke of belonging.

       Rum had come home.

       The people who made it were, finally, in charge.

- PRODUCTION –

Legally, rum can only be made by distilling the products of cane-sugar manufacture – molasses, syrup or fresh cane juice. It must be distilled no higher than 96 per cent for the EU and 95 per cent for the US. In the EU it cannot be bottled at lower than 37.5 per cent ABV. In the US the minimum strength is 40 per cent. The EU does not allow flavouring to be added to rum, but the US does.

Other than that, on the face of it, rum’s pretty simple. Take a sugar solution, add yeast, ferment it, then distill. At that basic level that’s all every rum distiller does. What makes rum fascinating and downright mysterious is how each one approaches these straightforward principles in such different ways.

Every point in this decision-making process influences a rum’s final flavour. Technology is used, but not at the expense of artistry. Terroir exerts itself in a multiplicity of ways, from a cultural aspect to a direct manifestation of soil, wind, and air.

Rum-makers, be they distillers or blenders, are guardians of style, holders of history, custodians. This is their story. This is their world.

 

CANE

 

It is fair to say that you don’t get a lot of practice with a machete in Glasgow. If you try, you tend to be arrested. Still, being given one in a plantation gives me an idea of the sheep bloody physicality of cutting cane. This is not romantic in any way. It’s relentless, back-breaking slog that continues all day, every day during the dry season.

Not all cane is hand cut today. While its proponents claim it’s the best way to capture the high concentration of sucrose at the base of the stalk, most cane is machine cut, allowing harvesting to take place 24:7.

The canes I’m cutting – varieties chosen to suit soil and climatic conditions – were planted a year ago and have grown to between three and five metres. The fields have been burned to sanitize the soil, remove the trash (dead leaves), and scorch the cane, preventing water loss when it’s cut.

As soon as that happens its composition starts to change. The invertase enzyme begins to turn sucrose into glucose and fructose, while dextran builds up. Because all these compounds make it more difficult to crystallize sugar, the cane has to be at the mill within 24 hours.

Most producers believe that the variety of cane does not matter if you are making rum from molasses. An exception is Appleton Estate, where master blender Joy Spence claims that the varieties they use help produce a fruity and slight buttery note in the rum.

 

Sugar Production

 

       I never tire of visiting sugar mills. The trucks rumbling in, piled high with teetering piles of cut cane; the massive grabbers picking up canes, feeding the insatiable maw of the mill. The smell is all-pervading: a weird, heady mix of sweet and sour, moist earth and vegetation.

Here the canes are chopped and crushed to release their juice, which is then clarified with a mix of lime to neutralize its pH. The resulting mud can be racked off and used as fertilizer. The juice’s pH is upped and evaporated into a syrup, then concentrated in vacuum pans into a supersaturated state. Tiny sugar crystals are seeded in, prompting larger ones to form, which then can be centrifuged away. This is then repeated twice. One on side is raw sugar, on the other molasses.

 

       By this stage, the rum-maker already has three options for a base material. Cane juice can be used, as can cane syrup the viscous, sweet product extracted after the first crystallization. This costs twice as much as the heavy, thick molasses with its bitterswseet, smoky tang of iron and blood, the most common base.

 

Molasses

 

       The consolidation of the global sugar industry means there is also a bulk trade in molasses, which comes predominantly from Brazil, Guyana, and Venezuela. This will be the source of raw materials for distillers in countries where there is no (or little) sugar being made. Each distiller has precise specifications for sugar content, ash, gum, pH, and acidity to ensure his or her rum’s flavour profile is consistent.

       The knock-on effect of greater efficiency in sugar-making is lower sucrose levels in molasses and a rise in its ash content. The latter can cause issues in the still, while a lower sugar content has a knock-on effect on yield and cost, meaning producers require more molasses to produce the same amount of rum.

