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#24 The History Of Royal Navy Rum With Matt Pietrek
1.5k Plays3 years ago
Matt Pietrek helps unpack the interesting history of Royal Navy Rum. From its beginnings in the 1600's through to a point in time, where the British navy had nuclear weapons and dolled out rum regularly to its sailors! Check out Cocktail Wonk and Matt's Book Here: https://cocktailwonk.com/
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Highlights
00:00:00
Speaker
How's it going, chasers? I hope you're having a kick-ass week. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Adventures in Home Brewing, a sweet home brewing store in America, both brick and mortar and online that you can buy your home brewing, home winemaking, home cider making, and yes, even home distilling needs from. Best thing is they have pretty decent rates in terms of by a minimum amount.
00:00:25
Speaker
get free shipping for most states in America. That's pretty cool. So if you're interested in their awesome service and great products range, you can go to homebrewing.org slash CTC. You'll be helping me out a little bit and you'll still get the great service and great products you're after.
Community Support and Podcast Updates
00:00:41
Speaker
This podcast is also brought to you by the Chase The Craft merch store. You can go to chasethecraft.com and check it out at the moment. What have we got up there? We have Glen Ken glasses, some rocks glasses, and for those of you that have been around for a while, both the pins and the Chase The Craft coins are now back in store and shipping out of America. So if that didn't work for you before, when I had to ship them from here in New Zealand, maybe it works for you now.
00:01:08
Speaker
This podcast is also brought to you by the Patreons. Thank you so much, so much, guys, for letting me do what I love. You really do help me be able to do that, so thank you. A very, very quick bit of housekeeping, guys. You don't need to know because you probably don't. But in terms of the YouTube geekery algorithm side of things, it just makes a whole lot of sense for me to move these long-form podcasts off the Still It channel. It's not great for Still It, to be perfectly honest with you.
00:01:37
Speaker
So what I'm doing is creating another channel for the podcasts and I'm not going to upload them there yet because I don't want people to miss out because they don't know. So if you're watching this on YouTube, please guys go into the description. There'll be a link there to the new channel. I'll put a card up top here as well. Jump over there, subscribe, hit the notification bell, all that sort of stuff. So when the podcast switches over there and the podcast start being published on that channel, you won't miss out. Cool. I hope that makes sense.
Guest Introduction: Matt Petrick
00:02:07
Speaker
Alright, I'm extremely extremely grateful to have been put in touch with today's guest. I put the word out in a couple of different places on RUM forums and stuff like that. Sort of saying that I was hoping to be able to talk to someone who was either very very into or was actually a RUM historian. I wanted to start getting this story of where RUM came from because I don't know anything about it.
Matt's Career Journey
00:02:30
Speaker
And today's guest, his name came up a bunch of times, a bunch of different people in different places suggested him and he was gracious enough to guest on the podcast and help us out. So his name is Matt Petrick. You can catch his work over on cocktailwonk.com. He also has a book called Minimalist Tiki, which looks absolutely stunning. And it turns out that Matt is a huge wealth of knowledge. So let's get stuck straight on into the podcast with Matt Petrick.
00:03:01
Speaker
Matt, thank you so much for agreeing to do this. Talking backstage with you, just for a second, I've realized that I've opened Pandora's box, and I'm a little bit scared about the amount of stuff that I'm going to have to dig into and learn over the coming months. But thank you for helping me kick this off.
00:03:20
Speaker
Let's start by just getting an overview of who you are in the rum world in terms of this is your job. Rum is your professional existence from what I can tell. Let us know, man. What is it that you do? What facets are you into? Thank you for having me on here. It's a pleasure to do this.
00:03:40
Speaker
Any opportunity to babble about ROM, I love to do.
Rum's Historical Context
00:03:44
Speaker
So for 30 years, I was a software developer, and the last five years or so, I was like, I'd rather be at home writing about ROM. I started my blog eight, nine years ago.
00:03:57
Speaker
and built up a collection. I was making geeky cocktails. And as I sort of got towards the end of this 30 years, I was like, I really don't want to be doing this anymore. I want to, someday, and I just do rum full time and do spirits and cocktails and goes towards the stories.
00:04:15
Speaker
And five years ago, it still seemed like a pipe dream. And now here it is, I'm doing it. It was in the end of 2018, Mrs. Wonk and I, we quit our jobs to jump into the unknown to go chase our dreams. And for me, it was to be a full-time writer. And that soon became writer and historian.
00:04:38
Speaker
And then they started doing training and education, and now companies are coming and asking for advice. And so I'm now considering myself a writer, educator, historian, and consultant, jack of all trades, whatever somebody needs me for. And I love all the spirits, but Rum is the one that has caught my attention and just hasn't got the same amount of love as the other spirits, so.
00:05:04
Speaker
This is what I do. It's definitely it definitely sort of simmers away under the surface, which is hilarious because from what I understand, it used to be the spirit, right? I mean, certainly, certainly one of them for many years, it was, you know, it actually is older than Scotch whiskey, for example.
00:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, which is kind of mind
Evolution of Rum Production
00:05:29
Speaker
-boggling. I guess the story you get told through marketing, the vehicle marketing thing, is the heritage spirit that we have access to as customers or consumers, right?
00:05:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty interesting. So I'm very, very keen to get into that. And for the people listening, we've talked back and forth briefly, very, very briefly. And I'm, I feel very comfortable talking to you already. So thank you for that. But we've decided to talk about Navy Rim for a host of different reasons. But before we get into that, there's one other sort of part of the, of your professional
00:06:09
Speaker
job, I guess, or actually a totally different job that you mentioned, which I found really interesting. So before we get fixated on Navy Room, let's talk about that. And essentially you act as a intermediary or almost like an ambassador between producers and consumers. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So essentially there's an organization that's been around for 50 years this year that's called the West Indies, Rum and Spirits Producers Association.
00:06:37
Speaker
known as WRSPA, W-I-R-S-P-A. And they are essentially, you can think of them, they don't like it when they say this, sort of like the OPEC of Rome, but without the oil budget. But essentially, the independent Caribbean countries, like Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, Guyana, Saint Lucia, Suriname,
00:07:05
Speaker
there's like 14 or 15 in total basically those countries or those islands or territories in the Caribbean which are not you know part of say the United States like Puerto Rico is or not part of France like Martinique is those countries are you know as lovely as they are they are tiny minnows in the world of international
00:07:27
Speaker
trade relations and things like that. So if it's sort of like Jamaica negotiating with the European Union over something, they're
Naval and Global Influence on Rum
00:07:35
Speaker
tiny. They have very little leverage. But by banding together and basically treating the Caribbean as a whole as collective, as like a trading block, they have more leverage and more ability to sort of represent the Caribbean as a whole when talking with the European Union or the United States or what have you.
00:07:56
Speaker
And so it's probably, I think it's around 30 different rum producers belonging to these different countries, but they've been around 50 years sort of behind the scenes for the most part. The most visible project they'd ever done on the consumer side was the authentic Caribbean rum market. If you've ever seen an ACR logo on your bottle. I'm sure I can find one behind me, but they were basically doing training about authentic Caribbean rum, things like that.
00:08:22
Speaker
They were basically behind the scenes, basically advocating for Caribbean rum and trying to drag it from the bulk rum space into the premium rum space, which is only really happened in the last 20 years or so. But long story short.
00:08:36
Speaker
They came to me and said, you know, we kind of want to know what the consumers are thinking they're doing. And we need to know more about what's going on out there, like our traditional business has been full crump. Now it's branded rum and we see, you know, attention. We need somebody who can help us sort of navigate that world.
00:08:55
Speaker
And they came to me, and based upon my writing and all the limited trips to the Caribbean, they brought me down to St. Lucia to, you know, very, very intimidating to walk into a room and basically see the CEO of Appleton Estate, the CEO of Demerter Distillers, CEO of St. Lucia Distillers, like all these like heads of the rum industry, all
00:09:21
Speaker
waiting to talk with me and ask me questions to see if I was worthy of this role. And in the end, I guess they decided. And so for the past two years, I've been sort of
Distillation Techniques and Impact
00:09:33
Speaker
an ombudsman, if you will, between the enthusiast community and the rum producers, the technical role, technical titles, community envoy. So I sort of, you know, when the producers want to know like, what's going on in the enthusiast community, I can tell them this is what I'm seeing. And likewise, I'm out there in the enthusiast community telling them, here's what's going on, sort of behind the scenes.
00:09:56
Speaker
in the rum industry, here's what's happening here and here's the challenges or the good things are doing or what have you. So I'm sort of that intermediate role and it's been fantastic and lightning and I've learned far more than I ever thought I would. So I'm very lucky to have
00:10:14
Speaker
Yeah, that sounds literally like a dream job for a rum nerd. And I have to admit. I was like, there's no way I'm going to get this. Are you kidding me? And that was within six months of quitting my job to do this. Oh, wow. Yeah, so it was very, very, very fortunate. That's awesome. Well, congratulations on making the switch. It is quite free to be able to move.
