RUM ORIGINS

The precursors to rum date back to antiquity. Development of fermented drinks produced from sugarcane juice is believed to have first occurred either in ancient India or China, and spread from there. An example of such an early drink is brum. Produced by the Malay people, brum dates back thousands of years. Marco Polo also recorded a 14th-century account of a "very good wine of sugar" that was offered to him in what is modern-day Iran.

The first distillation of rum took place on the sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean in the 17th century. Plantation slaves first discovered that molasses, a by-product of the sugar refining process, can be fermented into alcohol.  Later, distillation of these alcoholic by-products concentrated the alcohol and removed impurities, producing the first true rums. Tradition suggests that rum first originated on the island of Barbados. Regardless of its initial source, early Caribbean rums were not known for high quality. A 1651 document from Barbados stated, "The chief fuddling they make in the island is Rumbullion, alias Kill-Divil, and this is made of sugar canes distilled, a hot, hellish, and terrible liquor"

The landscape of St. Croix in the USVI part of the Caribbean is dotted with the ruins of more than 300 sugar, cotton, and cattle plantations that dominated Crucian life between 1750 and 1950. A typical sugar plantation contained wind, animal, and
steam mills for grinding the sugar cane; a factory for processing crushed cane juice into sugar, rum, and molasses; shops for
craftsmen; cattle and mule pens; a workers’ village and a hospital; wells, water cisterns, and the planter’s Greathouse. The Cruzan Rum Distillery still processes world-famous Cruzan Rum according to a centuries-old recipe. Cruzan Rum was created by the Nelthropp family, which has been producing this first-class rum for more than five generations. Cruzan Rum has been produced on St. Croix ever since 1760, and is named after the island's inhabitants, known as Cruzians. ( pronounced crew-shuns)

HOW RUM IS MADE

Rum production begins with sugar cane. To this day, mature sugar cane is harvested by hand - grueling machete work - in many parts of the world.

The cut cane is promptly transported to the mill where it is crushed in a machine. The crushing extracts the sugar cane juice from the fibrous pulp. The crushed pulp waste is burned to generate power to crush the cane and sometimes to heat a distillation column. Depending where you are, the pulp waste can later be burned to generate power or to heat the still.
Now that you have the sugar cane juice, three different things can happen:
One, you can proceed directly to fermenting and distilling the sugar cane juice. This is what they do in the French West Indies (Martinique and Guadalupe). Understandably, this most direct approach yields rum that most closely preserves the vegetal characteristics of the cane.

Two, you can cook down and concentrate the sugar cane juice into a syrup. This syrup is itself a stable sweetening product, but the syrup can also be fermented and distilled. A few distilleries work with fermented syrup, because it gives them most of the characteristics of sugar cane juice that they are looking for, while enabling them to distill all year, not just at the harvest.
Three, you can process the juice into molasses and crystallized sugar. The crystallized sugar is sold as a sweetening product, and the molasses is sold to a distillery to be fermented and distilled into rum. Most rum is distilled from fermented molasses.
The fermentation process varies by distillery, and there's a great deal of variation involved. At one extreme is "natural fermentation," where yeasts inherent in the environment are relied upon to ferment the sugars in open vats. At the other extreme, fermentation is tightly controlled under laboratory-like conditions. For efficiency and predictability, most commercial rum fermentation processes fall between these two extremes; distilleries purchase and add the specific yeast cultures they want and take basic precautions appropriate to their environment. Time is also factor for fermentation; some ferments last only several hours while others can take up to two weeks.

The next step is distilling. The concept and basic mechanics of distillation are simple. A fermented liquid is heated in a sealed vessel to approximately 175 degrees Fahrenheit, evaporating the alcohols from the liquid. The alcohols are then re-condensed and collected, yielding the raw spirit. However, the reality of distillation is extremely complex. There is virtually no seemingly trivial detail that lacks the potential to affect the end product. Distillation is a science, and success depends on a great deal of expertise, but craftiness, habit, mother nature, superstition, and luck all play a role.