 

Yeast

 

       Yeast can either be seen as the organism that converts sugar to alcohol, or an active participant in flavour creation. Today, wild yeast ferments (using yeasts naturally occurring in the local environment) are rare, but they do still occur. Some distillers use standard dried commercial yeast, while others have developed their own strains to produce specific flavours.

       Put yeast into a sugary environment, and it goes crazy, emitting heat, and CO2 and, most importantly, turning those sugars into alcohol. It is also temperature – sensitive, needing heat to get started, but unable to survive above 35 C. Maintaining that upper limit isn’t an issue in cool climates, but it becomes a problem when the ambient temperature is between 25 C and 32 C, as it is in rum-making regions. Temperature control is therefore required to keep the yeast working, prevent spoilage, and ensure that full conversion takes place.

       Molasses is one and a half times denser than water, meaning that no yeast could work through its thick, cloying depths. Prior to fermentation, therefore, it is diluted with water, the level of which varies, depending on the desired flavour profile.

       Yeast also requires nitrogen in order to work, and as molasses is low in nitrogen the level will be adjusted pre-ferment, most commonly with the addition of ammonium sulphate or ammonium phosphate. As yeast also benefits from a slightly acidic environment, the pH needs to be lowered to around 5.5 to 5.8. This in turn helps in the creation of fruity esters.

 

Fermentation

 

       Distillation is about the separation of alcohol from water, concentration of flavours, then selection of the flavours you want. Where do these flavours come from? Fermentation.

       Molasses contains 81 aromatic compounds that react with the yeast, which itself adds flavour. These then interact over time to create more flavours. The length of the ferment therefore has a significant impact. The longer it runs, the higher the acidity of the wash, and the more esters you make.

       A light rum needs a rapid fermentation – between 24 and 48 hours – to get the correct strength and flavours required. In general, heavier rums need longer ferments. Here, after the sugar is converted into alcohol, the wash is kept in the fermenter, where lactobacillus begins to work, helping to create those esters. Control is needed, whatever method you use.

       Temperature control allows distillers to play around with these basic rules. Zacapa, for example, uses a 100-hour temperature-controlled ferment, while on the island of Marie-Galante, the Rhum brand distilled by Gianni Capovilla at Bielle is fermented for five days in a temperature-controlled environment. At Foursquare Distillery in Barbados, Richard Seale slowly feeds in his molasses-and-water mix into the fermenter to help create more complex aromas.

       Jamaica, however, is the fermentation specialist. Here, fermentations can be as short as 30 hours, or as long as Hampden Estate’s 21 days. The rums that are produced are then graded by their ester levels. The well-named Common Cleans are between 80-150 esters and are made by short ferment. A fruity, raisin-accented Plummer (between 150-200 esters) might have a two-day ferment, while the oily, fruity funkiness of a Wedderburn (200 + esters) comes from a longer fermentation – and the option of the use of dunder. Continental Favoured rums (between 700-1400 esters) have massively extended fermentations, smell of acetone, and are used mainly for flavouring purposes.

 

DISTILLATION

 

       The distiller has created a wash of between 4% ABV and 9% ABV, with all of the flavours held in a dilute solution. Because alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, if you heat this in an enclosed vessel, the alcohol will be driven off in preference to the water, thereby increasing the strength and concentrating the flavours.

       The aroma-rich vapours rise up the still and are then converted back into liquid in a condensing system, which is usually a bundle of copper tubes filled with cold water. The more you make the vapour work, the higher its strength, and the lighter in flavour the spirit will be. Conversely, the shorter that journey, the heavier in flavour it will be.

       What’s happening is reflux. When the vapour meets a slightly cooler part of the still, its heavier elements revert into liquid and are redistilled: micro-distillations within a greater whole. Reflux breaks down the vapour stream into increasingly small fragments, thereby revealing more of its complexities.

       Stills are usually made of cooper, and as cooper holds on to heavy elements such as sulphur, the longer the dialogue between vapour and cooper, the lighter the spirit will be. So the slower the distillation – or the taller the still – the longer this conversation is. The shape and size of the still and the speed of the distillation will also have a direct impact on the final spirit character.