00:10:42
Speaker
You know, I mean, don't get me wrong at this job or a career and definitely a salary. That's the good part. That's the part I miss is the steady salary. I don't have that. You know, it's like it's doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. These three people owe me money. Oh my, I got to go do this project if I want to get paid. You know, it's a bit more of a scramble, but it's on my own terms on my own time.
00:11:06
Speaker
Yeah, totally. That's awesome. I have to imagine, too, the synergy between having access, increased access to the rum world itself and sort of behind the doors, behind the curtain sort of stuff, but also being forced to keep your finger on the pulse of the enthusiasts. Both of those things have to literally make you a better writer, surely.
00:11:28
Speaker
It certainly gives me a deeper perspective on things. A lot of the writing that you see out there is like, which producer has the best rum? Or which bottle should I buy next? Or what's the perfect room for my tie? A lot of it is very focused on the consumer, very small scale stuff. And the more I do, the more I realize there's bigger stories here.
00:11:55
Speaker
And I don't want to write reviews. I respect people who write reviews who can do that. And I'm like, there's so much more out here. That's interesting and fascinating. It's never been told. And well, nobody else is going to do it. I'm going to do it. Yeah. I've seen that sort of.
00:12:11
Speaker
paralleled in a lot of other places recently. I mean, I was in marketing before COVID shut that down, and now I'm doing my own thing too. But there's this thing, I guess even the marketing world's caught up to the fact that now this is what people want. To bring it back to rum, I guess it was kind of a, I'm going to go to the bottle store, and I'm going to buy five different rums, and then I'm going to talk about what they taste like and tell you which one tastes best. And all it's about is the product itself.
00:12:40
Speaker
But people, they do care about that for sure, but they want the story behind it, right? Like who's making it? Who's the person that's doing it? What's interesting about them? Where are they from? What's interesting about the place? What's interesting about the ingredients? And it seems when you first start thinking about it for any specific product, almost counterintuitive, because it's like, well, I don't really care if Bob or Fred's making the rum, because that doesn't make it taste different.
00:13:05
Speaker
And even if it doesn't make it taste different, people still care. They want to know the story. And then the more you dig into it, you realize that this idea of, I don't know for rum, but everything else I've ever come across, the idea of kind of terroir, like the people, the place, just the spirit of it actually does end up influencing the product. Right. Exactly. And not just terroir, but even
00:13:32
Speaker
In the history research I've done just sort of how rum evolved in which not just you know People in the local, you know, wherever in the Caribbean changing things up. It was actually like geopolitics, you know if you can draw a direct line from basically the British and the French fighting and the Napoleonic Wars to why we have rum aggregate today like oh Wow, yeah, I mean great great stories there. So Damn it. We're gonna have to do this again. I think
00:14:01
Speaker
All right. So let's get stuck into Navy rum. Royal Navy rum. Royal Navy rum. OK. And I almost think that maybe before we do that, especially for the non-initiated, perhaps we should draw a bit of a boundary in terms of what is the
00:14:24
Speaker
The, the, the least reducible definition of rum, like, like, how can you reduce the definite definition of rum down to one minimum thing? This is distilled spirit made from the by-product of sugar cane. Okay. So, and by-product is important as in. As in, as it can be, basically, if you take sugar, if you take sugar cane, the plant,
00:14:52
Speaker
And you like that it
Trade and Production Evolution
00:14:54
Speaker
comes from something that originally was a sugarcane plant. Okay, right. So as long as you're getting your fermentables from something that you can take sugar, you can take a sugarcane plant and you can press the juice out of it and you can ferment that juice. No different than it was brandy. Same idea, like it's got fermentable sugar in it. And make sure that enough yeast cells get into it, it will ferment and you distill it.
00:15:21
Speaker
Now sugarcane juice is actually the simplest way to do it conceptually. The majority of it is actually made from molasses, but molasses is in fact from if you take sugarcane juice, if you boil it enough to where sugar crystals form and then pull out those sugar crystals, what's left is molasses. So the whole reason the Caribbean got big with
00:15:45
Speaker
sugar cane and rum and everything was because there was a high demand for sugar. This was, you know, in the 1500s, 1600s, a high demand for sugar. And the Caribbean was a good place to have the right environment to grow sugar cane. But, you know, they, you know, they weren't gonna like ship the sugar cane stocks back home, they would have rotted. And what they were really interested in was the sugar.
00:16:10
Speaker
And so the way you make sugar, at least cane sugar, is you take this juice and you eliminate enough water from it to where sugar crystals form. The same way like if you made rock candy, which is basically sugar and water dissolved together, and then you boil it to the point where the crystals start precipitating out.
00:16:31
Speaker
That's basically how sugar was originally made. You take the piece, you boil it, the sugar crystals start precipitating, and pull out those crystals, and there's your sugar. And you're like, but what's left behind? Well, it's this sort of brown, this sort of thick liquid. Well, throw it away. At least that's what some are doing, throw it away. But that's actually molasses. Turns out that there's enough fermentable sugar in molasses to where you can make rum from it.
00:16:57
Speaker
So this is the repeated story over and over again for any spirit worldwide, as far as I can tell that the absolute root of it is either we find something that we're throwing away. Or we find something that we care so little about that we're feeding to the animals. That I mean, that is that is certainly part of, you know, some aspect of it. I think I know I the way I think about it is all distilled spirits come from are from an organic source.
00:17:25
Speaker
as either natively sugar or can be turned into sugar. If you think about, in my mind, there are four categories. There's the whiskies, which are the grains. If you take that grain, it doesn't have sugar naturally, but through the
00:17:42
Speaker
beer making process, you basically turn that into sugar. Agave spirits, where again, the agave plant itself doesn't have natural sugar in it. But again, by roasting it, you basically create a sugar ferment. Brandy, squeeze a piece, squeeze a grape, you've got a sugary liquid.
00:18:02
Speaker
ferment it, distill it, then there's rum, literally sugar juice. So it's sort of like a toss-up, which is simpler brandy or rum. From my perspective, those are the two most basic, simple spirits. It's like you squeeze up, you take the juice, you ferment it, you distill it. Yeah. So let's go.
00:18:25
Speaker
As far back as we can in the Wayback Machine, what is the first sort of solid evidence we have for rum? Like where does rum first pop up? So there's some, in recent years, there's been some interesting twists on the story and I'll touch on them in a moment. But in generally, if you think about the topic of cane spirits, we sort of first see them in
00:18:52
Speaker
in what is now Brazil in the early to mid 1500s, that the sugar was brought over from Europe, places like Madera, for example, had sugarcane growing there. And we could go back to BC times where sugar started from, but we won't do that here. Basically sugar made its way to what today we think of as the new world.
00:19:21
Speaker
around 1500. Columbus's second voyage is said to have been at least part of the way sugar came over. But sugar entered based on the Caribbean basin around 1500. There's some debate about when it was first fermented and distilled and you know it's that key difference. It's like
00:19:43
Speaker
sugar cane juice by itself, you just leave it out, it's kind of, it's gonna ferment. You're gonna get like, basically a cane wine, if you will. And there's a debate about when did that, when did somebody come along naturally, like, run it through a still, but, you know, I think generally, nobody would, nobody who studied the space would agree, or would contest that it was happening by, by say 1550 or so. That's about
00:20:11
Speaker
where there was at least some sort of a cane juice spirit being made in Brazil. And it's funny, it actually took about 100 years. It wasn't until maybe late 1630s, 1640s when that cane, sugar cane was certainly in the Caribbean before that, but that cane and the distilling know-how basically came over to Martinique,
00:20:39
Speaker
and Barbados. And there's even now some debate as to where it popped up first. But around the same time, we believe it appeared on Martinique and Barbados as team spirit being made. Okay. And is so that we're following the lineage of what's going to, to get the story to Royal Navy Rum. That's okay. So, I mean, I mean, you certainly can. The, uh,
00:21:06
Speaker
If you think about it, we certainly know that by 1640, Barbados was making rum. And we know that, according to the Royal Navy itself, that the first issuing of a rum to a Navy sailor was 1655 in Jamaica, which was pretty far back.
00:21:34
Speaker
I have questions about whether that rum they gave was actually distilled on Jamaica or not. So that was basically the same year the British took over Jamaica from the Spanish. And we don't actually know if the Spanish were distilling rum on Jamaica.
00:21:51
Speaker
prior to that. It's a question I've been trying to dig into. But as possible, it could have been made on Barbados and brought over to Jamaica. We don't really know. It's a murky area. But we know that by 1655, the Royal Navy is recording that sailors in the Caribbean were given rum. And when I say that, I mean, basically, there was an example of it. There was an instance. It was certainly not all sailors everywhere around the world.
