The British Edition: C April 2008!
Rum: A Social and Sociable History
Paperback Original
Ian Williams
Imprint: Nation Books
Extent: 340 pages
Format: Paperback, 210 x 140mm
ISBN 13: 978-15602-5891-9
Price: £9.99
Publication: 1st April 2008
Rum: A Social and Sociable History
Paperback Original
Ian Williams
340 pages
Format: Paperback, 210 x 140mm
ISBN 13: 978-15602-5891-9
Price: £9.99
Publication: 1st April 2008
Perseus Running Press, 69–70 Temple Chambers, 3–7 Temple Ave, London, EC4Y 0HP
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Here is my piece from the Guardian on Ybor City
Ian Williams
It’s better to taste a rum boasting ’smegmatic essence’ than drink a pre-mixed mojito with an invented history
Rum is the stuff of legend - and like most spirits, the legends are made up by imaginative public relations people. Some can’t be blamed on flacks however. For generations the Admiralty was scared to touch the Navy grog ration because of the legend of Nelson’s blood. Allegedly, the Admiral was shipped home pickled in a coffin filled with rum donated by tearful tars. It was also alleged that some less tearful and fearful tars drilled a hole and drained the embalming fluid.
The draining bit may well be true, but when I was researching my book on Rum, I checked the Garrison Library in Gibraltar where they recorded that his remains (minus an arm, eye and Lady Hamilton) were shipped from there in aguardiente - Spanish Brandy.
Maybe the tars were reluctant to give up their grog, or the Purser had difficulty accounting for it as embalming fluid, but captured Spanish war booty doubtless did the trick.
But if an easily falsifiable legend kept Britannia ruling the waves for a century, you can understand, if not forgive, some of the latest PR instant legends. Needless to say Bacardi, which invented the invention of the Cuba Libre, is among the best at it. Their latest, accompanying their invention of the bottled pre-mixed mojito, is an alleged early cocktail, El Draquo, named, not after Sir Frances Drake but his cousin Richard Drake, who they claim was mixing rum, sugar and mint half a century before the first recorded use of Rum in Barbados.
But then Bacardi has written out of history their donations to Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestre, not to mention the banner outside the headquarters offering “Gracias a Fidel” when the guerrillas rode into Havana, so it should not be surprising that they have written themselves into history as the makers of the mojito.
In fact, premixing a mojito, as with any other such cocktail, is a bad idea. Their distinctive taste depends on being freshly mixed. For the last two days I have been tasting other such people’s idea of a good idea as one of 10 judges at the Ybor City International Rum Festival. Here in sunny Florida, in two days we are sampling 150 rums.
The rums on offer range from decades-aged smooth and aromatic nectars to high-octane over-proofs that would easily power any tourist space rocket. The trick of judging is how to sample them without going into orbit yourself. There are a few that are just too good not to swallow, to get the finer points of mouth feel and finish, but even spitting out the samples is no protection as the potent spirit osmoses through the palate into blood and brain.
In fact, some of the more exotic offerings taxed the tasters’ vocabulary and were an open invitation to spit, indeed to gag. I offered one with “overtones of canine faeces,” for one nosing, “smegmatic essence” was another, until we hit the real lulu, which consensus dubbed “canine smegma”. It is a mystery why people would want to do things like that to a drink with such infinite possibilities as rum, “the global spirit with its warm beating heart in the Caribbean”.
Back in the Caribbean, the downside of rum and sugar was of course the slavery which accompanied sugar cultivation around the tropical belt. The celebrations of the bicentennial of the slave trade are appropriate for a rum festival but somewhat premature since of course the British maintained slavery for another quarter of a century and the United States for twice as long. It may be worth noting that while the British seemed to take ending the trade seriously, Washington often gave the impression that it was only kidding.
Now, the Caribbean moved from being the economic epicentre of empires to colonial backwaters. Having kidnapped their populations from Africa and bled them dry, the Europeans and Americans recently have repaid their debt in strange coin. WTO judgments secured by Bill Clinton on behalf of campaign-financing American banana companies removed EU preferences for Caribbean bananas, and EU tariffs in favour of beet sugar and US tariffs to protect high-priced corn syrup, all attacked basic local industries. And it leaves rum as the one common factor of the multilingual “continent of islands”.
The EU, for conscience money, has offered €70m to develop and market Caribbean rum in Europe. I hope that they do not waste it on flavoured concoctions like some of those we tasted, and concentrate on what they are getting better and better at: mature, smooth-aged premium rums that Guardian readers can drink, confident that it gives them a warm glow in their livers as well as a warm glow in their hearts for helping the Caribbean develop.
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