 

Pot-still Distillation

Traditional Pot Stills

       A pot still is effectively a giant kettle. The first distillation will give a spirit, called low wines, of around 24% ABV. This needs to be redistilled to refine the flavours and increase the strength. Here, the volatile elements in the first portion, known as the heads, are separated from the body of the spirit (the heart). Toward the end of the distillation, the flavours become increasingly oily. As there are undesirable, this portion, called the tails or feints, is also separated. The end result is a spirit with a strength of around 65-72% ABV. The heads and tails are redistilled with the next batch of low wines.

       There is a range of flavours within the heart for a distiller to choose from. A Lighter, more fragrant rum will be collected from the earlier part of the run, a richer one from the distillate coming across later. These heavier elements give mouthfeel and backbone to a rum that is going to be aged.

 

Pot Plus Retort

       Rum distillers also use a system in which cooper vessels called retorts are placed between the pot and the condenser. The pot is filled with wash, while the retorts contain the high wines and low wines from the previous distillation. This allows triple distillation to take place in one pass of the still.

       The wash is heated and the alcohol vapour (30%ABV) is carried into the first retort, which holds low wines. This then boils, liberating all of its aromas, and the vapour (now 60% ABV), goes unto the second retort, where the same thing happens. The vapour, (now at 90%), is then condensed.

       As the liquid flows into the receiver it’s split into four parts: heads, then rum 86%; next a cut is then made to high wines, with an average of 75%, then a final cut to low wines, with an average of 30%. The last two are used in the retorts for the next run, acting like a chicken carcass that flavours a stock. By adjusting their strength, the distiller can create different end results. If making higher-ester rums, the distillation will be run through the whole system a second time to concentrate the aromas further.

 

Wooden Pots  

       Demerara Distillers Diamond Distillery has two wooden pot stills. The first, the Versailles still, is made up of a pot of greenheart wood with a copper neck that plunges into a report, and from there into a small rectifying column, and then to the condensing system. The second of the wooden pot stills, the Port Mourant still, has two wooden pots. Both are filled with wash, then the heat is turned up fully on the first to drive off the alcohol. This vapour surges into the base of the second pot, boiling it, and this stream then runs into a retort and rectifier.

       As there’s not a huge amount of copper here, the resulting spirit is heavy. That from Versailles is beefy and rich. Port Mourant has a hint of oiliness, with added black banana, and overripe fruit. Both need long ageing and add substance to blends.

 

Column Stills

       The invention of the continuous or column still in the nineteenth century ushered in a new era for rum. For the first time a “light” rum could be made. Today’s rum distillers use a number of different designs of column still.

 

Coffey Stills

       Designers like Aeneas Coffey were looking for efficiency in distillation, with designs that allowed a “continuous” process. In a Coffey still’s case, this is achieved by linking together two columns: the analyser and the rectifier, both divided internally by perforated horizontal plates into a series of chambers.

       The wash is carried down the rectifying column in a coiled pipe, which it is sprayed over the top plate. It then flows downwards through a series of channels. Live steam is being injected into the column’s base, passing through the perforations and stripping off the alcohol from the descending wash.

       This vapour rises and is gathered in another pipe, which feeds into the base of the rectifying column, then releases the vapour to continue its upward journey. As it progresses, it hits the slightly cooler top of each chamber, thus causing heavier elements to reflux out. It behaves like a cross-country runner starting a winter race, wrapped up in heavy clothes. As she heats up, so various layers (flavours) begin to be shed. Because the columns are immensely tall, only the lightest compounds can reach the collecting plate, where they are diverted into the condenser.

 

Multiple Columns

        The more columns in your set-up, the greater control you have over the distillate – and the lighter the rum will be. These configurations have more bells and whistles, allowing different alcohols to be collected, redistilled, or removed.

