(Un)Happy Black Tot Day

 Ian Williams, Rumpundit, commiserates Black Tot Day
Saturday  31 July is the 40^th Anniversary of Black Tot Day when the Royal Navy abandoned the daily grog ration for its sailors. Do hoist  a dark rum to mark the occasion. The British decision to abandon a centuries-old tradition of high octane fighting spirit and replace it with high megaton Trident submarines has proven to be a financial and naval disaster. When it waived the rum rules, Britannia abandoned all pretension of ruling the waves!

The first reference to Navy rum was by Samuel Pepys, who although best known for confiding his sex life to his diary, was the civil servant in charge of the Navy. He authorized the Navy in the Caribbean to issue rations of rum to the sailors based in Jamaica.

Soon, however, rum was a major constituent of the Navy’s fuel supply. Admiral Vernon, after whom George Washington’s home Mount Vernon was named, decided that it was better for the health and safety of his ships and crew to mix the rum with water before issuing it, and to issue the half pint in two servings. He was known as  “Old Grog” because he wore a waterproof cloak made of “grogram,” a mixed fabric that served before oil-skins and that gave the name to the mixture.

His orders were that the grog was to be mixed in a “scuttled butt.” The idea that scuttlebutt was sailor’s chat around the water cask is a post-Prohibitionist invention. It was the rum barrel that loosened the tongues of the eagerly waiting tars.

Navy regulations insisted that once the grog had been mixed, it had to be served promptly, otherwise it would thrown overboard, because it went “flat.” I’ve experimented, and it’s true! While the rum is in a colloidal suspension in the water the droplets of rum hit the tastebuds and taste as strong as normal spirits but once they are dissolved it tastes like watered rum!

The US Navy initially adopted British grog rations but then under influence from the growing whiskey industry, swapped over to what was presented as a more patriotic spirit after 1806. During the Civil War, the US Navy abolished the ration completely, perhaps taking advantage of the connection between abolitionism and prohibitionism, both of them gaining the upper hand with the departure of Confederate personnel. However it was only the ratings who were deprived.  It was not until 1913 that officers were coerced into official abstinence.

In contrast, the British Admiralty was frankly scared of the mutinous consequences  of depriving ratings of their historical entitlement, and it kept issuing Royal Navy rum, until 1970, when they overcame public nostalgia by breathalyzing the pilot of  a nuclear submarine after he had drunk his ration.

In fact, for centuries, the Royal Navy had maintained naval supremacy despite often inferior technology compared with its Spanish and French rivals, because its crews, pressganged or volunteers, outfought their enemies. And looking at it analytically, the major observable difference was the rum ration, which is why wanabee naval powers like Czarist Russia and Japan also served up rum.

British captains and admirals still have the discretion to order “Splice the mainbrace!” for special occasions, however, and naval lore is still steeped in rum, which in Britain was known as “Nelson’s blood,” since allegedly the devoted tars donated their rations to bring the Admiral’s body back from Trafalgar to London.

I checked it out in the Gibraltar library in the contemporary newspapers, and sadly,  the Admiral's body was carried back to London pickled in Spanish Brandy, aguardiente. Perhaps the tars did not want to waste the good stuff... but I have not been able to prove or disprove the story that the coffin was drained by the time it arrived in Britain. The tars might have preferred rum – but any spirit in a drought was long-standing tradition.


This week Sukhinder Singh of Speciality Drinks in London launched Black Tot – an exclusive bottling of Navy Rum over 40 years old – a find for rum-drinkers equivalent to discovering Tutankhamen’s pickled stiff, except the archaeologists never brought the young pharoah back to life, while the old rum has indeed been revived. It  was in sealed ceramic flagons allowing its unique biochemistry to play out over almost half a century.

In the Admiralty, the most coveted job was to sit on the committee that each year assessed what proportions of Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara rums was consistent to maintain the formula, and Speciality's experts have topped up the work of all of those departed palates to ensure that the bottles live up to expectations.

If you can’t get some, then “up spirits” on Saturday with any dark rum and shed a tear for bygone glory!

Radio Rum

At 9 pm Monday 6th October, Catskill Review of Books is on the Radio again with Ian Williams interviewing Tom Gjelten about his latest book on Bacardi and Cuba.
It will be live and archived at http://www.wjffradio.org.

Bacardi & Castro

Ian Williams for World Policy Institute

Bacardi’s Muddled Fight for “Cuba Libre”

September 19th, 2008

Ian Williams
The Bacardi family elicits strong feelings across the world. Its propensity for mythmaking, its aggressive commercial competitiveness, its long history of lobbying in Washington, its family obsession with Cuba, and its understandable grudge against Fidel Castro’s regime are all guaranteed to produce friction.

Tom Gjelten has had unprecedented cooperation from both the family and from Cuban officials in writing his book, Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: the Biography of a Cause (Viking , 2008). Neither Castro supporters nor the Bacardi family have exactly trumpeted the financial, political, and logistical backing given by the family to Castro and the rebels. Both sides obviously regret the episode. Ironically, however, now that Raul Castro has succeeded his older brother, both sides are linked to the family business, since Raul married the daughter of a Bacardi executive family in a lavish Bacardi-hosted ceremony attended by Fidel, the original big brother.


Gjelten leaves nothing unrecorded in his objective, warts and all, history of an unusual company, illustrating Cuban history without the canonizations by leftist apologists for Fidel and the demonizations by conservative Cuban exiles and their friends.

