A Rum Tale E-Book

Joseph Piercy

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 206

Beschreibung

What links Fidel Castro, pirates from the Caribbean and George Washington? Rum. A Rum Tale: Spirit of the New World is a look at the history of one of the Caribbean's most famous and favourite drinks. From its start as a by-product of a mysterious plant called 'sugar cane' to twentieth-century bootlegging, smuggling and prohibition, rum's heritage is as rich as its flavour – so pour yourself a drink and turn the page.

Leseprobe

First published 2019

The History Press97 St George’s Place,Cheltenham, GL50 3QBwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Joseph Piercy, 2019Illustrations © Aubrey Smith, 2019Cover illustation © Ivangal/Shutterstock

The right of Joseph Piercy to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9278 7

Typesetting and origination by The History PressPrinted and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd.eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part 1 A Murky PastThe Birth of the Sugar Trade, Discovery of the New World, Christopher Columbus, the Slave Trade and all that …

Part 2 The Rise of RumSugar and Spice and all Things Nice and the Real Pirates of the Caribbean

Part 3 The Revolutionary SpiritRum in North America, Rum Running During Prohibition and the Australian Rum Rebellion

Part 4 The Rise of CubaHavana Club versus Bacardi in the Rum Fight of the Century

Part 5 Rum and the Royal NavyThe Traditions of the Rum ‘Tot’ and the Royal Navy

Part 6 Types of RumTowards a General Classification in Rum Production

Appendix: Rum Cocktails

Acknowledgements

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

A RUM TALE

The story of rum is complex – as complex as the blending process involved in producing the best brands in the world’s greatest spirit. It involves a cast of thousands to tell it anywhere near accurately. It includes some of the greatest heroes and villains of history: colonialism, pirates, wars, slavery and the growth of global capitalism. A ten-part, big-budget television series or a blockbuster Hollywood film would struggle to do the story justice. Key points, oddities and anomalies would be glossed over, ignored or conveniently forgotten. In short, it is an intricate, multifaceted story, which is by turns fascinating and absorbing, and at times downright alarming. This book tells only part of A Rum Tale.

The origins of rum are difficult to trace, but there is one indisputable fact: wherever in the world sugar cane is grown, rum (or something related to rum) is or has been produced. The ‘cast of thousands’ I mentioned above include such historical luminaries as Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Admiral Lord Nelson, John Adams, Captain William Bligh, Ernest Hemmingway and, in contrast to his abstinence and brilliant exhortations that rum was ‘a slave-owner’s drink’, Malcolm X – a whole host of major and minor characters throughout history who no doubt would have made for great dinner party guests, (whether rum was served or not). And yet rum remains, at least until recently, considered a ‘childish’ drink – something that neophyte girls order on a first date when their priapic beau takes them to a cocktail bar: ‘Oh, I’ll just have a Bacardi and coke please’ – possibly one of the most revolting drinks in the history of trying to have something resembling fun.

Rum, however, is on the march. New small-batch distilleries are springing up all over the world, with new markets opening and ‘rum festivals’ becoming commonplace across the world. This both dark and light drink, steeped in history, is finally starting to find its place. I have to admit that this is probably because the sudden interest in gin from the mid 2000s has started to wane through saturation, so the thirst for the ‘next big thing’ has centred on rum. I like to think of rum as a sleeping giant in that context, unencumbered by market forces, a drink for those ‘in the know’, which brings me neatly on to the matter of tasting and evaluating rum. Unlike other spirits, rum has no international classification – basically anything goes. There are some fantastic and very learned ‘rum scholars’ writing books and blogs, of whom I am greatly indebted to researching and writing this book. Nonetheless I take issue with pretentious and meaningless tasting notes and refer you to David Hume (1711–1776); my book is for rum enthusiasts, that is people interested in the history of drinks they enjoy, not for elitist snobs. I hope it is a beginners’ guide, so to speak, and doesn’t smack of any snobbery or petty prejudice.