       A distiller can make a huge range of different marks with this system. Demerara Distillers Limited, for example, makes nine different marks from its four-column Savalle stills. In Jamaica, Wray & Nephew makes an unspecified number of marks on its three-column set-up. Five-column stills are used by distillers such as Bacardi, Cruzan, and Angostura.

       Bacardi’s starts with a “beer column”, which strips off the alcohol and yields the firm’s aguardiente (80% ABV). After being run through a further three columns, all the unwanted elements have been removed and Bacardi has its redistilado (95% ABV). The fifth column is used for redistilling elements from the four other columns. All of this is done under vacuum, which lowers the boiling points and makes the process more energy efficient.

       It takes great skill to make a “heavy” rum from a stripping column, and it requires a lot of sulphur-removing copper. There is a risk of heavy fusel oils being retained. The resulting rum might be the same strength as a pot-still rum, but because it isn’t fermented and distilled in the same fashion, its flavour and palate weight will be different.

 

Hybrid Stills

       These stills combine a pot with a rectifying column. (sometimes contained in the neck of the still.)

Filtration

        Typically, light or “extra-light” rum will be passed through charcoal to remove any aggressive elements. This can either be bottled, or matured. In Bacardi’s case, both its marks are filtered before maturated. After that, like a number of white rums, a second filtration takes place to remove colour.

 

 

OTHER RUM STYLES

Rhum Agricole

 

       Rhum agricole is made from fresh sugar cane juice. (if molasses is used, the spirit is called rhum industrially.) Agricole has a physical link between the spirit and the land. If you are using cane juice, you need to process it as quickly as possible. This means having the mill and the distillery on the same site; often the cane is grown on the surrounding estate.

       Juice also allows you to notice the influence of sugar cane – even the variety: how the influence of soils impact on the rhum; or the impact of climate on a rhum made from a distillery cooled by Atlantic breezes compared to one on the hotter Caribbean coast. As distillation is about a complex interplay between different factors, it is hard to point at a single aspect and say, “This is what makes the difference.” All of these factors – cane, soil, climate – will impact in some way.

       Taste a range of vintages and you can discern the differences between the climatic conditions of each year. The punch of a 50% ABV rhum agricole blanc takes you straight to the island’s earth, a vegetal note mixed with that cane-juice aroma of flowers and light fruit you smelled in the distillery. Rhum agricole in many ways is one step closer to wine. You need to use what the vintage gives you. These distilleries are chateaux of rhum.

 

Production

 

       On arrival, the sugar cane is crushed, the juice diverted one way, and the fibrous mass (bagasse) used as fuel for the boilers. The juice tends to be fermented rapidly in open ferments with dried yeasts. Some distilleries complete this within a day, others run the ferment over two. The maximum permitted in Martinique is 72 hours.

       Distillation takes place in single column stills separated into 20 to 30 plates. The fermented wash (vesou) is passed through two preheaters, then directed into the middle of the column, while live steam is pumped in from the bottom, stripping off the alcohol from the vesou as it flows downward over the plates.

       This vapour stream rises above the vesou’s entry point into the still’s enrichment section, where reflux happens. It then passes through a pipe running through the preheaters (providing the source of heat) to the condenser. Any refluxed alcohol collected prior to condensing is fed back into the column. The result is a lower-strength spirit. Under appellation law in Martinique, the distillate must be between 65% and 75% ABV.

       The differences between rhum agricoles can thus come from terroir, cane type, the length of the ferment, the strength of the vesou, and the physical make-up of the column: its height, copper content, and how the chambers are separated.

       The old “Creole-style” still is the simplest design and produces more spiciness in the distillate; Savalle and Barbet designs make the vapour work harder, increasing reflux. Savalle stills tend to make a more floral style, while those from Barbet set-ups are often weightier and more vegetal.

       This green, vegetal note comes primarily from fermentation and distillation. This can be shown when you compare an agricole with a pot-still, cane-juice rum such as Rhum Rhum, which has had a long fermentation. Distilled to a higher strength, it is clean, floral, and fruity, with no vegetal notes.