He correctly questions some of the company’s mythmaking by copywriters, for example the “Cuba Libre” (rum and Coke), whose Bacardi origins were later dubiously certified by the Bacardi sales manager in New York. However, he is a little too accepting of the family tale, and indeed the Cuban view, of its innovation in rum-making. In fact, for centuries, the Spanish colonies were forbidden from making rum—not, as Gjelten suggests, to protect public morals, but to protect the brandy industry back home.

What Bacardi did was replicate the processes long used by the Jamaicans and other Anglo-Caribbeans, who had long before discovered how important aging in oak barrels was to make the product smooth and palatable. Bacardi made a lighter version of rum, filtered to take out much of the color and, in the opinion of many rum connoisseurs, much of the taste as well. But as part of its innovative marketing, the family was strong on quality control, ensuring that the brand, even if bland, was consistent.

In fact, the real innovation of the Bacardi family was its sedulous protection and cultivation of the brand name and trademarks. It was in many other ways a corporate innovator, despite being, as Gjelten says, “a closed, dynastic enterprise in an interconnected global economy.”

There is some irony in that the company has defied the capitalist consensus and does not trade on the stock markets that epitomize the modern economic age. It is still family owned, with shares being divided between the descendants of its founders and now led by a sixth-generation family member defying the old saw of family business, from muck to brass—and back again in three generations.

It became an early multinational, with plants in Puerto Rico and Mexico and its own distribution company in the United States. It was one of the first offshore corporations, taking its headquarters first to the Bahamas and then to Bermuda. (That was to avert confiscation by Fulgencia Batista, with whom the company had a long and hostile relationship, but it proved prescient when Castro repaid their support with confiscation in 1960.)

Indeed, even its off-shoring was free of the stigma of tax evasion. Bacardi was an exemplary corporate citizen: when Batista fled with the contents of the Treasury, Juan Pepin Bosch, who then headed the company, immediately took a check for $450,000 to the new revolutionary officials, in advance payment of the years’ estimated taxes.

Bacardi was also a model employer, and Gjelten’s narrative reminds us of something that Cuban dissidents have stressed in conversation. Cuba had an existing social-democratic, welfare-state tradition which included strong labor protections and which made it one of the most literate societies in the Spanish-speaking Americas.

The company had supported such reformism, to the extent that even its communist-led union had differentiated it from the general run of capitalists. It had a distinguished patriotic record, with members supporting the war against the Spanish, and attempting to build indigenous industry.

It is to the credit of the family, and its head Juan Pepin Bosch, who initially accompanied Castro on a delegation to the United States, that he was repelled by the firing squads that the rebels were so fond of. The progressive 1940 constitution had banned the death penalty. But Castro’s disavowal of the formality of elections, and his penchant for executions and imprisonment of former comrades like Huber Matos, did indeed give cause for opposition.

It was Bosch who a year later thwarted the effect of Castro’s confiscations by putting the crucial trademark certifications in the mail to New York. He realized that the value of the brand far exceeded the physical plant and the huge stockpile of rum left behind in Cuba, and astutely suspected that the crude Marxism of the rebels would not see the value in a brand.

In exile, the family picked up on old contacts. They had already started lobbying in the United States way back in 1901. They had secured a tariff preference for Cuban rums and lobbied and litigated their way past Puerto Rican opposition to build their biggest distillery in the territory, which secured tariff-free entry to the U.S. market. As an added bonus, under federal law, excise duties on Puerto Rican rum were returned to the commonwealth government, which used them to finance a big sales promotion for the “Rums of Puerto Rico.” The biggest, of course, being Bacardi.

That is one of the reasons why, for many years, Bacardi obscured its product’s Cuban origins. Yet the family still nurtured the cause. As Gjelten says: “Born of a love for Cuba and pride in their own role in its history, their patriotism was narrowed and made more spiteful as a consequence of exile.” Indeed, Pepin Bosch at one point bought a surplus bomber, intending to take out a Cuban power station. Later, as Gjelten recounts, the challenge of Pernod Ricard marketing Havana Club brought together two strands of the family lore—their ruthless competitiveness, and their desire for revenge on Castro.
Other Caribbean rum producers, including those in Puerto Rico, nurtured unkind thoughts about the company because Bacardi’s size and aggressiveness had kept them out of the U.S. market, but a combination of Havana Club’s exponential success and the familial grudge brought about an obsessive and expensive campaign—and a sudden revival of emphasis on the Bacardi brand’s Cuban origins.

The Cuban family that had owned the Havana Club brand name had not renewed their registration, which had lapsed, and the Cuban government re-registered it legally. Bacardi bought the family’s claims and litigated in the United States. It compensated for the weakness of its claim by buying political influence in Washington—just the sort of behavior they had complained about in Cuba under Batista—where legislators smuggled in clauses that retrospectively changed the law.

Jose Marti, the hero they shared with Castro, had written that the U.S. House of Representatives “is chosen by such corrupt methods that every election is falsified by the use of vast sums of money.” By then, Bacardi was pumping millions of dollars into the same sewer.