00:22:21
Speaker
Nor was it like every day. It was just something that happened. It was an incident that that happened. They were given robins. It's like one incident that you can sort of like put a pin in and say this actually happened. Yeah, this happened. Now the interesting thing about that is there's sort of some bigger backstory about this. If you think about it, like the Royal Navy ships shipped out from the UK or now the UK, but essentially they would be sent all over the world. They were going to the Caribbean. They were going to what was called
00:22:51
Speaker
the East Indies, basically India, they, you know, when they would go out, they needed to be provisioned. Like you're out in the ocean, you need things to drink. But if you think about what do they have available to them in say 1650, when they're sent out, like there are no metal tanks. They don't have the ability to cheaply fabricate metal tanks. So everything's going and basically would cask.
00:23:15
Speaker
cask. And you think about it, wooden cask, 1650 in the ocean, water is going to go bad pretty quickly. So you think, would casket water out there go bad in a few days? And so they drink that first. It's like, well, what else did they send out there? Well, beer, you know, who doesn't love beer? So it would send beer out there as well. And the alcoholic content of beer would
00:23:38
Speaker
would let it last a little bit longer because alcohol is preservative. Then they would also send out wine. Wine being at least typically a little higher strength than beer. Wine will last a little bit longer. And then last but not least, they would send out distilled spirits. If you think about it, go back even say pre-1655, what distilled spirits
00:24:04
Speaker
would have been available in England in say 1650 or 1640. What would you guess? What would you guess they were sending out? I would have to guess it was some sort of form of instilled wine brandy. Correct. Yeah, points to me. So that essentially if you think about it, England's not far from from France, not far from Spain. And they would, they would, they would basically
00:24:32
Speaker
We have records that they were buying Randy to send out in cask and Royal Navy ships in the 1600s. And in fact, there's a famous semi famous famous amongst us nerd history, famous letter from
00:24:49
Speaker
uh, the, the Navy secretary, um, uh, Samuel Peeps, uh, famous for his, his letters, but basically, uh, a letter in 1687 essentially authorizing, you know, gay barely when our Royal ships arrive in Jamaica, it's okay to give them rum rather than the usual brandy. Oh, wow. Okay. So before the Royal Navy was getting rum, they were, they were getting brandy.
00:25:16
Speaker
to think about, like, Caribbean rum, even though it was around from that 1640, 1650, it wasn't being wholesale shipped off to Europe then.
00:25:28
Speaker
And so if they were provisioning Royal Navy ships in England, they were going to be sending it off, sending off what the spirits are going to be sending them out to sea with. They're going to be what they happen to have there, which would be probably a brandy or possibly a whiskey at that point in time. I don't have records of that, but there's something locally available to them in England. Caribbean rum didn't really start coming over to Europe until
00:25:55
Speaker
around 1700 in any sort of appreciable volume. So in the 1600s, the Royal Navy started issued the first rum ration, but it was certainly not a continuous stream from there forward. It wasn't actually until
00:26:24
Speaker
1731, they issued a decree saying that in foreign stations, essentially like someplace other than like off the coast of England, like if you're off like thousands of miles away from England, if you're in a foreign station,
00:26:42
Speaker
Um, gay barrel, you will get a daily ration of something and it might be beer. Basically in lieu, if it's not beer, then it could be wine. It could be, you know, if it's not like a half gallon of beer, then it could be like a quart of wine or like two pints of rum. So 1731, it was sort of like, if you're not, if you're somewhere way out there, um, you're going to get a daily ration.
00:27:06
Speaker
And it only took nine years for them to realize that, gee, giving their sailors a pint of rum, if I remember. Basically a pint of rum a day, high strength, overproof rum a day was going to be a bad idea. And so basically sailors would drink it and just like immediately hammered. And so it was in 1740 that Admiral Vernon
00:27:36
Speaker
me of Admiral Vernon and Ragh and all that kind of stuff. Basically I said, you know, we're going to dilute this. We're going to like force you to, before we give it to you, we're going to add four parts of water to one rod of the bomb to sort of stretch it out. Basically diluted it down to the strength of wine, basically. But, but if you look at that time span from say 1655 to 1740, it's almost a hundred years before Royal Navy Ragh
00:28:04
Speaker
a thing, a consistent thing that everybody got everywhere every day.
00:28:09
Speaker
Yeah, right. So I have to imagine that in the in the process of going from what is essentially sounding like a crime of opportunity, you know, this is what we generally provision ships with. But you know what, you're a long way from home and you've got something else over there. So just when you run out, go buy some what you need. Yeah. So going from that through to this is a big, big business basically of provisioning.
00:28:35
Speaker
I have to imagine that things changed a lot in that time in terms of how it was made. So before we get into that, I'm really interested from a technical point of view to go back to, I think you said it was sort of 1640 to sort of, I guess 1660. Yeah, when Caribbean dramas we know it. Sort of started. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. So what do we know?
00:28:58
Speaker
about how it was produced then and then like do we know everything about how it was produced in that time period or do we have to guess? We have a fairly good idea and it's interesting is that in the study of rum you learn a lot from the study of whiskey or the study of other spirits and think about it 16 you know the
00:29:25
Speaker
I don't know. I won't get ahead of myself here. But essentially, when you think about it, when you think about what distillation technology was available in the 1650s. Pot stills. Yeah, single to basically a pot still, just like, you know, a single malt scotch whiskey is made today, like, you got a still, it's got a neck on it, you still it.
00:29:46
Speaker
You get low winds, you put it back in, you distill it again, you get a spirit. So that was the only technology available was a simple regular pot still from about 1650 until the 1800s. And I'll come back to that in a moment. Then on top of that, it was what was the
00:30:08
Speaker
What were they fermenting? What were they actually distilling from? Well, it was typically probably some combination of molasses, cane juice, and basically whatever had some fermentable sugar in it that they couldn't turn into real sugar,
00:30:30
Speaker
It's primarily canes or molasses. But interestingly, at some point they noticed that they could use what was left in the still after distillation run. They could put it into the mash of the next run.
00:30:50
Speaker
And then on the next batch. And so basically, and if you think about it, water was hard to come by is like, unless you're sitting by a stream or something like that. I never thought of it from that point of view. I thought it would have been purely a stylistic or if, yeah, that makes so much sense.
00:31:08
Speaker
It was, it was entirely think about it was hard to do this. And so they'd be like, okay, we have this, this, all this molasses or king juice or spoiled king juice or whatever left behind. Um, so we're going to like try to ferment it and make some room out of it. Um, and you know, again, water, not necessarily readily available. You don't, there's no public water supplies. So after your first distillation run, like what, what have you, what have you got left in the still? You got a whole lot of water.
00:31:37
Speaker
after you're stripping run, you've got a whole lot of water left in the still. It's gotta be more acidic, but that's okay. It actually turns out, that's a benefit, it turns out in run making. They basically sort of like reusing the water from, you know, your banasse in French, basically put that, that becomes part of your mash recipe, but basically like some parts cane juice, some parts molasses, some part,
00:32:05
Speaker
the venous also skimmings, which would be the when you boil the sugar, when you boil the cane juice to create the sugar crystals from it, you sort of get this little head on it, this little crusty head. And those have fermentable sugars as well. And so it was literally what was left after they had made sugar. After taking the sugar and boiling it in pans, and I could nerd out about
00:32:32
Speaker
the original sugar production for hours. But after taking cane juice, boiling it, extracting sugar, anything left behind that had sugar remaining in it got to go into a cistern and they're going to like somehow get yeast in there and they're going to going to ferment it as best as possible and make rum. So it was not it was not this sort of highly specific thing of recipes like we have today of like 100 gallons of water and 23 gallons of molasses and 14 gallons of yeast. It was it was literally like
00:33:03
Speaker
What's the trash we have around? Throw that in, and we'll see how much we can get out of it. So the variance would be huge, I would have to imagine. And we're going to the extreme of, oh, man, we've got a whole lot of pineapples over there that are about to go off, because whatever. Let's try that again. Yeah. I mean, it was crazy.
00:33:34
Speaker
a horrifying story, but it's a Jamaican book I have. And basically, they would put
00:33:44
Speaker
human excrement into into like them into like them leftover molasses to to basically prevent us to prevent those enslaved people from basically consuming it as it started to ferment. So that would literally you would you have you would get just the most awful vile stuff would end up in the ferment. And so it doesn't matter because at the end, it's like, hey, it's like
00:34:14
Speaker
you're distilling it, you're taking out the alcohol, you're basically distilling, purifies everything. But yeah, there was no highly set recipe. It was like some distillers might have used mostly skimming, some may have used some wasted or some not so great cane juice. It was like, if it's got fermentable sugar, they figured it out and they throw it in and make the best of it. It varied wildly throughout the season.