David Hume, the Scottish philosopher and historian, attempted to analyse the problem of how to define good from bad in matters of judgement and expertise in his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757). Hume was concerned with critical judgements and how (or why) one pronouncement can hold sway over another contrary point of view. One of the major concerns clouding critical judgements, such as claiming one rum was the best in its class over another, boiled down to an inability to distinguish between simple facts and expressions of sentiment and/or emotion. For example, an ardent supporter of a certain football team may witness a goal scored by their team that exhibits skill, balance and athleticism, and pronounce it a ‘beautiful goal’. If the opposition, moments later, score a goal of comparable merit, it is unlikely to be viewed with dispassionate reason. This is because the initial judgement is coloured by sentiment and emotion, and therefore is subjected to prejudice. Critical verdicts based upon sentiment and emotion are devoid of any discernible truth value and thus rendered, in Hume’s words, ‘absurd and ridiculous’.

For Hume, standards of taste and their accompanying critical judgements are often determined by slight differences, nuances and subtle oppositions. As a general rule people respond to more obviously apparent aspects and qualities in ‘things’. How many times have you heard people express pleasure at the sight of a sunset? Yet the sun sets every dusk all over the world, so why should one sunset be any more beautiful than another? This point, in turn, opens up questions about perception, time and place, or, if you like, ‘being in the moment’. Some years ago, I visited filmmaker and wine producer Francis Ford Coppola’s winery in Geyserville, California. It’s a stunning estate, which contains a small museum of Coppola film artefacts and props. My wife and I toured the estate and had a private tasting of the forty-plus wines they produce onsite (I hasten to add we didn’t taste all forty wines but a selection of their vintages). If I am truly dispassionate in my assessment of the wines we sampled, they weren’t actually that great, but there was something about sitting behind Don Corleone’s (Marlon Brando’s) desk from The Godfather sipping a fair-to-middling pinot noir that was very seductive on my judgement. I subsequently purchased a case of mixed wines to ship back home, but when opened and drunk back in the UK on a cold, wet November evening, they proved to be a profound disappointment. Situation, moment, sentiment, blimey, even the bloody weather can cloud judgements.

Hume makes this point about the ‘fine margins of taste’ and illustrates it with reference to Miguel de Cervantes’ (1547–1616) timeless novel Don Quixote (1605). In one scene in Cervantes’ episodic master work, Sancho Panza tells a story about two wine connoisseurs tasting and evaluating a barrel of wine, which they have been told is the finest produced in the whole of Spain. The first of the ‘experts’ samples the wine with the tip of his tongue, rolls it around his mouth, spits it out into a bucket and concurs that it is indeed of good quality and has a finish of rusty iron. The second ‘expert’ smells the wine, breathing deeply and agrees that it is of very high vintage but that it has a hint of burnt leather in its bouquet.

Some onlookers ridicule and dismiss the judgements of the so-called experts accusing them of making false and bogus judgements. However, when all of the wine has been drunk a rusting iron key and a burnt leather strap are found in the bottom of the empty barrel.

Hume deploys Cervantes’ tale to illustrate his view that developing good taste is a matter of refinement that requires time and needs to be practised in as detached a manner as possible. For Hume, it is not a matter of determining if one stated position in contrast with another is true or false, or vice versa, but in deciding which is simply better according to certain principles. In summary, Hume sets out the following criteria for sound taste and judgement: ‘strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character of sound judgement and taste’. In other words, practice and perseverance, variation, considered comparison – find what you like and then measure according to that standard – and always looking for something new is what makes a rum connoisseur, not daft tasting notes about coconut husks and rotting mangoes.

I can’t actually remember when I first tasted rum and thus if I actually liked it immediately. It is possible, even likely, that my first contact with the ‘flavours’ of rum wasn’t through drinking at all but through cakes, ice cream and other sweet treats. This stands in stark comparison to other spirits. Experimenting with alcohol at teenage parties inevitably is a matter of trial and error, with more errors occurring to the novice drinker. I can remember being violently ill on gin – an experience that has coloured my ability to drink ‘mother’s ruin’ to this day. Whisky too presented its pitfalls, particularly during my undergraduate years, and vodka only seemed to serve one notable purpose: to get drunk as quickly as possible (a position I later revised when I lived in Russia – although getting drunk in Russia is less of a vice than a necessity and national pastime).