In the end, they succeeded in provoking a trade war with Europe at the World Trade Organization, to no commercial advantage whatsoever and provoking opposition from other major companies who did not want to see international trademark law impaled in the course of Bacardi’s Quixotic obsessions. In their process, the family’s association with some of the most reactionary Cuban exiles, and their support for maintaining the punitive embargo, compromised their historically progressive reputation.

Even though he wisely eschews any prophesy, Gjelten hints that even with a possible change of government in Cuba, the Bacardi family’s recent exercise of its grudges has rendered dubious any triumphant corporate return to a country where for a century nationalist opposition to the United States has substituted for ideology.

Ian Williams is the author of Rum: A Social & Sociable History (Nation Books, 2005).

British Edition of Rum Out Today! and Guardian on Canine Faeces/rum

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

w Tel: 020 7353 7771 w Fax: 020 7353 7786

Distribution: Grantham Book Services

Isaac Newton Way, Alma Park Industrial Estate, Grantham, Lincs, NG31 8EN w Tel +44 (0)1476 541080

w UK Fax: +44 (0)1476 541061 w Email: orders@gbs.tbs-ltd.co.uk

w Export Fax: + 44 (0)1476 541068 w Export Email: export@gbs.tbs-ltd.co.uk

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.

Alaska and the UN!

Here's my talk to the Alaska World Affairs Council in Anchorage, on the UN, with a sideline on Rum, of course!
AWAC Presents: Ian Williams
By Kristin Spack
... Williams explains why the UN is “the worst possible system in the world… except for all of the alternatives.” Ian Williams: Author, Writer, Speaker; Ian Williams: More columns than Parthenon; Ian Williams Blog: Deadline Pundit ...
KSKA Public Radio - http://kska.org/

Rum and Pirates at Old Baldy, NC

For those bored with politics, I went to North Carolina at the weekend to speak about the history of rum. The occasion was fund raiser for one of the US's oldest lighthouses, Old Baldy, which used to warn shipping away from the treacherous shoals of Cape Fear.

The organizers had tied the event in with Pirates, and a properly villainous bunch of them milled round the site, firing off black powder muskets. It was a highly appropriate venue all around. Firstly, the coast was indeed the haunt of real pirates, like Blackbeard, and the island was site of British fortresses and Revolutionary attacks during the War of 1776, during which readers of Rum: A Social and Sociable History will remember, rum was one of the causes and one of the major weapons of war.

It was also the site of a Confederate fortress, and USN blockade ships shipwrecks. The Union Navy had gone prohibitionist and abolitionist at that point, stopping the grog rations for the ratings.

North Carolina is still hungover from Prohibition. In a country where George W. Bush and Rudolf Giuliani can sneer about socialized medicine, North Carolina has socialized state owned liquor distribution. It has a limited list, and any North Carolinian of more refined tastes can indeed special order of the better stuff – but only by the case, which seems a little counterintuitive if the purpose of this exercise is to cut back drinking.

The dinner and rum tasting event in the evening at the Bald Head Island Club was highly successful and if they were at all like me, all the participants felt a lot a better than they deserved the follow morning.

The organizers and the Alcohol Board of Control of North Carolina pulled together these brands, which were consumed in statistically significant samples, with the remnants from the cases being auctioned off to enthusiastic bidders after enthusiastic toasters raised their tots to "The Global Spirit with its warm beating heart in the Caribbean," and "Every tot downed helps Third World Development."

Appleton Estate 21 yr, Jamaica
Rhum Barbancourt 15 yr Estate Reserve, Haiti
Flor De Cana Centenario 12 yr, Nicaragua
Pyrat XO Reserve, Anguilla
1 Barrel Rum, Belize
Angostura 1919, Trinidad & Tobago
Pusser's British Navy Rum, Tortola (and Trinidad).

Distilled essence of snobbishness

Distilled essence of snobbishness - full text

Never mind what it's made from: premium brand vodka is all about image.
Ian Williams
Guardian Comment is Free
The EU shouldn't be worrying about what vodka is made from, but about what the super-premium brands make out if it.

Anyone who has been in a bar late at night watching the staff refill the expensive designer brand vodka bottles with the cheap cooking vodka knows that the European Union was engaged in one of its more pointless debates last week. It was arguing about what distillers could use to make vodka.

There is an unimpeachable source: Dmitri Mendeleyev, the Russian scientist who invented the periodic table that adorned all our school chemistry labs. He defined it as 60% water, and 40% pure ethanol, three times distilled.

If it is properly distilled, vodka is a flavourless, odourless, colourless spirit. Indeed, most brands filter it through charcoal, just in case any residual taste is left in. It is just possible, although highly unlikely, as numerous blind tastings have demonstrated, that discriminating drinkers of neat vodka could occasionally tell what they were made with. However, it is inconceivable that anyone who has added tonic water or other cocktail mixers to vodka would be able to identify either the brand or whatever was fermented to fill the still.

As a militant champagne socialist I strongly believe that nothing's too good for the workers and will knock back gallons of the stuff - when someone else is paying.

But when not sniftering aged rums to promote my book, my usual tipple is vodka and tonic and I always insist on the cheapest brand, the Nockoff or whatever - the type of stuff my local liquor store sells in plastic half-gallon bottles. That's what I would almost certainly get anyway in half the bars, no matter what expensive brand I asked for, and it cuts out the late night decanting and reduces already-pricey bar bills by half.

