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Transport yourself to the tropics.

Once the most popular spirit in the world (and the official spirit of the British Navy), rum is still widely used to make mixed drinks—and new premium rums are now enjoyed as sipping drinks. Discover rum by reading:

A brief history of rum and the basics of how rum is made
A rundown of different types of rum, so you’ll know what you’re buying
Rum cocktail recipes from the Four Seasons restaurant

Rum Basics

Made by fermenting sugar cane, rum is a sweet and spicy spirit that has conjured up all things Caribbean for more than three centuries. Today it’s enjoying a major revival.

A Short History of Rum

Rum grew out of the West Indies sugar trade that European powers established soon after they colonized the Caribbean. The first step in sugar processing involves extracting and boiling the cane juice, which produces a leftover sugary liquid waste that the English called molasses (from the Portuguese melaço, originally from the Latin mel, meaning “honey”). The molasses was usually set aside for later use as livestock feed or fertilizer, and legend has it that rum was created by accident when a tray of molasses was left unattended for several weeks and sunlight and rainwater caused it to ferment. This rudimentary brew gained favor, and in around 1640, plantation owners began to distill a refined version for the European market.

By the mid-1660s, virtually every sugar plantation in the Caribbean manufactured rum. The rum and molasses trade grew so rapidly that Britain and France eventually prohibited the importation of rum and molasses to protect their gin and brandy industries. In response, the island distillers shipped their products to the English colonies of North America. Rum soon became the liquor of choice in the Colonies, as well as in the British Royal Navy. As the New England colonists established their own rum distilleries, rum became an integral part of the notorious “triangular trade” in which sugar was sent from the West Indies to New England, rum distilled from that sugar was sent to Africa, and slaves from Africa were sent to the West Indies to work on sugar plantations.

Rum reigned as the most popular Western liquor until the early 1800s, when demand shifted in favor of whiskey and gin. Even the creation of light rum by Bacardi and Company in 1862 (the year of the company’s founding in Cuba) couldn’t restore rum to its former glory. Ironically, Prohibition (1920–1933) temporarily brought rum back to the fore (in the United States, at least) as “rum runners” smuggled untold millions of quarts of the spirit from the Caribbean to cities on the Atlantic coast. Recent years have seen another revival in rum’s fortunes with the introduction of high-end añejo (aged) rums of great complexity, as well as low-cost flavored rums.

How Rum Is Made

The source of most rums is molasses, though some rum is made from freshly pressed cane juice.

Fermentation: The first step in fermenting molasses-based rum is to dilute raw molasses with distilled water. The mixture is then pasteurized into what is called the live wash. Yeast is added to trigger fer-mentation, which can last anywhere from 24 hours to three weeks, depending on the character that the rum producer is looking for. The fermented liquid is called the dead wash.
Distillation: The dead wash is distilled to remove impurities and undesirable compounds, producing a neutral, white spirit. Today, most large-scale man-ufacturers use large, multicolumn stills to distill their rum, though many distillers of premium rums make the spirit in small batches using old-fashioned pot stills.
Aging: The time for which a rum is aged and the container in which it’s aged depends on the type of rum being made. Light rums are aged in oak barrels or stainless steel containers for a minimum of one year. Gold rums are aged in charred oak barrels for an average of three years, while dark rums are barrel-aged for three to twelve years.
Blending: The majority of rums are blended carefully to showcase the best qualities of selected rums of different origins, purities, and ages. A master blender selects the barrels to be used, and the rums from each are hand-blended. The mixture is then transferred to oak vats until the flavors “marry” (merge).
Dilution and bottling: Once the blend is ready for bottling, it is transferred to bottling vats, where it is diluted with purified water. It is then filtered (usually through charcoal) before being put through a polishing filter, which removes any remaining particulate matter. Most rums are bottled at 80 proof, or 40% alcohol by volume (ABV), but some rums have an ABV as low as 27%, while overproof rums are often 75–80% ABV (150–160 proof).

Acknowledgments & Disclaimer

Next:
Types of Rum

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