 

Clairin

       It was commonly thought that Haiti only had one distillery: the legendary Barbancourt. The reason? It was available worldwide and few people visited that sadly troubled country. Then rumors began to circulate that there were more – a lot more. In fact, there were hundreds of stills in Haiti. What they produced however wasn’t rum, or rhum. It was Clairin.

       Clairin is to rum what mezcal is to tequila and should be approached in the same way. This is a small-scale, artisanal, agricultural spirit, made in traditional rather than an advanced technological manner. It has soil of Hailti in its blood.

 

Cachaca

    Brazil is the world’s largest sugar producer, and its sugar cane also provides industrial ethanol, molasses, and cachaca: 1.5 billion liters (329,953,872 gallons) of it a year, this quantity made by an estimated 30,000 registered producers.

       More than 90 per cent of production is concentrated in the hands of a few large producers, who make “industrial” cachaca. A vastly larger number of smaller producers make “artisanal” cachaca with Minas Gerais having the highest concentration at around 8,500 of them.

       By law, cachaca is a spirit made from sugar-cane juice (garapa); in Brazil, it must be distilled to no less than 38% ABV and no more than 48% ABV, to which no more than six grams per liter (1/5 oz per 1,3/4 pints) of sugar can be added. Industrial producers will source cane from a wide variety of plantations. Artisanal producers tend to own their own cane fields, giving them greater control over the base ingredient.

       After clarification of the juice, fermentation can start. Some industrial producers utilize techniques from the fuel-ethanol business and can complete fermentation in 10 hours. Artisanal producers will run their fermentation for longer. In their case, the yeasts on the cane provide the fermenting agent.

       To this, some add a “starter” made of toasted corn/flour/bran/soy bean/rice that’s mixed with garapa to kick-start the ferment. In many cases, this is only used at the start of the distilling season, with subsequent ferments helped along by the addition of some of the ferment from an older batch. This technique, which is akin to that used in making sourdough bread, is commonplace, but with so many distillers there are an infinite number of variations.

       Fermentation of artisanal cachaca is gentle, taking between 24 and 36 hours to complete the conversion to fruity, mild wine. The yeast is then racked off and re-enters the system, while the wine is distilled.

       Industrial cachaca is a column-still distillate, while artisanal is made in copper pot stills where the heart of the distillate is separated from the heads and tails. There are a huge number of different styles of these: simple pots and condensers, some with plates in the neck, others with two linked pots, both with plates in the neck.

       Industrial producers sell “fresh” cachaca, while artisanal makers will always give their spirit a period of mellowing in casks of no larger than 700 liters. While ex-bourbon and ex-Cognac barrels are common, a huge variety of native Brazilian woods are also utilized: amendoim and tauari – both confusingly called “Brazilian oak”.

Some, such as the first pair, are neutral in their character, making them ideal for mellowing. Other types have more colour and aromatic qualities and are used for maturation.

 

Arrack

 

       The term “arak” is a catch-all term for a distillate. In Sri Lanka and Goa it means a spirit made from the coconut palm. In Lebanon it is a grape-must spirit, while in Mongolia, (arkhi) is made from fermented mare’s milk. In Java, however – where an extra r and c are added – the term refers to a cane spirit.

       Batavian arrack was, in its time, the most highly prized cane spirit for use in punches. Produced in Java, it was shipped mainly to The Netherlands, from whence it was re-exported. The firm of E&A Scheer was primarily an arrack importer before it became a wider rum specialist. It still trades with Java and is the source of Batavia-Arrack van Oosten. The spirit is also used by the flavour industry and in Swedish punsch (a blend arrack, rum, sugar, and spices).

       The spirit is produced from molasses, which is fermented with the addition of a starter made of red rice cakes. Distillation takes place in pot stills, after which the arrack spends time mellowing in teak vats before being shipped. Further maturation can take place in Europe.