In Puerto Rico I have had vodka that proudly proclaims that it was made from pure sugar cane. In fact, under EU and US regulations, that makes it rum, but it was indeed indistinguishable from the vodkas made with rye, wheat, potatoes, wood pulp, milk products, or sugar beets as the root feedstock for the still.

Of course I appreciate that in Eastern Europe vodka has developed an almost sacramental aura that is difficult to dispel. Red Army men in nuclear tests and at Chernobyl were given vodka to stave off the effects of the radiation. But they never showed any particular concern for where the stuff came from.

Super-premium vodkas are distilled essence of snobbishness. It is what is on the bottle, not what is in it that sells it. Sydney Frank, the late inventor of Grey Goose demonstrated that. He realised that Absolut was making an additional $10 a bottle simply because of its brand. So he had Grey Goose distilled in France, put it in an even fancier bottle and charged twice as much as Absolut. Vodka is bottled and sold hot from the still, with none of the aging and maturation of rums, brandies or whiskies.

Grey Goose, like Absolut before it, was a classic case of the emperor's new clothes. People are prepared to pay a huge premium for qualities that exist only in their minds. But gullibility has always been a major revenue source for astute brand builders. In fact, Frank sold the Grey Goose brand to Bacardi for over $2bn, which was highly appropriate, since it is a company that has done its best to make its rum as tasteless as vodka.

But there is no way to legislate against stupidity and cupidity. By all means list the ingredients in microdot form on the label, but in the end the people who suffer are not those who buy their supermarket vodka made out of industrial alcohol but those pay through the nose for a designer label. And I am all in favour of a tax on stupidity. If people want to be goosed, take their money, and leave me with the anonymous firewater and water.

High Spirits in the Guardian

High Spirits in the Guardian.. why vodka is distilled essence of snobbishness

Rum of course is for more refined palates...

The Full Ration of Rum, Sun, Sand - or Coke (no cola)

Full text of the Comment is Free
Tourism or cocaine?
Caribbean economies depend on tourism. So why aren't the nations to the north encouraging an honest way to make a buck?

Ian Williams

May 19, 2007 9:00 AM
Lots of people think that it is humiliating for a country to be dependent on tourism. Things could be worse: about the only country in the Caribbean that doesn't rely on visitors dropping in is Haiti, which is hardly a model of sturdy self-reliance to emulate. Even Cuba has escaped from Marxist orthodoxy enough to accept that its economy depends on planeloads of palefaces landing to be become lobster-red before their return.

Some of the Caribbean islands are dependent on tourism for 80% of their GDP and, if anything, the trend is upwards as World Trade Organisation decisions force them out of sugar and bananas and leave them with a choice between building a tourist industry or being relay stations for cocaine shipments between Columbia, the US and Europe.

Indeed in 1999, after Bill Clinton requited a $500,000 donation from Chiquita with a WTO case that ended preferential access to Europe for Caribbean bananas, some local leaders were overheard questioning whether they could afford to continue cooperating with the US in the "War on Drugs". Perhaps wisely, most of them opted for big planes full of tourists rather than small planes full of coke.

Even now, however, Washington is not helping. Until last year, most US visitors to the islands, like most Americans, did not have passports. They were allowed to visit the Caribbean, Canada and Mexico and return with a driver's license or a birth certificate. As part of the paranoia of the "war on terror", they now need to have a valid passport.

But there is money in the islands. I've just been to the Caribbean Hotels Association Tourism Investment Conference in Curacao, where there were record numbers of financiers with chequebooks loaded looking for viable projects - hotels, villas and condominiums - to cater to the baby-boomer demand for what Captain Jack Sparrow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Jack_Sparrow celebrated on his desert island as "Sun, Sand, Rum! It's the Caribbean!"

Local opponents of tourism see it as demeaning: reducing locals to servings meals and cleaning rooms. It is an understandable prejudice in island societies that were built on slavery, but it is not borne out by the facts. In fact, the industry generates investment and skills in IT, telecommunications, finance, construction and can even put life into local industries like furniture making. And tourists may be obnoxious - but less so than grinding poverty, or proximity to a bauxite mine.

Not only do tourists take far more cash to developing countries than official overseas aid they do it in a much more "virtuous" way. Instead of recycling the cash back through experts and tied purchases, or at best handing it over to governments of occasionally dubious probity for prestige projects, they put the cash directly into the hands of locals where it immediately goes to work in the local economy.

This is not always true. I remember the sense of shock in Cuba when I saw sachets of sugar marked "Made In Canada" in an island that had massive and un-sellable stocks of the stuff. However, the best resort and hotel owners have been working to develop local suppliers and to develop local skills.

There is another dilemma. Small islands smack in the middle of the hurricane belt are the most vulnerable to global warming and sea level rise. Those beaches are not for sunning when the winds blow and the waves crash. But the only effective way to get their hands on all those tourists' euros and dollars is to fly them in, so local officials are peeved at current European calls to tax and curtail air traffic.

From a Caribbean point of view, it looks triply, indeed quadruply, ungrateful. First Americans and Europeans kidnapped their ancestors and brought them to grow sugar, then we lost interest in them, and then put up huge barriers against the very products that they were enslaved to grow. Now we try to curtail air links to make up for all greenhouse gas damage caused by our historical industrialisation process that was largely capitalised by the fruits of their servitude.

I once did a rough calculation - the modern economy jumbo passenger probably does have less space than a slave on a slave ship - but it really isn't the same, and few tourists would care to make the Middle Passage for their dream holiday in the sun.