I don’t think I ever considered rum to be a childish drink, as was a common misconception in some quarters – quite the opposite, in fact. If I am to identify two people to thank for my love of rum, it is my father and his long-time friend Joseph Christopher (whom I am named after). My father met Joseph ‘Joe’ Christopher at Durham University in the early 1960s where they were both post-graduate researchers in the physics department. Joe Christopher was born and bred on the island of Bermuda, which has a rum-related history and culture thanks in the main to the Gosling Brothers (see Rums of Distinction: Gosling’s Black Seal). My father didn’t really drink alcohol (having come unstuck on Scotch at a student party) aside from the odd sociable pint of bitter in the Student’s Union, or wine on special occasions. Joe Christopher introduced him to the wonders of rum, sales of which were in decline at the time with the market more or less dominated by brands such as Lamb’s Navy Rum, Bacardi and, God forbid, Malibu (once considered the height of 1970s chic, which says it all really). It was rare to find any other varieties of rum in pubs and bars across the United Kingdom, let alone exotic marques from the Caribbean. My father and Joe Christopher (who returned to Bermuda on completion of his PhD and eventually served as Minister for Education on the island) have remained firm friends for over fifty years and visited each other on numerous occasions. Whenever Joe comes to the UK he always presents my father with a bottle of rum, which is always of impeccable quality and taste: Appleton Estate’s, Mount Gay’s and, of course, Gosling’s Black Seal, to name but a few. Whenever my family visit the Christopher family on Bermuda, it is tradition to bring back rum. It is for this reason that I have firm and fond memories of rum, of watching my father and his friend sitting, sipping together, reminiscing and laughing, often with an illicit Cuban cigar each to accompany the spirit, and listening to their tales and discussions long into the night. It is also therefore why I associate rum with being a sophisticated drink, drunk by men (and women – Joe’s wife Marlene mixes a mean Dark ‘n’ Stormy) of stature and standing – a drink for grown-ups.

As mentioned previously, this book is an introduction to rum, the fascinating history behind the drink and a user-friendly guide to a marvellous spirit. Alongside the historical developments sit rum-related anecdotes and trivia, appraisals of some fine marques and brands, and some suggestions for cocktails. I have selected a baker’s dozen of ‘Rums of Distinction’ but confess the choices I have made have been partly arbitrary and often determined by the back story to the brand and my own personal preferences. Rum is a truly global drink currently produced in over fifty countries across the world, and although Caribbean rums sit at the top of the tree and set a high standard, there are some fantastic rums being distilled, aged and blended in many other regions. With this in mind, I have tried to give an even spread when making my recommendations and apologise for any omissions that may offend. Considerations of time and space have also had a part to play.

Some books dedicated to a type of drink offer advice on how best to appreciate it, presenting a mannered approach – mix with this, don’t mix with that, don’t mix it with anything at all. Some rums lend themselves to certain mixers better than others (although arguably this is a matter of personal preference) while some are just so complex on the palate that to drink them sloshing in ice, with fruit juice or flavoured fizzy pop is borderline insulting. I have at points made suggestions for how I personally have best enjoyed a particular rum, but by all means experiment, explore and discover your own preferences.

If I have one major bugbear about modern cocktail establishments, however, it is the extraordinary amount of ice that bartenders use. This also enrages my father who spent an amount of time on a recent holiday to Barbados loudly admonishing bartenders for drowning his rum in too much ice. We have a ‘one piece of ice’ rule per 40/50ml glass when sipping a premium aged blend. This sets up a flavour journey as the ice slowly releases water, which in turn unleashes the aromatics. Any more than that and the drink becomes too watery too soon, washing away any subtle nuances.

Overproof rums need to be carefully watered. In fact, as a rule of thumb, overproofs, unless combined in a long cocktail, should always be watered and treated with respect – not to is literally to play with fire. Some years ago, my friend and rum connoisseur, Kal Elhasjoui, gave me a bottle of the now discontinued Ron Bacardi 151 overproof as a birthday present. A disastrous and frankly bizarre evening ensued involving myself and Kal, Aubrey Smith, the illustrator of this book, and a minor 1980s indie rock star (whose name I shan’t mention), which reached its zenith when my kitchen caught fire and almost burned down the house. Bacardi discontinued production and sale of Bacardi 151 amidst numerous legal battles with burns victims, so handle with care. You have been warned.