 

Maturation

 

       Rum was one of the world’s first deliberately aged spirits. Legally, some countries insist that rum has to be aged before it can even be called rum; in Cuba, for example, the spirits gas to spend two years in cask before it can be called rum.

       An understanding of oak is the area that is benefiting rum the most. After all, if up to 70 per cent of a cask-matured rum’s character comes from the interaction between oak and spirit, then the nature of the oak, its quality, and character are vital.

       Oak is used because although it is watertight, it also breathes. Liquid stays in but oxygen (and alcohol vapour) can pass through. It is durable, so casks last a long time. It is also easily coopered. Most importantly, it has flavour.

       Casks from the bourbon industry are by far the most widely used. These are made from American oak (Quercus alba) and add notes of vanilla, coconut, chocolate, and sweet price to the spirit. Producers of rhum agricole have traditionally used ex-Cognac casks made from “French oak” (Quercus sessiliflora), which add savoury spiciness, vanilla and grip.

       Less common are ex-Sherry casks made from “Spanish oak” (Quercus robur), which add notes of cloves, resin, dried fruits, and tannin. Distillers such as Brugal and Foursquare have had success with these, while the latter has also begun to explore other fortified wine cask types.

       Oak should participate in the slow accretion of flavour. It gives colour; it mellows; it adds character.

 

Mechanism of Cask-ageing

 

       The first thing that happens when rum is put into a cask is the removal of aggressive elements, either through evaporation or by the layer of char on the inside of the cask, which acts like the charcoal in a cooker hood.

       The inside of the cask will also have been toasted. This transforms aromatic compounds in the wood, creating flavours such as coconut, vanilla, spice, and cacao. It also creates tannins, giving colour and grip. All of these seep into the rum and interact with the flavours created in distillation, increasing the spirit’s complexity.

       The fresher the cask, the more impact it will have. A three-year-old rum put into a fresh cask will show more oak influence than the same rum put into a cask that has been filled a number of times. Refills still have flavour, but are more discreet. What needs to be avoided is a cask that has been exhausted and has turned into a container rather than a participant.

       While a heave pot-still rum needs time to fully mellow out, a light rum can get oaky too quickly. Having a deep understanding of these parameters is part of a rum blender’s job.

 

Climate

 

       As the rum matures, so the cask is breathing, inhaling oxygen (which helps change the aromas) and exhaling alcohol: the angels’ – or, in the Caribbean, “duppies” – share. The hotter the climate, the more rapid this respiration is. Not only do you get quicker oxidation, but the volume of liquid is reduced and the interaction between rum and wood is speeded up.

       A rum moves through its maturation cycle more rapidly in the Caribbean than in Europe. The same rums matured in Europe and the Caribbean are very different beasts after five years. The latter become more woody quicker than a cool-climate-aged spirit. Remember this when you look at an age statement on a rum’s label. (Tropical ageing will have a marked effect on the flavour of a rum.)

       Carsten Vlierboom, master blender at E&A Scheer, demonstrated this to me with a flight of rum from Jamaican-aged Worthy Park. The subtle, sweet fruitiness and light oak after one year in cask had turned into dry spice and raisin 12 months later. A year on, there were cedar notes and greater complexity. After four years, the wood was taking over.

       If rums suck up wood quickly, the logical solution is to use a higher percentage of “refill” casks to give a gentler, more subtle result. There is a quality difference between a mature rum and one that’s just dominated by the vanillin from a cask.

       Another option is to locate your maturation cellars in a cool zone, an option taken by various Central and Latin American producers. Zacapa, for example, distils at 275 metres, but its ageing cellars are in Quetzaltenango at 2,300 metres.

       Scheer matures its rums for a maximum of five years in the Caribbean before transferring them to the cooler conditions of Amsterdam or Liverpool, where the ingress of oak is dramatically reduced.