The designs of stills (the primary apparatus of distillation) also vary wildly. They are broadly organized into two groups: pot stills and continuous stills. Many stills combine elements of both pot and continuous stills. Nearly every still is a unique design (if only by virtue of how it is installed), and each still is hand-built. Every still has its innumerable quirks, and those quirks have their mysterious consequences. Some stills are profoundly simple devices, where others have multiple stages and features that enable different components of the alcohol to be separated. (Some distillers want to remove particular chemical components from their rum. Sometimes these chemicals that are undesirable for a rum are useful for other purposes. Large distilleries may collect byproducts to sell to other industries, such as the artificial flavor industry. Regardless, what comes out the end of the still is raw, hot rum that absolutely, positively couldn't have been made anywhere else.

Note: some liquor products are marketed - proud and loud - as pot-still products, as if that distinction alone were definitive. Another common marketing conceit is touting the number of distillations a spirit has undergone. Don't ascribe too much importance to these statements.

What happens next greatly varies depending on the product the distillery is aiming for. The raw spirit from the still will be between 70% and 95% alcohol by volume (although cachaca can distilled as low as 38% and no higher than 48%abv). Some rums, particularly for local Caribbean markets, are simply bottled and sold, fresh from the still. Most rum is aged, which radically alters the character of the spirit. Almost all rum is blended with other batches from the same distillery, often marrying rums of different ages. Some rum gets infused with herbs, fruits, and spices or deliberately blended with juices or extracts to produce a flavored rum product. Most rum is diluted with water - at some point prior to bottling - to 40%-50% alcohol by volume.
Although there aren't that many major steps, per se, to producing a given rum, the possible variables, beginning with the cane itself and ending with the post-distillation handling, are innumerable. These variables make rum the most varied of all the distilled spirits.

AGING RUM

In the seventeenth century, Robert Lignon described the clear spirit he found on the island of Barbados as ". . . a hot and vile liquor." A few years later, the captain of a Dutch ship returned from the West Indies and wrote in his log, "… the spirits are now smoother to the tongue and have acquired a golden color during the voyage." In the next century, George Washington ordered a hogshead of the finest aged Barbados rum for his inauguration party.

Unlike other distilled drinks such as vodka, whisky, gin, or even brandy, rum varies from a clear, colorless spirit through hues of gold and brown to black but there's a lot more to the color of the spirit in your glass than meets the eye. From their transparent infancy, rums change as a result of aging, the addition of caramel or coloring, filtration, and that mysterious quotient of magic present in every bottle.

Some Caribbean spirits are bottled directly from the still, but most distillers age a portion of their rum in oak barrels that were previously used to age whisky or bourbon in the U.S. or Canada. A small number of rum barrels come from Europe where they aged Scotch whisky, Cognac or, in a few cases, sherry. Before these barrels were filled with other spirits, the inside surface of the barrel staves were charred. Some rum distillers scrape the original char from the barrels and then fill them with rum to be aged. Others rechar the barrels, while a few distilleries simply refill the once-used barrels with their rum. In a handful of cases, new barrels are charred over a wood fire to avoid contamination from the hydrocarbon residue of a gas fire.

The chemistry of aging isn't fully understood, but it's universally accepted that aging mellows and improves the taste of freshly distilled spirits. While the rums are sleeping in oak barrels, natural tannins in the wood impart a golden tint that yields to a rich brown cast after several years. The alcohol in the rum acts as a solvent and attracts the tannins in the porous wood as well as esters which will give rum, or any other spirit, a slight vanilla flavor as well as a smoky oak tone depending on the age of the spirit.

Most rum producers age their rum at 70% to 80% alcohol. A few dilute their spirits to nearly bottle-strength, 40 to 45% alcohol by volume, before putting the barrels away for aging. A lower alcohol content during aging tends to leech slightly lighter esters and phenols from the wooden barrels while a higher alcohol content will attract heavier compounds and associated flavors. Most distilleries age their rum at a higher strength as this requires fewer barrels, but a higher alcohol content also contributes to higher evaporation losses, known as the angel's share.