All those environmentalists who want to cut back air traffic to the Caribbean are compounding historical injustice to the locals with meanness to their own compatriots. There is a very good reason why people don't go for weeks in British seaside resorts anymore. It will take a hell of a lot of global warming before they can compete with the beaches, the warm blue waters, the music, the rum and the sun of the Caribbean.

Rum, Sun, Sand - or Coke (no cola)

Latest on Guardian Comment is Free about tourism (and of course rum) as a development tool
check out

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ian_williams/2007/05/the_modern_economy_jumbo_passe.html

High Spirits, Rum and Development

And now for something slightly different...
Latest Comment is Free Why I love rum
followed by the results of the competition, for aficionados

How else can you savour taste, enjoy history and aid the developing world? With rum, of course. A report from the Ybor City spirits festival.
Ian Williams

March 26, 2007 7:30 PM | Printable version

It's a tough job, but someone has to do it. Since my tome on Rum hit the stands, my book tours have been, shall we say, more high-spirited than most. Of course, after the audience has sampled some of the subject matter, they would applaud enthusiastically if I gave them a sermon in Sanskrit.

I've spent the last few days in Ybor City, an old Cuban enclave of Tampa, Florida, for the International Cane Spirits Festival, where, in addition to spreading enlightenment about the history of rum, I was a judge. Tasting over 80 rums in two days is no joke. Each sample is judged for appearance, nose, flavour and mouth feel. It requires no effort to spit out some of the really bad rums - certainly with some of the unaged cachacas you can see why it did not demand too much genius for the Brazilians to come up with putting the stuff in their fuel tanks.

On the other hand, it was a great temptation with some of the aged rums to swallow instead of spitting. But that path would end in disaster and the gutter. In the evenings, importers ply us judges with statistically significant samples of their distilled products, as the spring-breakers around us play beer pong - a game I had never seen before, but which I suspect is on a par with Bud in its sophistication.

Rum aficionados are gregarious and committed to the cause: in the US, the cause is mostly persuading people that there is more to rum than Bacardi - much more. In fact no other spirit has such a great history, or such an infinite variety, with a rum for every palate. Our gold medalists came from Tortuga to Tennessee, Martinique, Venezuala and Guatemala, Bermuda, Barbados and - just a little hike from the Caribbean - Nepal.

Rum was first recorded in Barbados, where, one suspects, some exiled Celtic prisoner from the British Civil War noted that the molasses left over from sugar making could be fermented and distilled. The distillation was necessary, because the molasses carried on fermenting in the belly of anyone desperate enough to try it.

It was the British in the West Indies who also discovered that distilling it a second time and leaving it to age worked wonders of alchemy on what was, with some justice, originally called "killdevil".

And the rest, as they say, is history. Samuel Pepys took time off his diary writing to begin issuing Naval rum to the fleet in Jamaica. (Any of you opposed to naval nukes may do so with redoubled fervour knowing that the Admiralty abolished the Grog ration with a public relations ploy: emphasizing the dangers of having sailors operating nuclear submarines under the influence.)

The American Revolution was not about tea. The Boston tea party was a bunch of smugglers throwing duty free tea overboard because it devalued the stuff they had already smuggled in. But mostly they smuggled molasses to make rum, to trade with the Indians for furs and the Africans for slaves.

Rum is now a global spirit, with the second and third biggest brands being Philippine Tanduay and Indian Old Monk. But its heart is in the Caribbean and around the Spanish Main, in keeping with its colourful and bloody history. That was where most of our 80-plus samples came from, ranging from the oaky cognac-like rhums agricoles of Martinique to the rich molasses based traditional rums of the Anglo-Caribbean.

The newcomers are the aged cachacas of Brazil - which show that even car fuel can develop subtlety if treated properly, and are perfect for Guardian readers' political sensibilities: an influx of smooth and well-matured Venezuelan rums such as Macuro -and Santa Teresa and Diplomatico, whose distributors resisted my attempt to rename it Undiplomatico in honour of Chavez. I am not sure that their makers are necessarily Chavezistas, but a tot for solidarity is no bad thing, whatever you think of the president.

In fact, most rums - apart from the big B which usually strives to keep its rivals, and not only the Cuban ones, off the market - come from developing countries that can't sell their sugar on European or the US markets because of tariffs and subsidies for home grown substitutes. High value-added aged rums make much better economic sense for them. Get out there, raise a tot and drink a toast to third-world development!

COMPETITION RESULTS 2007

CACHACA, UNAGED

BEST OF CATEGORY AGUA LUCA

GOLD,Agua Luca,Leblon


SILVER

Beleza Pura, Fazenda Mae De Ouro

BRONZE, Cabana, Cuca Fresca

CACHACA, AGED

BEST OF CATEGORY YPIOCA 160

GOLD, Fazenda Mae De Ouro Single Barrel 5 Year Old, GRM ‘Small Batch’ 2 Year Old,Ypioca 160