00:34:44
Speaker
as things change, it would vary wildly from distillery to distillery. It was basically the wild west. I love it. So that's still a long, long way away from these formation of stiles. But what we do know is that for the first, from 1640 onward,
00:35:03
Speaker
for many, many years, it was simple pop distillation. That's all anybody had. Yeah, right. And then like, were they making structured cuts? Was there anything about that? Or was it literally just everything that came off the stool? You can't do it. Oh, yeah, I mean, I mean, there was some notion of cuts and that kind of stuff. I mean, they weren't just, yeah, they were, they were, you know, by that point in time, you know, you were seeing, you know,
00:35:30
Speaker
there was brandy distillation going on in Europe, for example. So that sort of the knowledge sort of fed over from the different types of spirits, like they were all learning from each other, adopting each other's technology. So yeah, I mean, it wasn't bad, certainly not bad. I mean, I've had rum distilled in 1780, which is a lovely rum. But the sort of where things really started to take off
00:36:01
Speaker
is around the 1800s, early 1800s, basically the start of the Industrial Revolution. One of the most important things that came out of that was the invention of the continuous distillation. That that was the first time like, oh, we can instead of doing a batch and then claiming to still and then distilling it again, that it was like, you know, continuous distillation. And it wasn't just coffee, it was a bunch of
00:36:30
Speaker
of different inventors from UK, from France, primarily, but there was sort of an explosion of different sort of continuous distillation technologies that occurred at the beginning of the 1800s. Equally important for Caribbean rum, maybe less so elsewhere, as there was also, as far as I know, it was the early 1800s was also the first
00:36:54
Speaker
introduction of what you what we call retorts or like whiskey a thumper essentially instead of doing you know the doing instead of doing what we would call single malt scotch whiskey distilling two times through a still
00:37:10
Speaker
they would basically put a retort on it, maybe even a second retort on it. And so in one pass, they could end up with, let's say in a 75 or 80% alcohol spirit, instead of having to steal it twice. So, you know, whereas, you know, whiskey sort of like ran quickly towards the continuous thing. It wasn't until the mid 1850s or later that that sort of
00:37:37
Speaker
continuous distillation really took off in the Caribbean. But we did see a little earlier in the 1800s, we saw like the retort, like the double retort come to the Caribbean. And that's a classic double retort, you know, the state or whatever. And my understanding is it was actually, you know, developed in the UK, but migrated to the Caribbean and the Caribbean's loved it. And, you know, other spirits
00:38:07
Speaker
never really adopted the double retort. So that's that's a sort of emblematic, you know, Caribbean distillation technique is this double retort. You know, when we think about like classic Jamaican rum, for example, it's this double retort rum. And it's still it's still that way to this day, like if you look at most
00:38:30
Speaker
pot still in the Caribbean today. It's done in a double retort. It's not done in a single report like scotch whiskey or not done in a, it's not twice as still. Yeah. So that's still just today. There's a few simple pots in the Caribbean, but for the most part, and St. Lucia distillers, all that you make in distilleries, Demar distiller has one. The majority of the pot still, pot stills in the Caribbean are double retorts.
00:38:59
Speaker
Let's get a little off topic here and just jump into that for a second. So is there a distinct change in the characteristic of a rum that is produced from double distillation, like double pot distillation versus a double retort?
00:39:17
Speaker
That's a great question. I don't really know the answer to that. I've never seen a distillery do it both ways. Yeah, exactly. You'd want the same wash. Yeah, you'd want the same wash. I'm trying to think. It's funny. I know, for example, Pierre Ferrant, Plantation Realm, they have taken some of their
00:39:47
Speaker
They've taken Caribbean molasses and like the yeast they use in the Caribbean and done a fermentation in cognac and then distilled it on a cognac still. So they have done that. I have tasted that and to be honest, I can't remember how it tasted. But yeah, we don't see, there's not a whole lot of
00:40:12
Speaker
not a whole lot of ability to do side by side on this. It's a good question. Is there even a, you know, just stepping back from that to a completely anecdotal, if you rounded up?
00:40:25
Speaker
the distilleries that do double pot still and then put them next to the distilleries that do double retort and start to make a comparison. I'm just trying to think off of my head of anybody who does in the
00:40:46
Speaker
I'm drawing, you know, somebody will correct me, I'm sure, but I can't think of any major Caribbean story that has just the standalone, single, I'm really sweating some heads here. But I've put you on the spot. Essentially, the, for example, you'd say like, like in St. Lucian stillers, they have their they've been domed still, which is
00:41:16
Speaker
which is not a double retort, but it does have a rectifier column on top of it. So you would see a single pot still out there. There's typically some rectifier on it as well, such that they are not necessarily running through twice.
00:41:33
Speaker
Okay, yeah. Because let's face it, the amount of the amount of extra work, both in terms of man hours, and also in terms of like physics work, just the amount of energy that goes into it is just ridiculous. Like double distilling out of a pot still. And that's why that's why they love to retort is that was one of one of the key things like it was an energy savings that that
00:41:59
Speaker
I mean, I assume most of your audience knows this, but in this double retort, you only have to heat it once. You don't have to heat the retort. All the energy that's generated in the initial pot literally causes the re-distillation in the first retort and then the second retort. You're essentially creating, it's kind of like a three-plate column. If you're thinking about it the right way, it's kind of like a three-plate column, but it's all driven by the heat in the original pot.
00:42:30
Speaker
And not only that, it acts what the old school sort of moonshiners and stuff would call a slobber box. So I mean, let's remember too, guys. This is not, oh, things are getting a little bit hot. I'll just turn the knob down a little. So having the double retort, if you do get a little bit.
00:42:49
Speaker
little bit feisty on the on the original pot and you do get a little bit of puking or boil over into the the first retort, the retort will catch it and you're not ruining you know everything you've collected so far. I have to imagine from a production value but then that was gold too. It's also fascinating just to see like like you know the way they charge the retorts like what they
00:43:12
Speaker
pick what they call the low winds and high winds, and the Caribbean are not what we think of as the low winds and the high winds. Oh, do explain. In Scotland. So when the, and I can't promise I've got this 100% correct, but in general, what comes with the output of your double retort, when you distill it, it basically comes off, it comes off is actually like the highest strength first,
00:43:41
Speaker
And so essentially they will, what comes out, the end result coming off of a retort, you know, you take, there's the heads cut. So typically fairly small heads cut. And then there's, you know, the body or the hearts is, is essentially from about something like 90% ABV down to something like 70% ABV.
00:44:02
Speaker
And they collect that as sort of like the body. And then everything continues to come off as what is lower. And they call that the low winds. Interesting. Okay, so that's the tails. So again, I'm speaking off the top of my head, but what we'd call the heads are what they call the high winds and tails or the low winds, but they're really just separated in time.
00:44:30
Speaker
um coming out to retort but then those then go back and we can get recharged to retort the next time around so yeah i think it's the i think i think it's the low lines go into first retort and the high lines go into second retort like like i said i haven't i haven't
00:44:49
Speaker
Hadn't wrapped my head around this for several weeks now. But yeah, literally, you know, when they do the next distillation run, the retort is precharged with basically the non-harts from the prior run. I'm not a distiller, so I've never instilled anything.
00:45:09
Speaker
As opposed to Scotland, where the low wines is the result of everything that comes off the stripping line or the first distillation. Yeah, right. Okay, that's really interesting. Yeah, different terminology. Confused of a lot of Scott Twisky people you try to explain this to.
00:45:27
Speaker
Oh yeah, and it's a constant source of arguments in distilling forums and stuff too, because different people from different areas will use the same English word. Right. Different concepts, yeah.
00:45:42
Speaker
completely different things. So I have to imagine that this new technology, the double retort, is one of the big things that then allows the British Navy to be able to produce enough rum to really make Royal Navy rum. Is that correct?
00:46:05
Speaker
Yes and no, I'd say. The Royal Navy never made it. They never made it. They never made it. They were essentially the Royal Navy from about 1800 on when they basically started blending their own rum. Prior to that, they were basically having, basically dialing up the equivalent of Amazon and saying, you know, please deliver like 100 cask this ship off in, say, Grenada.
00:46:35
Speaker
Around 1800, they started blending it themselves and they basically were ordering from the British merchants, the ones who were in London or Liverpool near their supply yards. It's like, hey, we need some rum. Everybody submit bids and basically give us samples of the rum you have for sale and we want to buy 50,000 gallons this time.
00:47:01
Speaker
But the rums available to them, easily available to them, were from the British Caribbean. If you think about it in 1800, the Spanish Caribbean distillation hadn't really taken off. They were basically prohibited from distilling up until around 1796. Same with the French. The French were not really just going gangbusters with distilling the Caribbean.