       Understanding the different energies given to the maturing rum by climate, oak type, and cask activity is helping to widen the possibilities for rum.

 

Zacapa’s system solera

       There are a number of different types of solera system. Guatemalan producer Zacapa’s is undoubtedly the most complex, mixing static ageing, elevage (French – agricole) and solera. The rum matures in a progression of different cask types: ex-bourbon, extra charred ex-oloroso, then ex-PX butts, before entering a solera. In addition, each time the rum is moved to the next type of cask, a progressively older age profile of reserve rum is added to the blend while some of the blend being transferred is then blended back into the reserve.

 

 

Blending

 

       Most rum is blended: a blend of casks, styles, distilleries, or countries. Blending gives volume, creates consistency, and establishes character. It is creative and dynamic.

       If a distillery makes one style of rum, then the blender could use different ages of rums, or fills of cask to build in complexity. This would be the option taken by Cruzan in St Croix, for example. Havana Club takes a different path.

       Using different ages also helps build complexity. Young rums add vibrancy and freshness, older rums add depth. First-fill casks give a hit of vanilla, while refills allow the character of the rum to speak.

       Other distillers may be producing different marks from pot stills, giving weight, and columns stills, giving delicacy. These different characters, aged in different fills, can then be blended, which is the approach taken by Foursquare, Demerara Distillers, and Appleton Estate.

       “We are always trying to find new flavour profiles,” says Juan Pinera Guevara, Bacardi’s master blender. “This could be trough fermentation conditions, distillation, and casks; ages, etc.” In other words, the blender is involved in the whole of the process.

       To get an idea of the possibilities in blending, I visited Carsten Vlierboom, Master blender at E&A in Amsterdam. Firstly, we looked at how to add character to light rum. Adding a small amount of Plummer gave raisin and punchiness, while a Wedderburn brought in tropical fruits, peels, and that Jamaican funk. A drop of Continental took things into pineapple territory. The blends seemed sweeter, but no sugar was being added. “You don’t need to when you blend like this,” he said.

       He then showed me how different ages of cask-matured rums from one distillery could be blended to make a more complex whole, and how a rum which, on its own, would be too woody, can add structure to a blend.

       Finally, we looked at how to make a multinational blend, with a selection of mature rums from Guatemala (coffee bean, savoury - spicy, oily), Barbados (vanilla, banana split), Nicaraguan (chocolate and crispness), and more. Adding any of these, or combinations of these, to a light, aged base added depth, complexity, and aroma. The possibilities, even with this small selection, were huge.

       Having created a flavour profile, the blenders must maintain it – even if volume increases, or a distillery stops producing. Ultimately, the buck stops with them.

Adjustment

 

       Colouring rums is an old practice, and either spirit caramel or a molasses-base solution can be used. This is the standard practice for making the “Navy” style of rum. Here, the colouring will have an impact, not just on the rum’s hue, but on its flavour, with a bitter, liquorice element being added. Cask-aged rums can also be tinted with spirit caramel. This is primarily to standardize any color differences between batches.

       Prior to bottling, some firms add sugar solution to their rum. This is currently the most vexed issue facing rum. Producers in Jamaica – which, like Barbados and Martinique, forbids sugar addition – think that declaring sugar levels should be mandatory.

       An outright ban is extremely unlikely. No addition of sugar could, I feel, be declared on the label, much as some whisky labels declare that there’s been should be a maximum amount of sugar permitted, as in cachaca or Cognac.

 

Solera Ageing

       This technique comes from the Sherry industry and is used by many rum producers in Latin America. A solera consists of horizontal tiers of casks, each containing a rum of the same average age: the oldest at the bottom, the youngest at the top. When the rum is ready to be bottled, the requisite amount is taken from the oldest tier of casks. These are then topped up with the same amount of liquid from the next-oldest tier, and so on back through the system. None of the casks are ever fully emptied, which means there is always some increasingly rich and complex rum within them. These more powerful flavours give their character to the younger rums being added.