SILVER, Cuca Fresca Gold, Rochinha ‘Single Barrel’ 12 Year Old,Ypioca Ouro


BRONZE.Armazem Vieira ‘Onix’ Solera 16 Year Old, Ypioca Prata





RHUM AGRICOLE, UNAGED

BEST OF CATEGORY CLEMENT PREMIER CANNE

GOLD Clement Premiere Canne

SILVER, J.M. Rhum White



RHUM AGRICOLE, AGED

BEST OF CATEGORY TIE J.M. VSOP J.M. 1997

GOLD J.M. Rhum Vieux X.O. J.M. Gold, J.M. VSOP, J.M. 1997

SILVER, Clement Cuvee Homere, Clement V.S.O.P., Depaz Blue Amber Rhum


WHITE RUM

BEST OF CATEGORY PRICHARD’S CRYSTAL

GOLD, Mount Gay Special Reserve, Prichard’s Crystal



SILVER, Bacardi Ruby Rey Reserve, Ron Botran White, Santa Teresa Blanco



BRONZE, Havana Club (Bacardi version USA only) New Grove Oak Plantation, Mainstay Cane


DARK RUM

BEST OF CATEGORY ONE BARREL RUM

GOLD, Khukri XXX, One Barrel,Vizcaya VXOP Cask 21

SILVER, Pirate’s Choice Molasses Reef

BRONZE, Jack Tar Superior Dark Rum, Rogue Dark




RUM, AGED UP TO & INCLUDING 8 YEARS

BEST OF CATEGORY TORTUGA 5 YEAR OLD

GOLD, Goslings Black Seal,Mount Gay Sugar Cane,Prichard’s Fine Rum, Ron Barcelo Imperial, Tortuga 5 Year Old

SILVER,Bacardi 8, Cockspur Fine Rum, Diplomatico Reserva, Goslings Gold, New Grove Oak, Santa Teresa Gran Reserva

BRONZE, Appleton Estate Reserve, Appleton Estate V/X, Bacardi Select,Centenario Anejo Reserva Especial, Mount Gay Eclipse, Ron Botran Anejo 8 Year Old, Ron Botran Oro (Gold)


RUM, AGED 9-15 YEARS

BEST OF CATEGORY TIE DIPLOMATICO RESERVA EXCLUSIVA,& TORTUGA 12 YEAR OLD

GOLD, Diplomatico Reserva Exclusiva,Tortuga 12 Year Old


SILVER,Mount Gay Extra Old, Ron Botran 12 Year Old,Ron Zacapa 15 Centenario Year Old,

Santa Teresa Selecto

RUM, AGED +15 YEARS

BEST OF CATEGORY TIE

RON ZACAPA CENTENARIO 23 YEAR OLD & SANTA TERESA 1796

GOLD, Pyrat XO Reserve,Pyrat Cask 1623,Ron Macuro Anejo Ultra Premium,Ron Zacapa Centenario 23 Year Old,Santa Teresa 1796



SILVER, Centenario Fundacion,Goslings Old, Ron Botran Solera

LIQUEURS/FLAVORS/CORDIALS

BEST OF CATEGORY SANTA TERESA ARAKU RON Y COFFEE LIQUEUR

GOLD. Clement Creole Shrubb. Santa Teresa Rhum Orange Liqueur,Santa Teresa Araku Ron y Coffee Liqueur

SILVER, Castries Peanut Rum Crème,Prichard’s Sweet Georgia Belle Peach Mango Liqueur

Bush and Alcohol in Brazil

An awful lot of baloney in Brazil

Bush wants a show of cooperation with the Brazilians over biofuels - while keeping the stuff out of the US.
Ian Williams


March 7, 2007 8:00 PM |

President Bush begins his tour of Latin America this week, hitting Brazil on March 9, in his attempt to woo America's backyard away from the seductions of Hugo Chavez. In an iconic display of content-free concern, Bush wants to engage Lula, the Brazilian president, in a show of cooperation over biofuels, in which Brazil is world leader - while keeping the stuff out of the USA.

Once upon a time, anyone who drank cachaça, Brazilian rum, could see why the Brazilians decided it may be better to use it to run their cars than stock their bars. However, times have changed. Aged cachaça and the caipirinhas made from them are high-end drinks in the world's cocktail lounges.

And the gasohol in Brazilian cars that used to cover the smell of alcohol on the breath of drivers is now an ecological blessing for a world where the oil is running out and the temperature is running up. Brazil's sugar plantations produce fuel that can compete on the world markets with the black stuff from the Gulf, and it is selling its technology to other sugar-producing countries. Renewable bio-fuels are good for the carbon cycle and global warming, and reduce dependence on fossil fuel which tends to come from countries whose rulers get uppity with Washington. They can also create economic opportunities in the developing world.

There are legitimate concerns about what the expansion of Brazilian sugar-cane production may have on its own society. However Lula has little choice but to use whatever comparative economic advantages the global economy gives him, while trying to spread the gains around domestically.

But the response from the industrialised world is, as usual, to protect its own climatic disadvantages with discriminatory trade practices. In Europe they subsidise sugar beet production - developed by Napoleon to beat British control of the Caribbean cane fields. But in the US, Brazil's hoped for biofuel market, there is a 54 cents a US gallon tariff imposed by the country that wants to impose free trade on everyone else in the world.

Two of the most potent lobbies, major sucklers at the teat of corporate welfare, have dressed themselves in a green figleaf with the bioscam. Archer Daniel Midland, and the exiled Cuban sugar barons, one of whom was, you may remember, important enough to interrupt Bill Clinton in his sort of suckling with his intern in Oval Office are generous donors to both parties.