00:47:32
Speaker
you know, back in France, they were protecting their brandy market. So the British, you know, in this, by the, you know, 1700, 1800 British, at least beginning of the 1800, the British dominated Caribbean rum. So that was what was available. And this also looked at the rum merchants in London, elsewhere in England. That's what they had available to them. So they were basically buying, basically buying, you know,
00:48:00
Speaker
runs primarily from Jamaica Barbados, a little bit later, British Guyana, Demerara came online. But basically, it changed over time, what they were buying changed over time. But in 1800, we can safely say everything was pot distilled. And then by the time
00:48:25
Speaker
double retorts came along. Um, we're hitting the Caribbean and say the 18th or just 1840s. Oh, was that like, was it? Yeah, I don't know exactly when the double retort first made it there, but any of the earliest reference I've seen to one is around 1840 or so. Ah, okay. Right. Yeah. But also as well, as well, we started also seeing around the same time, we started seeing
00:48:54
Speaker
column distillation infiltrate with the Caribbean. It didn't actually go to Jamaica. Jamaica didn't get a column still until 1960. But places like British Guyana, which were rapidly coming up to speed and making more and more rum, they adopted the column pretty early. In fact, just the other day,
00:49:18
Speaker
came across, discovered an 1862 patent for the wooden coffee still from British Guyana. Yeah there basically it was the idea of like it was basically the idea of a coffee column still but made in a square out of wood out of British Guyana what they call green heart wood and you may or may not know this there is still one of these operating today in Guyana. What?
00:49:47
Speaker
The one distillery in Guyana, Demerite Distillers, has three wooden stills right now. Wow. So I've seen and heard people talk about in the home distilling circles, actually seen a couple of people make, oh man, I'm so bad, I can't remember the actual name of it, but it was essentially a flat sheet of copper
00:50:11
Speaker
rolled this way with two wooden boards on either side, and that was the hot of the still. Does that and that was definitely related to rum. Okay, so what they had and what they were so what and what basically what these things wooden coffee stills are quite a few of them are essentially this green hard wood is incredibly
00:50:34
Speaker
incredibly heavy, very dense. You can basically like, they would build like piers out of it because it wasn't going to decompose water. And so they basically would basically build a wooden frame and then have like a rectangular copper plate, you know, sort of like set inside of the frame. And then another one, they literally stacking up these frames with these. So, but it was a full, it's still there in Denver. It's still there today. I've seen it in person.
00:51:01
Speaker
I've written about it on my website. Basically, there was this what they called a, it's called the Enmore still after the plantation is from. That one was built in 1880, but there were many more around there. So they have that, but on top of that, they actually have two, what they call Demer bat stills. And that's where your kettle is basically a wooden bat.
00:51:25
Speaker
So giant stave, like staves align the shape of the vat. I think they're, I think the simplest one diverse, what they call the Versailles still, one wooden vat, I think the capacity is something like 2,500 gallons in the vat. The other one, the most famous one, and I'm going to tie this back to Royal Navy Room. The most famous one is what they call Port Morant still, which is actually two wooden vats,
00:51:55
Speaker
They sort of look like a Scotch whiskey still, but it's two wooden vats with the goose net coming out of it, but they charge both vats, and then the output from the first bat goes into the second bat, so it's not a retort. Literally, you fill up two vats with your mash, heat the first one,
00:52:21
Speaker
and gooseneks into the second one, heats back, and that boils off, or that flows through that and goes into a rectifier column. No, that's a retort.
00:52:34
Speaker
and then a rectifier column on top of the report. It's this crazy set up. It makes this phenomenally distinctive rum, unlike anything you've ever tasted before. It's like a very, it's a ton of interesting fusil oils. It's, for me, it's sort of like,
00:52:59
Speaker
Like leather in green vine, it's just Yeah, fine. Yeah fine. Yeah fine. If you're a fine port moron rum, they'll drink it and say like this is unlike any room I've ever had in my life That rum is the signature note of Royal Navy rum that that is That that like basically from my perspective if it doesn't have this port moron want rum from this one still as part of it
00:53:28
Speaker
It's not really a royal navy rock. It's so distinctive of a note. So this is definitely foreshadowing of what I really want to get through. I think we're getting there soon. So now we've got early 1800s. I think it's kind of where we got the story to, right? And there's British in the Caribbean area.
00:53:54
Speaker
making a lot of rum. Shipping and primarily shipping it back to the UK. Yeah, I was just going to say that's exactly what I was going to say. I have to imagine their largest drive to produce was to get it back home basically. So then you've got the British Navy then bartering and wheeling and dealing with... Yeah, basically buying from the local suppliers.
00:54:20
Speaker
too. They had identified a flavor profile, like this is what we wanted to taste like. So this is where the flavor profile pops up, is it? And this is kind of where I was heading. Yeah, okay. So it's around this 1800. And this is because they've got their hands on enough product where they can start blending. Is that the reason that they're starting to target a specific flavor? Yeah, blending. And again, it's a good point. Essentially,
00:54:47
Speaker
people and it sort of ties into this notion of blended thought from a whole other dimension. We don't have to go into it. But essentially, people think the British the British Navy was was buying rum and bringing it to London and putting it in the cask and letting it sit for five years or whatever. It's like, no, not at all. Actually, the rum that was coming over was was basically unaged rum. It was like made in made in Guyana made in Jamaica made in
00:55:16
Speaker
St. Lucia, whatever, putting a cask shipped over to the UK and then the Navy would buy it and then put it into the most amazing batting system the world's ever seen. Oh, okay. You can't tease that. They weren't putting it in cask and letting it go sit in a warehouse somewhere. They had by the 1840s, the earliest, or at least by the 1840s,
00:55:45
Speaker
that they had a series of interconnected vats. Some of these vats were 30,000 gallons in size and all, but they were all connected with each other. Sorry, I've got to, I've got to convert to not freedom units. 30,000, that's about 120,000, about 110,000 liters. 110, 120,000 liters. And actually those, those would have been, those gallons would have been, I'm sorry, I'm going to do that again.
00:56:15
Speaker
those were, uh, Imperial gallons. So, so 30,000 gallons would actually be around 140,000 later. And you said, like clue that they had something like 30, 30 vats, not all that, especially barrels would come in, dump them into the bats and then they would basically
00:56:39
Speaker
circulate them. We this is the big mystery I can't solve is is where they kind of keeping them separate to the end where they just throwing them all into vats and literally just all circulating amongst them. We don't know exactly how they were controlling the circulation but it was it was essentially if you think about it was kind of like a Celera in this. Yeah. There's always rum new rum going in goes through some series of vats and then
00:57:09
Speaker
Comes out the end when it's done at the end. They would they wanted it to be at Issuing strength what they call DV strength, which is all sorts of confusion about that but We go, you know would come in as basically if the terminology of the day would have been 40 overproof so about a hundred about a hundred sixty US crew for about eighty percent EVV go into the bats and
00:57:36
Speaker
Circulate amongst them and different reports some say six months. Some say two years, but at some point emerged from the issuing bats at around Proof or around 57% ABB So with a change but but essentially flowing between the bats and basically Aging and evaporating and basically smoothing within the bats for a short period of time
00:58:02
Speaker
And were they circulating it just to keep everything homogenous so they didn't have that a tasted different to that Z? That's what we don't know. That's my holy grail is to find any sort of written records as to
00:58:17
Speaker
what they were doing there. We know from the descriptions that there were lots of vats, that they were all connected, that they had the ability to circulate between each other. But I dearly believe that in some navy museum archive lost somewhere
00:58:42
Speaker
blenders notes and what they're doing that you know that that's my Ark of the Covenant if you will. So you've got this description of what they could physically do but you don't know what their their goal what they're putting to me and we know what's going in and we know what they were coming out but we don't know like where they
00:59:05
Speaker
trying to keep the Barbados rums separate from the Trinidad rums. We don't know. We don't know, but how they were managing it with their pipelines was all just one big stew. We don't know. I can see why that's so tantalizingly because my brain automatically starts thinking of
00:59:30
Speaker
Okay, you've got the scaffolding in terms of what's physically possible. What would you do? Yeah, so you could have, like you say, you could be putting all the similar style or the similar tasting rums into each different vat, and then you can almost blend out of those, right? So you can pull 2% from this and 10% from that.
00:59:50
Speaker
And he's like, okay, these five vats for this flavor profile, and these 10 vats, these three vats for this, and then blend it at the end, or are they all circulating? We don't know. And I've had a good spirited conversation with David Wunderich about this. We can go back and forth on what that went. And I've also spoken with Dave Broom about this. He's done a lot of research in as well. And none of us really know what was going on.
01:00:20
Speaker
Oh man, I really hope you get to find it. Well, it's kind of one of those things, isn't it? It's almost like, it's almost sometimes just not knowing and having those conversations. It's that old, you know, that horrible adage of the journey is better than the destination sometimes. I don't know. So I wish you much joy eventually finding out.