As I am writing this on an uncommonly warm February afternoon, the sunlight is streaming through the window and warming my face. Rum is a sun-drenched drink, redolent of Caribbean beaches and bars and fun times. Let’s get started on our tour through the world of rum – a journey through histories and cultures which makes the story of rum so timeless. Enjoy!

Joseph PiercyBrighton 2019

The beginning of the history of rum is inextricably linked to the history of sugar, or more precisely the cultivation of sugar cane. Saccharum officinarum (in Latin) is the most commonly grown variety of sugar cane, a fast-growing species of grass cultivated in more than ninety countries, with a worldwide harvest of 1.69 billion tonnes. The base material, however, had far more humble beginnings and took several millennia to spread across the world and become the biggest agricultural crop on the planet.

Botanists believe that sugar cane originated on New Guinea, a large south-western Pacific island with a unique climate and ecosystem perfectly suited for the grass to flourish and thrive. The first settlers on New Guinea are thought to have arrived some 50,000 years ago and were itinerate traveller tribes who made their way through the South–east Asian peninsula. Archaeological evidence found on New Guinea suggests these early inhabitants (from whom the various modern-day Papuan tribes are descended) developed sophisticated agricultural systems in the form of irrigation mechanisms and are thought to have practised crop rotation many centuries before their western counterparts.

In sugar cane they found an abundant source of calories, first chewing on the stems of the grass before developing other methods and tools to extract the sweet and sticky cane juice. Over time techniques of preserving the juice developed, largely to counteract the tendency for the extract to spoil quickly in the tropical climate – boiling the juice down produced a rich, honey-like syrup and heating the juice caused it to form into crystals.

The Papuans transported their crop first to Indonesia and the Philippines and eventually to mainland Asia, with sugar arriving in India and China around 1000 BC. The ancient Hindu texts that comprise the Arthashastra (a classical treatise on politics and economics written between the second century BC and third century AD) refer to a type of sugar wine (gaudi) and a spirit liquor thought to be a simple distillate of molasses known as amlasidhu. India embraced sugar, cultivated the growing of sugar cane and put the crop to a variety of uses. The grass was used as fodder for working elephants, sugar was used in medicine and religious rituals, and India also produced the first recorded confectionery bars – blocks of crystallised sugar syrup known as khanda (from which the modern word ‘candy’ derives).

Alexander the Great’s (356–323 BC) celebrated general and explorer Nearchus (360–300 BC) visited India in 325 BC, sailing from the Indus river to the Persian Gulf and recording his expedition in his travel journal Indica. Nearchus was particularly taken with sugar cane, writing: ‘In India there is a reed which brings forth honey without the help of bees from which an intoxicating drink is made.’ However, despite Nearchus’ recommendation, it was another 300 years before sugar appeared on the doorstep of Europe when it was exported to Persia from India in AD 600.

The establishment of the Umayyad Caliphate (AD 661–750) oversaw a rapid expansion of the Islamic world. At its height, the Umayyad’s power spread from Pakistan to Portugal, conquering Egypt and most of North Africa along the way and constituting an empire of 4,300,000 square miles and 33 million people. The Umayyads were cultured and progressive both intellectually and socially. They established secular regulations that allowed Christians and Jews to practise their religions without sanction and side by side with Muslims. They set up democratically appointed advisory councils, minted their own currency and developed innovative technological advances in agriculture and water management. These latter developments led to the establishment of sugar-cane plantations in Egypt, Sicily, Malta, Cyprus and, by the eighth century, in southern Spain.

The achievements of the Umayyad were all the more remarkable given that the rapid expansion occurred within a matter of decades. However, not all factions of the Islamic world agreed with the Umayyad’s progressive and liberal ideas, and the dynasty was overthrown by a civil war in AD 750. Whilst the majority of the Umayyad family were rounded up and executed, a few members escaped the purges and set up an emirate on the Iberian Peninsula in Córdoba, Spain, bringing to Southern Europe techniques for growing and refining sugar for the first time.