Their campaign cheques are a sound investment. American biofuels and sweeteners made from corn or maize (as the British prefer to call it) can only compete with Brazilian sugar and ethanol because of the tariff wall, and because Washington subsidises corn syrup production and sugar production to the tune of billions of dollars.

So not only are American consumers paying over twice the world price for sugar, while their government effectively stomps on the chances for economic development of significant parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, but the diversion of a large proportion of corn towards syrup and ethanol production is raising American and world corn prices. Milton Friedman would not have approved.

The American companies concerned are fighting any attempt to reduce or remove the 54 cents a gallon ethanol tariff. Their spokesman told Businessweek that the tariff offsets the 51 cents a gallon tax credit for biofuels - making it fairly plain that the purpose of the tax credit was not to encourage better use of renewables but to boost the bottom line of Archer Daniels Midland and their colleagues.

So Bush's concern for biofuels will have all the sincerity of a Scooter Libby denial, and give Hugo Chavez yet more ammunition to highlight the hypocrisy of the gringos. Well done W.

Bush and Alcohol -and Brazil

Latest Guardian Comment is Free on Bush's infatuation with American alcohol

Spirit of Christmas Past—and Future

Latest on the rum trail for the season

from fpif.org,

For centuries, rum has been a warming folk remedy for colds, flu—and indeed cold itself. As the winter solstice approaches in its various festival forms, one worldwide constant is the need for rum to bring a little tropical warmth into the winter. In places like the Caribbean, India, and Australia a solid rum-drinking tradition ensures that the amber nectar is savored year-around, but in colder climes, rum in eggnogs, Christmas cakes and puddings, mince pies and of course just rum in tots, are traditional accoutrements for the holiday season.

Rum is the world's biggest selling spirit—and both the European Union and the United States define it as any drink distilled from sugar cane products, so Brazilian cachaca is rum whether the Brazilians like it or not. (And they do tend to like it, whatever it's called.) While a certain formerly Cuban transnational corporation is, despite its bland tastelessness, the biggest brand, India's “Old Monk” and the Philippines' “Tanduay” are next up there. From Cuba's “Havana Club” to Barbadian “Mount Gay,” “Guyanese ElDorado,” and Jamaica's “Appleton,” rum offers a range of experiences for guzzlers to gourmets, from those best drunk in cocktails to those best savored sip by sip.

Not So Useless Byproduct

Most rums are made from the molasses left over when the white sugar is crystallized out, and one of its original attractions was that it used an otherwise useless byproduct instead of competing for scarce food grains—as whiskey did for example. The American colonies banned whiskey distillation because it drove up the price of grain and hence bread. And when that happened, old Anglo Saxon tradition was that you rioted and knocked the Town Hall down until the authorities did something about it.

On current evidence, Barbados is the place where nascent Northern technology and tropical agriculture combined to bring about the distillation of spirits of unsurpassed strength and in unsurpassed quantities. The Caribbean was a great melting pot for cultures and for a brief period in the seventeenth century, Barbados was at their focus.

The Portuguese in Brazil had brought sugar-growing from the Arabs in the Mediterranean. The Dutch and the Portuguese Jewish refugees had brought milling and trading skills. And one can only suspect that among the prisoners and indentured servants sent from Britain were some Irish or Scottish exiles who were familiar with the new technology of the still.

Hot Hellish Liquor

People knew that the molasses left behind by sugar refining fermented easily, but only the bold risked drinking it. It continues fermenting in the stomach, according to some who've tried. However, put it through a still and you had a potent and palatable drink. They called it Kill-Devil, or rumbullion, “a hot, hellish liquor,”—and they loved it.

Rum was born.

Soon, they discovered that storing it in oak barrels did wonders for the palatability. Killdevil became rum or “Barbadoes Water” and was in demand across the Atlantic World, until in Jamaica, they discovered that if you redistilled the liquor, it was still hot, but a little less hellish.

It soon spread. New Englanders made rum from contraband molasses that they smuggled from the French colonies, where Paris forbad distillation, in case it competed with Cognac. The enterprising Yankees drank a lot of it, and as Benjamin Franklin boasted, used what was left to help ethnically cleanse the Indian tribes to the West and to trade for slaves in West Africa.

They did so initially under the protection of the British Royal Navy, which won its wars with the French through the period not least because the British national debt was underwritten with the profits of the Caribbean sugar and rum trade. The British Navy was also fuelled more directly by rum. For hundreds of years, every British sailor had a daily ration of a pint of overproof rum.

Revolution Over Taxation

After defeating the French, the Royal Navy turned to defeating American smugglers who had been busily trading with the enemy, and the American Revolution began. The British felt that the American colonists should make a financial contribution to the biggest national debt hitherto that they had run up clearing the French threat from Canada. American colonists were as averse to taxation as some of their descendents. The revolution was about taxation, not representation—and it was not about tea but molasses and rum. In fact, the core problem was American resentment of military policing of civilians. This was two centuries before the White House reintroduced the concept after 9-11 of course.

Throughout the 18th century, the Caribbean was the equivalent of the modern Persian Gulf. The great powers went there to fight their wars over the liquid energy and liquid capital of the islands. France, Britain, and others sacrificed untold hundreds of thousands of white indentured laborers, African slaves, soldiers, and sailors on the altar of sugar and rum.