01:00:45
Speaker
What's the real answer? I found the more history I do, the more I have these little white whales. When did the first column still come to the Caribbean? When did maybe strength change? When was the first hydrometer officially used? All these little questions. And you're trying to infer a truth
01:01:13
Speaker
from little scraps of incidental information. It's like, well, if this is true, and this is true, then this must be true. It's like putting together a puzzle where you don't actually see what the pieces contain. You don't know what it's going to look like. You just said, hydrometer. Interesting for me, starting to think about this world, because a lot of what I've done is,
01:01:40
Speaker
focused on what happens now and products and going after certain styles now, but not really thinking about where they came from and just kind of the stories behind it. This is fascinating for you.
01:01:53
Speaker
I'm imagining you're in a world where you're trading and you're selling and there's no internet. You can't just look up, oh, I'm about to buy from Joe Bloggs. Turns out Joe Bloggs is a shark. Nope. I'll pass on that because whatever I've seen is review. You can't do that, right? So it's all word of mouth and it's all literally
01:02:12
Speaker
the old school art of buying and selling and trying to figure out if this guy's full of shit or not. A hydrometer has to be a game changer in that world, surely in terms of people like fake products or watering products down or like, was that a thing?
01:02:30
Speaker
So yeah, so I was like, is fast. Yes. Fascinating. And you know, what I call them rabbit holes, a little fascinating rabbit holes I run down. Did we just never expecting like, I'm going to be studying the history of alcoholic strength measurement. But turns out, as best I can tell the the so a there's some myth that you know, there's often again,
01:02:59
Speaker
history reported incorrectly of like, you know, the British Navy used to test the strength of their rum by lighting it on fire with with with gunpowder gunpowder ignited it was proof strength and there's all this
01:03:11
Speaker
myth is out there. And it's like, there's some small kernel of truth in that, but the reality is much, much different. But, you know, as part of that myth, it's like, well, they would use the, you know, out in the ocean, they would be like lighting gunpowder and rum on fire. I'm like, that's a dumb thing, too, on a wooden ship. But, but it was like, yay, barely in 1816, the psychsiderometer came along and
01:03:38
Speaker
solved that problem. It's like, it's a great, great story, except that the psychsiderometer replaced the, an earlier hydrometer, the Clark's hydrometer, which was around since 1731, I think, around 1730, the prior hydrometer. In fact, in fact, you know, I was like, this is one of the first myths I sort of dispelled in my head was like,
01:04:00
Speaker
Oh, you know, the psych's hydrometer is like 1816. I'm like, no, I have a letter written. Like I held this in my hand in the British National Archives, basically a letter to, I'm forgetting his name, basically the British commander at, oh Lord, let's say that, British commander at Bunker Hill, like the American Revolution.
01:04:28
Speaker
the British commander in North America, who was the commander at Bunker Hill, one of the seminal battles of American history, and basically a letter to this guy saying, like, you know, yay, barely, like, we've sent you some rum, here, we're sending you some gasket rum, and by the way, we're sending you a hydrometer for you to guarantee that's the strength it's supposed to be. So, like, here we have in 1777, we have a letter referencing a hydrometer.
01:04:55
Speaker
predating Sykes by almost 50 years. So I started digging back more and more and more and like, oh, large hydrometer, 1730, like, well, okay, so why did they invent this? And the best I know, like many things, taxes. The Brits, you know, the Brits like to fight wars, and they like to go out and, you know,
01:05:18
Speaker
plunder and conquer and, you know, what do you cost money to do that? It's like, well, where do you, where do you get money? Well, one way is you're taxing spirits. Um, and so, but you can't really have your excise man going out there and going like, I think you owe this much. You need some objective, some objective measure of how much to tax, not just the quantity, but the strength of the spirit. So.
01:05:44
Speaker
So there were there were you know up to that point there were like crude measurements of of strength like there's a thing like what they call like Bile and some bubbles something about like you put you take put a sample of spirit
01:05:59
Speaker
and you would swirl it or something and by counting the number of bubbles, you could infer like, is it above or below? I've got to interrupt you here because this is still a thing with a certain subset of the home distillers community is the guessing the proof thing. And I, oh man, don't get me started. We have hydrometers people, we have hydrometers, alchemeters, proof trails.
01:06:29
Speaker
But yeah, so they had these various crude tests and there was actually some, I think there was a test about involving like oil, like, oh, there's a particular type of oil and there's actually like advertisements of like rum of sufficient, sufficient strength that oil will float. Something about like some type of oil, put it in spirit, like if it floated, it was at least this strength. If it was under, if it was not sufficient strength, it would sink.
01:06:58
Speaker
Some tests like that. So these are basically sort of like very crude, like at least or less dense, right? But Clark's hydrometer, which just kind of looks kind of like the Sykes hydrometer, but basically like a series of weights that we're trying to compensate for, like temperature and all sorts of stuff. I think the Sykes hydrometer has something like six or seven weights that you would put a dress based upon various conditions, you'd adjust the weight. The Clark's hydrometer at one point, there was like some version of it
01:07:27
Speaker
to over 200 different weights. It's basically like a little manual. Here's the weights you need to apply in which order based upon these conditions to try to accurately gauge the strength of the spirit. But we do know that there was a hydrometer at least from around 1730 or 1740 onwards. The measurements were crude, not necessarily always accurate. They could be fudged.
01:07:56
Speaker
Sykes came along and basically Sykes won a competition to design a replacement for the Clark's hydrometer. Basically won the British government contract to make these hydrometers promptly died.
01:08:17
Speaker
Basically, his family basically is like his wife and his son basically had to like, take over and basically keep the contract and make it going forward or whatever. So they said that the study of measuring alcoholic strength is enormous rabbit hole to go down. That's fascinating. All right, sorry. Yes, I have. We can go off. Yeah.
01:08:45
Speaker
All right. So, so now we've got these, these dirty, great, like basically from what I can tell the biggest Celera system I've ever heard of, uh, Spanish style Celera, but kind of the idea always kept going in and all the stuff going out. Yeah. I use the term very lightly. Yeah. I, I, I, the rum world is rife with people going like, that's not really a Celera and Celera is bullshit. And like,
01:09:11
Speaker
You've got to define what you mean by celera. Yeah. And I guess especially when you start mixing passionate people about a certain category of alcohol with people.
01:09:22
Speaker
with history as well. That makes it worse. So I apologize, but I used the term loosely. Um, so, so now you've got this, this huge operation and, and this is kind of birthed. Is this the birth of a category? Like as what we think of a category now? Um, I mean, now, yeah, now we think of, of, of maybe around as a category, um, it's sort of, it's, it's kind of an oddball category is not a category of the way we think of say, it's raw magical,
01:09:51
Speaker
or Spanish heritage rum. It's much more sort of like tightly defined and sort of in one general dimension. What's interesting is that by the late 1800s, we start seeing navy rum being sold to consumers, not by the navy, but by the rum merchants who basically
01:10:21
Speaker
you know, as the sailors, you know, would come out of the Navy and go into civilian life, they loved the flavor of their Navy rum. So basically, brands basically started like, hey, we're going to make something that tastes kind of like the Navy rum with the same component rums. And interestingly, some of the earliest advertisements we see for it were like
01:10:47
Speaker
Definitely. I was Australia and possibly New Zealand. I'd have to go look at my records. Really? Yeah. But yeah, there was this, it's kind of, you know, as in England, we start seeing like the evolution of brands and bottle products. And then you start seeing names like Lemon Heart Pop-Up or Red Heart Rum or whatever. It's almost simultaneously available.
01:11:09
Speaker
in your part of the world. Yeah, there's some, like I said, I think the earliest reference to maybe rum being sold to consumers by a rum brand, not actual name rum, is from your neck of the woods.
01:11:26
Speaker
Wow. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to have to follow up. I won't, I won't hold you to that now, but I'll follow up with you afterwards. So, so these people, how do I put it? It's enough of a thing that people want it as a consumer. And so what, at that point in time, what defines Navy rum? So if I, if I made a product and you made a product and we both put Navy rum on it,
01:11:52
Speaker
And a bunch of people drank it. And someone said, oh, Jesse, you're making a bollocks product that is not Lavi rum. You have no right to put that on the bottle. How would that differ from what you made that people celebrate? Right. So I'd say the defining characteristics, and actually I'll go back and say it's often described these days. It's described as a blend of rum, some Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and Guyana.
01:12:17
Speaker
As you saw in the article I was mentioning beforehand, like not a whole lot of Jamaican rum in there. People assume it was not a whole lot of Jamaican rum. But there's definitely a preponderance of heavier rums from the former British colonies. Basically a lot of, now what we call Guiana rum, Demerara rum, definitely some Demerara rum.