The demise of the Umayyad Caliphate did not diminish Islamic influence in the Mediterranean. By the middle of the eighth century Spain had fallen to the Moors who held sway in Iberia for several centuries, and several islands such as Crete and Malta became Arabic outposts during the ninth century. The Arabs and the Moors experimented with sugar-cane cultivation, borrowing ideas gleaned from India and Persia. The first industrial sugar mills, although little more than manually operated mechanical presses, were introduced from India to gain maximum yield of cane juice. Sugar was much in demand by Arabic physicians who experimented with the spice for medicinal purposes. It was in the area of agricultural production that the Arabs and the Moors excelled, and wherever they ventured they took their innovations with them.

The cultivation of sugar cane was a labour-intensive process with growing seasons of up to twelve months. As a subtropical crop, sugar cane required extensive watering, which tested the ingenuity of the Arab agriculturalists. The growing of sugar cane had stretched from Egypt and North Africa, across the Mediterranean basin and along the southern coast of Spain as far as Valencia. The Arabs, mindful of sudden seasonal shifts of climate and frosts in the crops grown further north, began to alter the traditional planting seasons so that the cane could be harvested in summer.

The southern sugar plantations had the opposite climate issue, particularly in Egypt and North Africa where rainfall could often be scarce in the summer months. Islamic engineers adopted and revised Persian irrigation and water transportation technologies such as the noria (bucket wheel) and built qanats, ingenious underground aqueducts that rely upon the power of gravity to feed irrigation systems. The remains of the engineers’ labours (qanats were built by teams of skilled labourers known as muqannīs – a lucrative and respectable profession) can still be seen to this day with qanat systems surviving in North Africa and Spain, most notably in Granada.

By the time Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade (1096–1099) to reclaim the Holy Lands from Muslim rule, Islamic influence had begun to wane across Southern Europe. Up to this point, Northern Europe had had little exposure to sugar and it was considered a scarce but valuable spice. The crusades were integral in introducing sugar in greater quantities to England and Northern Europeans. Albert of Aachen, the Frankish historian of the First Crusade, mentions discovering sugar in his twelve-volume Historia Hierosolymitanae Expeditionis (History of the Expedition to Jerusalem) written between 1125 and 1150):

In the fields of the plains of Tripoli (Libya) can be found in abundance a honey reed which they call Zuchra; the people are accustomed to suck enthusiastically on these reeds, delighting themselves with their beneficial juices, and seem unable to sate themselves with this pleasure in spite of their sweetness. The plant is grown, presumably with great care and effort, by the inhabitants.

It was not long before the crusaders fell under the spell of sugar and alongside importing greater quantities they soon began supervising the cultivation and production of sugar in the conquered areas such as Jerusalem, Palestine and Jordan, where the sugar mill at Tawaheen es-Sukkar, near Jericho, was excavated in 2001. As more and more land was conquered or reclaimed from the Arabs and the Moors, more and more sugar plantations and production sites were garnered and requisitioned. This inevitably led to more bountiful supplies of sugar flooding into Northern Europe, although the fact that sugar was not as scarce as it had been previously did not radically affect the price. Sugar was seen as an artefact of wealth and status. In his book Rum Revolution (2017) Tristan Stephenson cites an annual audit from the Royal Household of Edward I from 1243 stating that the English Court purchased (and presumably consumed) 3,000kg of sugar at a cost of somewhere in the region of £100 per kg in contemporary money.

By the fifteenth century, Portugal had jumped on the sugar-cane bandwagon and began explorations along the African coast. Central to Portuguese expansion was the nobleman Infante D. Henrique of Portugal, Duke of Viseu (1394–1460), better known as Prince Henry the Navigator. Gathering together a fleet of sailors and map-makers, Henry’s primary intention was to find the sources of the West African gold trade established by the caravans that flowed into the Moorish city of Ceuta, a former staging outpost for the Umayyad Caliphate’s conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.