Not that it did him much good, but Napoleon devalued Britain's Caribbean empire while losing most of the important battles. In 1811, Benjamin Delessert had a pilot plant working with Spanish POWs who were experienced in sugar refining, when the emperor turned up, with a troop of horse guards, pinned a Legion D'Honneur on his chest, and ordered the wholesale expansion of sugar beet production.

Within a few decades, beet sugar and the anti-slavery movement had converted the Caribbean from being the engine of North Atlantic economic and military power to a backwater of empire and they have never really recovered.

Bacardi and Revolutionaries

The English-speaking islands had lost American markets to the new whiskey distilleries that Western grain made possible, and the French and Spanish colonies were finally allowed to make rum themselves. Even so, Jamaica rum was the standard until the 20th century and it was Jamaican distillers who moved to Cuba who probably founded the original Bacardi distillery.

Bacardi won prizes from the Spanish Court for its rum, credited with bringing young King Alfonso of Spain back from death's door with a tot of the family specialty in 1892. Bacardi was revolutionary in many ways.

Even as it saved the royal life, the family supported the Cuban revolutionaries against Spain, and later supported Fidel Castro and the guerrillas against Batista. The Bacardi clan even provided members of Castro's first trade delegation to the United States. And then he nationalized them and they took it personally—very personally. They have been fighting on every level ever since, especially politically in the United States.

Bacardi boss Juan Pépin Bosch brought a touch of the old connection between buccaneering and rum back to life in 1961 by buying a surplus U.S. Air Force B-26 Marauder medium bomber, to bomb a Cuban oil refinery. Later he was the money behind a plot to assassinate Castro.

In fact, the Castro takeover had not fatally wounded the company, which had already become one of the first trans-nationals. From 1955, Bacardi was headquartered in the Bahamas, getting British Empire tariff preferences, and from the 1930s its major distillery was in Puerto Rico to get access to the American market that it had cornered during Prohibition, when it was the rumrunner's favorite product.

Evil Empire

Bacardi has been the evil empire to the other smaller Caribbean rum producers. It works to keep them out of markets as fervently if they were all Castroite allies. On some islands you cannot get the local rum in the hotel bars, because Bacardi has bought the concession.

The Caribbean islands that once fuelled world wars and industrial revolutions are now almost entirely dependent on tourism for their economic survival. First President Bill Clinton took them to the World Trade Organization to remove preferential access to Europe for their bananas. The Drug Enforcement Agency takes strong measures against another traditional island recreational crop, and in the face of protected EU and U.S. sugar substitutes, their sugar cane fields are being leveled to make golf courses for gringos.

But tourism and rum could go together. The region's Rum producers should be selling more than a drink—they should be selling a concept, a life style. As Johnny Depp exulted, staggering round his desert island in the film Pirates of the Caribbean, “Rum, sand, and sun! It's the Caribbean!”

And almost every shot you down will help development. Sugar cane only grows in the tropical zone, which as it happens, is mostly underdeveloped in the modern world. Selling high value-added branded spirits on the world market makes much more sense than trying to compete with cane sugar in a market where the EU protects sugar beet farmers and the United States looks after the double interests of Cuban exile sugar plantation owners in Florida, and Archer Daniels Midlands' high fructose corn syrup, made from maize.

Pathetic Substitutes

These pathetic substitutes need high tariff protection and subsidies because there is nothing as efficient as cane for producing sugar and energy—and hence rum. As a result, as Fidel Castro discovered, mass marketing high-value added Havana Club rum across the world produces far more revenue than bags of sugar in the supermarkets.

Somehow, the Caricom island rum producers have to overcome their insularity. Just as the island governments have been selling the Caribbean as a concept, they should be boosting Caribbean rum as the distilled essence of the islands, whose every sip in the cold of winter evokes happy memories of sultry tropics, and an altogether better and more relaxed life style. They should be keeping their sugar plantations because, not only can they produce gasohol like Brazil, they can produce rum and attract tourists to watch it being cooked up.

Trade Spats

Caribbean Rum distillers have millions of potential customers coming into their territories who can take their acquired tastes back with them to the bars of London and New York. They have expatriates in their millions who can guarantee exporters a market. So far, whatever dents there have been on the Bacardi empire have come from major international spirits acquiring distribution rights for island products. The biggest success story is Pernod Ricard's partnership with Havana Club. That old Bacardi magic in Washington ensures that they cannot sell it in the United States and indeed the dispute over the trademark has almost provoked trade wars between the EU and United States.

However, it takes more than variations on “Old” and “Aged,” on the bottles to build a brand. Discerning and affluent consumers want to see precise ages and they want a back-story for their bottle. And what a back-story rum has. It can beat any other drink with four centuries of Caribbean history to call on. Rum launched revolutions, slave rebellions, and fuelled wars on land and on sea. Its devotees include pirates, sailors, soldiers and admirals, planters and field hands, rum shops and chic bars.

Every rum bottle on every cold northern bar shelf should be a spirited ambassador for Caribbean tourism. Vodka, whose sales are booming world wide with heavy advertising, is just a dull spirit, literally ethanol and water. But rum, in its infinite flavorsome variety, is the true global spirit with its warm beating heart in the Caribbean.

Ian Williams is a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor (www.fpif.org) and the author of Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 (Nation Books, hardback 2005, and paperback 2006). This article is specially written for FPIF in aid of development and merrymaking.