01:12:44
Speaker
later on Trinidad rum, but essentially heavier rums with a large amount of caramel, and not E150, not the caramel, but like the caramel they would make in the Caribbean, basically, like what they would call dark rums, they were not necessarily aged, they were dark because they would make
01:13:07
Speaker
make their own caramel and put a lot of it in there to where it was like a dark looking rum and enough to where you can definitely experience that caramel note in the rum. So heavy rum, heavy, I'd say like heavy, mostly pot stilled rums with a strong caramel note would be closest I could come up with. So you've got quite a, quite a feisty, I imagine high Ister
01:13:36
Speaker
high kind of thing going on. That's really high ester. Interesting. Think about that is if you think about like, so for example, that the Port Maranram that I talked about, it's extremely heavy. It's a very noticeable flavor, very polarizing. If you look at this ester level, it's about 30 to 40 grams per hectoliter. It's very low, not at all.
01:14:05
Speaker
compared with these Jamaican rums. So in the rum world in particular, we have this obsession with esters. But the reality is esters are one slice of the picture that many more flavors are actually higher alcohols, aldehydes, other things that aren't necessarily esters. Esters are these fruity notes, like bananas and pears and things like that.
01:14:32
Speaker
but these really heavy rums, and especially ones that are very phenolic, like crony, for example. Flavor is not esters. There's some esters in there, but the dominating flavors are not ester. So people have started, you know, people say like high ester to mean very flavorful. And, and I always correct that. I was like, okay, you know, it's like, there are high ester rums, but they, and they're very high in flavor, but it doesn't mean every
01:15:01
Speaker
very flavorful, heavy rum is a high ester rum. So, so when you say that this Navy strength rum was heavy, are you, so you're talking more on the, on the phenolic. Phenolic, the fusil oil, things like that. It's more grungy and earthy. The exact opposite of like Bacardi silvery.
01:15:28
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. All right. So we've got this deep. So it's, it's, it's, it's rum. I imagine before you go and slap the caramel in it, that drinks much more like a single malt does now rather than, so if you, yeah, if you got like Bacardi on the scene, it's, it's, it's way on the other side of the spectrum. Heavier pot to still think of it as like heavy pot. Think of it as almost like the, you know, like Lagavulin versus, uh, I don't know, uh,
01:15:57
Speaker
spring tank or something like that. I mean, if you look at the Lagavulin stills or like, look at how squat those necks are, you're not going to get a lot of separation. Like, you know, you get very clean, crisp spirits out of the palm necks and the Lagavulin stills are like this, you know, the same kind of idea of like wider cuts and bringing in more heads and tails if you are trying to make a very light, crisp spirit.
01:16:26
Speaker
So it's a, it's a heavy, excuse me, heavy, phenolic rum that's then being mixed, like basically back sweetened with the caramel. Yeah. That is the main about how sweet the caramel was or not. But yeah. Okay. And, and was that, how do I put it? Was that a, like a cosmetic choice or was it, this rum is so,
01:16:56
Speaker
like heavy and serious that we have to basically make it more appealing or was it? I don't know. That's a, that's a, that's a good question. We don't, again, this is, it's one of those things of like, I would dearly love to find somebody's notes from that era, but we definitely know that they were, that they were adding those dark rums and dark in the sense of heavily covered with heavily, um, flavored with caramel in spirit care.
01:17:24
Speaker
disparate caramel time. But it's one of those unfortunate things of like the questions we have now as spirits, enthusiasts, we're not necessarily like what the British excise manuals were bothered to write about. So we look for clues elsewhere. And I don't actually, I don't really know.
01:17:47
Speaker
Yeah, interesting. And so was this, was the idea of adding caramel or other, any other sort of sort of sweetener, is that something that came from further back in history too, or is that a thing that popped up here? I mean, definitely predated, you know, the 1800s, but again, they would, they would, if you look in advertisements for rum, it would basically be like, say this, um, it would be like such and such a state dark rum or light rum.
01:18:15
Speaker
And they were essentially the same rum. It was just, do you, do you, do you want to put a lot of, a lot of caramel in it for you? They were, yeah, it was not at all about aging, but it was, but yeah, dark, dark and light rum, which, which is a scourge today. Like I hate to describe this light from the dark rum, because it's so misleading and so many problems with it. But back in the day, it was like legitimately like.
01:18:41
Speaker
Rum was an age, really. I mean, it was they basically they weren't like it wasn't like
01:18:46
Speaker
you know, Hampton Estate in 1749 was, was distilling the rum and putting it in a warehouse for eight years to sell to you. It was like, you made rum, you shipped it off. It was a commodity. Yeah. And the agent was no longer sat in the barrel to get to where it needed to go. Exactly. Yeah. You weren't engaging it on site. You weren't, you wasn't going in a branded bottle. It was, it was a commodity. Yeah. But you could get it light or you could get it dark. And those were your two choices really.
01:19:14
Speaker
So, but you don't think that the idea of adding caramel went way back to where I started? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'd have to go research that. Now I'm curious.
01:19:25
Speaker
a little archive where I can quickly find information like that. But I don't know off the top of my head. Yeah, no problem. All right. So we're up to sort of the late 1800s now. And has there been any distinct change from then through to now? Because I'm guessing that the British Navy no longer get doled out rum.
01:19:49
Speaker
on a daily basis in 2021. Not anymore. So essentially over the years, they basically changed the amount of rum issued. They were changed not only the amount of rum, but also sometimes the dilution ratio. Interestingly, it was in 1866 that they
01:20:16
Speaker
quantified that Royal Navy Rum would be issued at 4.5 degrees under proof. So basically 4.5% less than proof, which is 57% ABB. 54.5%. So for all the people, all the people are going like Royal Navy Rum, over proof. No, actually it was under proof. It was actually less, it was less strong than a proof spirit. Certainly not an over proof spirit.
01:20:48
Speaker
from 1866 onwards. But as well, the officers continued to be able to get, they could get their rum meat, but it was sort of like the lower, you know, the non-officers, they were the ones who got it diluted. So you got the same amount of rum, but the officers got the drink of meat, and everybody else got it diluted. And then over the years, there was something like, well, it's going to be three, you know, three parts water, one part rum. Now it's going to be two parts, and now it's going to be three parts again.
01:21:16
Speaker
now we're going to give you half in the morning and half in the evening. Like they would constantly sort of switching, switching it up or whatever. But by, um, but in basically 1969, they said, you know, basically like, I think they use the words, like we are a modern Navy and you know, we have nuclear weapons now and missiles and we can't have half-plowed people, you know, making these decisions. So they basically said,
01:21:41
Speaker
gave early on July 31st, 1970, Black Dot Day, no more daily issue. So back up, there was a point in time where there was a Navy that had nuclear weapons and sailors getting a daily dose of rum.
01:22:04
Speaker
And actually, well, let me say, not eight, not eight, maybe probably several. No, the Royal Navy had the ration until 1970. I think, if I remember correctly, was it New Zealand? Had it until 1991. Maybe it was Canada. One of the other British sort of former British colonies had it until like 1991. I forget, like Australia had it for some point. I'm drawing a blank on all the other ones.
01:22:33
Speaker
Hell, even America had a spirit ration until 1862 and Lincoln killed it. It is just bizarre to me. It's interesting too, because so now I see overproofed in terms of rum thrown around. People have no idea what it means. Yeah, like almost to mean just
01:22:55
Speaker
It's more than 40%. Do you know what I mean? Like, oh, it's 45%. It's proof from like, does it even have a meaning anymore? It does. It does. And this is what I, what I, what I sort of rant and rape about proof. A proof spirit is defined, um, by the British government. I can, I have the 18, 16, um, decree with the psychs hydrometer. And basically a proof spirit is exactly.
01:23:22
Speaker
Basically, what happens is what you get when you combine 13 parts of pure spirit and 12 parts of water at this temperature. Not terribly useful to most people, but if you do that, if you actually create that spirit, it turns out to be 57% ABV. 57.14% ABV. That was the official British definition of proof.
01:23:51
Speaker
Completely independent of what the Americans did, two times ABB. The British definition of proof was, was this sort of weird thing which faced those 57.15% ABB. And in fact,
01:24:07
Speaker
When they would put on a label a bottle, like how strong it is, they would put it in units of how much above, like what percentage above proof, like proof is around its point. So they would say, for example, this bottle's 10 degrees over proof. That would be 10% more than 57% ABV. So 10% of 57% is 5.7%. So 57% plus 5.7%
01:24:37
Speaker
10 degrees overproof, or 30 degrees underproof would be 30% less than 57, so around 80, or I'm sorry, around 40% ABV. So the proof was the reference point, 57% ABV was stronger, it was overproof, it was less strong than underproof. That was the way they did it up until 1980. That was the official
01:25:04
Speaker
So it's funny when you see old, old British bottles and you say like 70 proof, people are like, what is it? Like, I like, no, it's not, it's like not 70 American proof. It's, it's seven tenths of full British proof. So it's around 40%. Yeah. Really confusing to people. So it really is. And, and, and I guess, so there's still this, the, the, there's a lot of things out there marketed as Navy rum, Navy.