Before the aged spirits are bottled, pure water is blended into the rum to reduce the alcohol content. Diluting the aged rum, however, also dilutes the color of the matured spirit. In most cases the rum is not as pleasing to the eye as the distiller would like, so caramel (burnt sugar) is added to adjust the color. Because not all barrels tint their contents to the same cast, caramel is sometimes sparingly added so that all rum bottled under a particular label will be the same color. In other instances, generous amounts of caramel are used to make the spirit black, as in the case of Myers's from Jamaica or Gosling's from Bermuda.
Just as some wines are fermented to be drunk within a few years (or even months) of bottling, some rums are distilled to be consumed as soon as they are bottled. In the case of French rhum agricole, the raw spirits are allowed to rest for a few months in large vats while the light gases formed during fermentation are released. On the other islands, unaged over-proof rums are bottled straight from the still for their very loyal local market. In both cases, these rums would lose much of their character, appeal, and consumer base if they were aged.

Distillers typically blend their aged rums from a variety of barrels containing rum of different ages and characters. Variations in the aged spirit are influenced not only by the barrel but also by where the barrel was stored in the warehouse. Samples from each barrel are tasted, and then the contents of those barrels are blended to meet the taste profile that the master blender wants to bottle. This final blending takes place over a few days while the intricate flavors of the different rums in the blend marry. In a few cases, the blender will recask the rum and then allow the blend to mature in another barrel in a process called "second maturation." The term "single barrel" is sometimes used to designate these special rums, but these are rarely bottled from a single barrel, as they are in the bourbon industry. In rare cases, sherry casks are used to mature the rum in the final phases of aging before they are bottled as the best offerings from the distillery.

Moreover, some distillers top off their barrels annually from rum of the same age, while a few have adopted various forms of the Solera process from the Spanish wine industry. In the Solera process, the barrels are topped off each year with rum that is one year younger than the barrel to be refilled. At the end of the Solera process the spirit is bottled.

Age statements are beginning to appear on rum bottles, something that has caused quite a stir in an industry where such details have historically been left up to the distiller or blender. If a spirit is imported to the U.S. and there is an age statement, the age must reflect the age of the youngest spirit in the bottle. Look for an actual age statement and not just a number. Some distillers use the word "premium" to describe their best aged spirits. Another common description is the word "anejo," which simply means "old" in Spanish. "Gran anejo" denotes something even older. Neither of these terms really tells you how long the rum has aged, but like the word premium, they are generally reserved for the better rums.

The French Caribbean distillers label their rhum "vieux" if it has aged at least three years. Other designations such as "tres vieux" denote much older rums and "hors d' age" applies to a blend of old rums. Vintage years are not uncommon, but it is important to determine when the rhum was actually put in the bottle and not just when it was distilled, as the aging process of any distilled spirit ceases upon bottling.

Age matters in a lot of things, but don't get hung up on the age of your rum. Much more important than age is maturity. If you're used to drinking scotch or whiskey, you probably think spirits have to be at least 12 to 15 years to be of premium quality. I wouldn't argue that many lesser spirits need to be aged a long time, but the truth of the matter is that many very good rums are aged only a fraction of that time. Because sugarcane spirits intrinsically don't contain as many offensive congeners as other spirits, they tend to mature faster. It's generally agreed that the warm Caribbean climate helps spirits aged there to gently reach maturity faster than spirits aged at higher latitudes. This isn't to say that rum isn't any good after spending 12 or 15 years sleeping in an oak barrel on a tropical island, but unlike spirits distilled from grain, rum doesn't need to be as old to be quite palatable. In fact, some of the oldest rums have passed their pinnacle of maturity and been over-powered with the smoky oak and burnt tobacco flavors associated with decades in a charred barrel.

RUM COLOR

Walk into almost any rum shop in the Caribbean and you will see a few patrons drinking what looks like water. This liquid is most commonly downed in one gulp, after which he or she promptly drinks from another glass or bottle that does actually contain water or soda. West Indian white over-proof rum, a.k.a. strong rum, is the most popular drink in much of the Caribbean. Ask any connoisseur of such spirits and he will tell you, "It has to be hot! If it doesn't take your breath, it isn't good." But not all clear spirits will leave you gasping for your next breath.

To satisfy those consumers who want a smoother taste in a clear spirit, distillers age the rum to improve the flavor and then carbon filter it to remove any trace of color it has acquired. Carbon filtering can also remove some of the congeners or impurities, yielding a drink with less hangover potential.

