Perceptions of rum are dominated by Bacardi, one of the biggest international spirits brands in the world (globally, it sells nearly 20m cases a year, second only to Smirnoff). I remember the ads from the '90s: a trendy, cool drink which meant guaranteed success with Latina women; such an ad inevitably led to ordering one in a bar, and, equally inevitably, vowing never to drink the stuff again. For an older crowd, though, rum means Navy Rum: bottles with drunken sailors on the front and only ever ordered by an old ruddy-cheeked, frantically stubbled man. Both these styles are image conscious, Bacardi the party spirit for good times (and, of course, to be drunk with coke), Navy or dark rum the drink of history and tradition. Neither image does much for rum, though.
this looked really cool in the 1990s
an ad for Lamb's Navy rum about the "True British Character" - featuring a Creative Branding Guru...
what's it made from?
It was probably Marco Polo who brought back sugar cane from Asia and it made its way to the Caribbean through the Spanish (by way of Christopher Columbus). By the seventeenth century, sugar cane was an even more valuable commodity than gold, so much so that it led to the development of the slave trade. Extracting sugar from the plant creates a residue of sticky sweet molasses, which planters distilled into spirit so as not to waste any material. By the eighteenth century, this spirit had become extremely fashionable in Britain - yet another spirit with a heavily colonial history.Most rum is made from molasses, though it can also be made from sugar cane juice (particularly in the French islands Martinique and Guadaloupe, when it's called rhum agricole).
different styles
white rum - clear and colourless; if they receive any oak ageing, the colour is filtered out (which is how Bacardi has traditionally been made); flavours aren't particularly intense, though this depends on the desired style.golden rum - the colour comes from time in oak (as well as some caramel for consistency), and the ageing results in a greater complexity.
dark rum - the different methods of distillation for rum lead to spirits of lighter and heavier intensity - a dark rum will be made from the most intensely flavoured spirits, while the dark colour comes from lots of time in oak. This prolonged maturation also allows the unripe, green cane flavours of the base spirit to develop into rich tropical fruits. The heat of the Caribbean plays an important part in maturation; a "tropical year" is eight months long, so a twelve-year-old rum is almost the equivalent of a twenty-year-old spirit from a cooler climate. This is the kind of stuff sailors used to drink in great quantities, and there's another style of dark rum - Navy Rum, which is even more aromatic and has caramel added to it to give it a burnt-treacle flavour.
where it's made
Most countries in the Caribbean produce rum, and often the base materials are shipped from one country to another - as long as the drink is made in a country capable of growing sugar cane it can be called rum. The major countries include Guyana, which uses Demerara sugar and produces a broad range of styles of rum due to the unusual wood pot stills used for distillation, Jamaica, where the variety of styles comes from the length of ferment, and Cuba, where the style of white rum originates.Diploma tasting
Bacardi - my notes say vegetable and grassy, with green bananas and bubblegum. I'm not sure it even tasted of that much, but we have to write something for the tasting exam. We also need clues to help us spot which spirit is which when we do the exam, especially when they're this bland, so for a white rum we should be looking for tropical fruits such as underripe banana. These clues didn't help me for the mock blind tasting at the end of the day, as I thought this was a vodka (we were warned that it's easy to confuse white rum with tequila; I wish I'd made a mistake that obvious).La Mauny Rhum Agricole - a much, much more interesting white rum. The clue is again green banana and grass (flavours you don't find in vodka), but there's also cinnamon, white pepper, melon, and smoke.
Appleton Estate 12YO - no confusing this with vodka, as it was mahogany coloured. The tropical fruits were much less ripe, with cedar and sherry aromas from the oak, and treacle, toffee, and fruitcake from the molasses.
El Dorado 15YO - another mahogany coloured rum, with lots of complex aromas. I've already talked about this, and Pusser's Navy Rum, in my initial blog about the Diploma spirits classes. These two rums were fantastic.
Wray & Nephew White Overproof Rum - I coped pretty well with tasting nearly forty spirits one after the other, by taking small sips that I thoroughly spat out. This, though, was 63% and the alcohol was immediately apparent before even pouring it from the bottle. On tasting, the aggressive alcohol did fade to reveal tropical fruit aromas, but the level of alcohol meant that there's no way this could ever be considered a complex drink. Quite amazing, though, to produce a drink of this quality with such high alcohol.
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