This post is dedicated to my favorite spirit category of all time, rum.

This is a good introduction as to this spirit category, what is truly a beautifully dark history. From pirates and slave trade to the tiki craze of the past decade, rum has been as brilliant as it is resilient in terms of its popularity and claim to fame.

SUGAR CANE

To understand rum, we must first understand sugar cane.

Rum can ONLY be called rum if made with sugar cane, no exceptions. Now I know this isn’t strictly enforced internationally quite yet, and I may sound like a mad man, but it is something that I truly believe is the reality we must live in and respect to bring rum to its greatness. As it deserves to be, in the higher echelons of spirits categories.

Sugar cane is a grass, much similar to the kin of bamboo. It can grow up to 20 feet tall! Sugarcane is grown and harvested in over 90 countries.

The history of sugar, in itself is quite foggy. It is said that traces of sugarcane plants and harvest can be traced as far back as 15,000 years back in Indonesia and Malaysia! Around that same time, it was also said that in Spain, there were accounts of honey being collected from beehives.

Alexander the Great, around 300 B.C., (according to legend) was with his troops conducting a military excursion to India when he found people harvesting and enjoying the fresh sugar cane juice. He had called it “honey without the need of bees”. This was an interesting time, as the nations in Persia and Greece were finding new ways to grow their economies. The trade began with India, and it was planted around all around the Mediterranean: Egypt, and other Islamic States around the middle east.

By around the 18th century, sugar had dominated Europe and its peoples’ palates. There was a craze for sugar and nations like Spain and Great Britain needed to find a place to further thrive and keep up with the demand for this sugar being processed from sugarcane. Where did they turn? The Caribbean and the Americas (South and Central).

The only thing that was really missing to create a huge, and powerful market of sugarcane in these regions is the labor. And where could the Spanish and British possibly get enough “affordable” labor to work their cane fields on the blistering hot days of the Caribbean and Central America?

SLAVE TRADE

The slaves began to flood into the Caribbean and Central/South America with astounding pace. The sugarcane fields were planted and organized to produce. The Spanish and British realized that their people, and other indentured servants were not able to withstand the grueling work that was needed to cut down the cane to be processed. Besides, labor was pretty expensive and there were not a lot of people able to withstand the brutal weather conditions of tropical Caribbean and Central/South America.

Their solution? Slaves.

There were boats and boats coming into the islands of Barbados, Jamaica, Dominican Republic (then called “Hispaniola”), Trinidad, Cuba, St. Thomas, and more. Many of these slaves were dead by the time boats arrived. This was because of intense fatigue and lack of clean transport conditions.

It is safe to say, that without rum, the slaves might not have been on this side of the world (North and South America). The same is true vice versa, as the slaves made rum what it is today.

This, of course, is one of the saddest parts of the rum culture. Rum has had a very bleak and deadly history.

RUM IS VERY MUCH ALIVE

That is just a touch of what rum culture is, and its history. There is much more to cover, but this was just skimming the surface of its key defining points. Later on, we will discuss the other prevalent points of pirates, the Revolutionary War, and rum’s globalization.

There are people out there that say rum has been heavily relegated to a lower-quality spirit over the last few decades; Although this may be true at the present time in the USA, there is still much to be said about rum, and how it is very much a part of global drink culture.

 

 

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