So you ask, "How do I know if the rum in my glass owes its color to aging, coloring, or carbon filtering?" The only sure bets are the strongest, clear rums. If it is bottled in the Eastern Caribbean on an English-speaking island at over 50% alcohol and is clear, it is most likely a strong, hot spirit. Raw, unaged, over-proof rum straight from the still!

In the French West Indies, prior to bottling, some distilleries allow the fresh spirit to rest a few weeks or months in large oak vats, a practice called staling. You may notice a slight tint to their rhum. While the spirit will mellow considerably, staling is not considered aging. The French island distilleries don't carbon filter any of their rhum, but because their clear rhum is distilled from sugar cane juice, it lacks the sharp bite of the molasses-based rums.

In contrast, almost all the white rums bottled at a more conservative 40 to 43% alcohol content have been aged and then filtered to remove the color acquired while the spirit was mellowing in the barrel. Some distilleries bottle a white and gold version of their most popular rums. While both of these rums are aged, the one bottled as clear rum has been carbon filtered.

If the rum in your glass is very dark, you can be pretty sure that caramel has been added. But if the color is not too dark and the label doesn't say how long the rum was aged, you can only guess. When you taste and smell the rum, look for the sweet caramel traces that are sometimes present. Also, try rubbing a little dark rum vigorously between your palms and then smell your hands. You might get a clue.

The above notwithstanding, it is the Caribbean that is the spiritual and commercial center of the rum world and where the bulk of your rum will be crafted. While people (particularly in Asia) have been tinkering with fermented sugar cane longer than they've had written language, what we know today as rum evolved in the sugar-producing industry of the colonial Caribbean world. There is considerable dissention (the dissention having become a tradition in itself) and a smidge of acrimony about where, exactly, rum was "invented." There can't be much doubt that sugar cane spirits were being made where sugar was being grown before it was brought to the Caribbean. Rum was certainly made in South America by Europeans before sugar became the Caribbean cash crop, and the cat was clearly out of the bag by 1640, after which rum swiftly became ubiquitous.

The French West Indies (Martinique, Guadalupe) and some of the French Pacific Islands make rhum agricole (rum distilled from fermented sugar cane juice). Most everyone else makes their rum from molasses. Consequently, the former rhums tend to be more vegetal, and the latter rums more spicy. Traditional local styles have emerged that break down approximately as per the chart to the left.

HOW TO UNDERSTAND RUM LABELS

What is the proof? Watch out for overproof rums, they can be easily mistaken for lower proof spirits. Spiced rums are typically 35% alcohol.

Is there any age statement? If it says "Aged x years?," that would be the form of an age statement sanctioned by the Treasury Tax Bureau. If it simply throws around a number, it may not mean anything at all. Don't confuse age statements with brand names (e.g., Bacardi 8 or Matuselem 15 Solera Blender.) Some countries of origin have laws about aging, some don't. Puerto Rican rum must be aged at least one year, in Venezuela - two years. In other countries rum aging is not controlled by law or simply ignored. Rhum vieux means aged at least three years in small barrels in the French islands.

Things to look for: "Virgin Island rum" means from St. Croix. "Cuban style" tells you nothing. "Estate bottled" or "Estate rums" are usually just marketing terms employed by large corporations but carrying little meaning. "Plantation" has similar connotations, as does traditional, except in the French islands where "traditionnel" means made from molasses.

Who is the importer? This can be important; some importers specialize in cheap well products, others in quality.

Who is the distiller? Does the label tell you who the distiller is? If it doesn't, they probably don't want you to know.

Where was it bottled? Was it bottled at the distillery of origin? If it's not bottled at the source, lower your expectations. Is it bottled by or for? "Bottled for" indicates contract bottling.

Lastly, take a look at the bottom of the bottle. There may be a clue or an indication of the country of origin. Is there any embossed lettering such as "Jamaica Liquor Bottle." While this is simply an indicator, I wouldn't expect a bottle of rum from the Dominican Republic with a story about Cuban refugees on the label to be bottled in a bottle with "Jamaica" embossed in the bottom.