01:25:34
Speaker
Navy strength of 57% is my biggest pet peeve in this space. Navy strength was not 57%, it was 54.5%. I literally have the note from the Navy that says, yay, barely, it's 4.5 degrees under proof. That is 54.5% ABV. And in fact, if you go,
01:25:59
Speaker
look at the Royal Navy ROM that's still just today, which would be the Blacktop ROM. What's the strength of it? 54.3% or basically 54.5% EBV. If you go look at Pusser's ROM, the ROM
01:26:15
Speaker
that, you know, the Royal Navy gave the recipe Charles Tobias in 1978 or 79 to make what did they originally come out at? 54.5% ABV. There's all these drums and gins as well. Navy strength 57%. And they're wrong. They're historically wrong. Oh, that's hilarious. So this this leads on to, I guess that the culmination of all of this for me is if I was going to go out and buy
01:26:44
Speaker
in a Royal Navy rum that I can find on the shelf that's relatively widespread, what would you say is the classic example of the style? And is there a difference between, can you say this is the bottle that I would say you should go and get to be more historically correct versus what defines the quote unquote category now?
Navy Rum's Legacy and Modern Debate
01:27:10
Speaker
Is there a difference? Yeah. Yeah, good question.
01:27:15
Speaker
I would say I have to answer carefully, but I know people doing this stuff. They're friends of mine. But I would say the Black Tot Last Consignment, which is specifically that name, is marketed by the Whiskey Exchange. They're good friends of mine. But that is actual Royal Navy rum. That's basically rum that was in flaggings. They bought the flaggings.
01:27:45
Speaker
opened the flag and checked it out, mixed them together at some point. And that's what they put out is Black Dot Alaska Assignment. And US dollars will run you 800 to 1,000 US dollars for a $750. That is official Royal Navy Norm. I happen to have some of it sitting around here. In terms of matching the flavor profile, the closest thing I would say is might
01:28:17
Speaker
Pusser's gunpowder proof. So the Pusser, you know, Pusser's was, you know, the, you know, the story, as the story goes, they, they got the recipe from the Royal Navy. I actually interviewed Charles Tobias about this last year. They got the recipe from the Royal Navy and making it with the same ingredients, et cetera, et cetera. Obviously not the same batting system, but from what the,
01:28:45
Speaker
from what the sailors, you know, former Royal Navy sailors who were still around say like, you know, the pussers gunpowder proof is, is a fairly close taste representation of what, what it was like. That will run you around $40 US, much cheaper than 1000. I'd also say, so the whiskey exchange, you know, they have the last consignment, but they also
01:29:11
Speaker
came out with a slightly lower strength, like their blacktop finest Caribbean, which has a little Jamaican in it, which is not really used. But it's a lovely rum, and certainly in that style. It's very drinkable. Blacktop finest Caribbean. And then as well, like even if you sort of move away from specifically things calling them.
01:29:40
Speaker
British Navy or Royal Navy Rum. Something like, I don't know if it's available in the UK, but certainly in the UK, I'm sorry, I don't know if it's available in New Zealand, but in the UK, for example, Woods Navy or Woods Old Batted Demerara. Basically, if you had to shrink Navy Rum down to like one producer in one distillery, it would be like Demerara Rum.
01:30:09
Speaker
but then there's only one Demerara distillery now, Demerara distiller. And so Woods was OBD or I think it was like a Woods Navy or something like that, but heavily caramel. That's certainly stylistically within that sort of envelope of what the Royal Navy Rums were like.
01:30:29
Speaker
So you can go from that to actual Royal Navy Rum for 20 times the cost. Yeah, yeah. I don't think I'm going to be buying that. So as a commercial style, do you see it continuing to evolve at all? And if that does happen, how do you feel about that? That's a good question. I don't know. I've never thought about that specific question.
01:30:57
Speaker
It's certainly a style that's marketed based on its history. And I think a lot of rum geeks are interested in it. I don't necessarily know that it's going to become the must-have style for your cocktails. Yeah, right. I make a lot of Tiki cocktails, a lot of tropical libations, and the
01:31:25
Speaker
The navy rum makers are always pushing it, and you're like, no, historically, that's not what the tiki cocktails were using. They weren't using royal navy rum or simulations of royal navy rum. But it sort of like gets pushed into that space, things like.
Rum vs Whiskey Enthusiasts
01:31:40
Speaker
The Pusser's Painkiller, for example, uses pussers. My friend Mitch, when he sees this, I'll be like, what are you talking about? But I don't know. It's sort of like, if it's based on history, if it's sort of like, this is what it was like.
01:32:00
Speaker
Should it evolve? Like, do you want it to evolve? You know, it's, you know, it's sort of like, you know, there's certainly, there's certainly a market and a need for like, heavy, you know, heavy, finaki, fusilli, rum, like, we love this stuff, you know, stuff like coroni, like, market loves this stuff in the same way that there are people who love, you know, Lagavulans, Peat and Monster. There's certainly a market for it, like, should they evolve substantially? I don't know.
01:32:29
Speaker
Well, that's why I ask because it's a tricky thing, right? Because you'll talk to someone and say...
01:32:36
Speaker
you know, ask them a question, what are you into? Oh, I love, I just love traditional Scotch malt, like Lagervollen is my favorite. It's like, well, what date have you got written on the bottle? Because you don't really like traditional Scotch. You like, you like Scotch from a certain year, you know, like, it has changed, it will change. But then that's not,
01:32:59
Speaker
The reason I bring it up specifically in this case is that the very name of it is now not a thing anymore, right? Like Royal Navy Rum is not, they're not making that anymore. It's a different thing. It's sort of like, it's like, I'm forgetting the quote. Basically like, I know it when I see it. Like I have an expectation of what it is, but does that really hold up to scrutiny?
01:33:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's bizarre. So you mentioned that this is an interesting thing for me. So in the world of single malt, in the world of bourbon, in the world of most whiskeys, anyone who claims to be a serious whiskey person, it's almost uncouth or it's almost below you to talk about putting your beloved spirit into a cocktail.
01:33:55
Speaker
And it seems to be a little bit different in the world of rum. So like, do you want to, I haven't delved too deep into this world. So do you want to let me know? Like tell me what the deal is here. Oh, no. I mean, the, the, the rum world is blessed in that we is, is that our prices are far, far less than an equipment level of, um,
01:34:17
Speaker
of suburban, for example. So a rum like Appleton 12, which a beloved, everybody loves Appleton 12, might go for say $35 a bottle. It's equivalent in quality and taste and everything to 150 or $200 bourbon. So we benefit from A, just our prices are lower, but even putting that aside, say we also have such as enormous
01:34:46
Speaker
differences in flavor profile. At the end of the day, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but any competently made single malt scotch whiskey is going to have some sort of a banding of flavor. It's going to be somewhere
01:35:07
Speaker
in here, and you may decide that this, you know, the 18-year, you know, 18-year like, uh, glenalki is this, you know, but it's sort of like, there's still some band there. And it's like, with rum, you're like, okay, you've got funky Haitian Clarins, you've got, you've got a weird Jamaican, you've got this very smoky Caroni. It was an enormous flavor profile. You know,
01:35:30
Speaker
10 or 100 times more different weird flavors available. And they're inexpensive enough, many inexpensive enough that that you're like, why not? Why not use it in cocktail that from a Jamaican overproof from like rum fire. You know, we'll just like
01:35:49
Speaker
like obliterate a whiskey, somebody's only drinking whiskey, rum fire will just obliterate any perception. Like you may hate it, but you're like, this is weird. And this bottle costs like $20. You know, and it just, you know, and there are people who make rum-fired daiquiris left and right. Like, there's just, it's like, why the heck not? In fact, you know, the whole, the whole, you know, I've written basically, rum is the only
01:36:19
Speaker
spirit that has a sort of like associated affiliated cocktail community with it. Oh, it's a key thing. But I wrote, I wrote, you know, Minimos Tiki here, the whole section here in Rum. And basically, the Tiki, the category of Tiki drinks came about in the 1930s.
01:36:40
Speaker
and were basically almost entirely on rum. That was inexpensive Caribbean rum at the end of US prohibition. That there's all these classic Tiki drinks, hundreds of these classic Tiki drinks, almost all featuring rums that were A, relatively inexpensive, B, very flavorful. And that as Tiki's waxed and waned and come back in popularity now, it spurred
01:37:07
Speaker
like hardcore rum enthusiasts, like people like me, who mix my ties with the bandit, but we also have 300, $500 bottles of rum. My rum collection, I don't know, 300, 300, 400 bottles somewhere in that rum. I have been seeing crazy expensive, weird rums out there, but I'm also using them in cocktails. And it's like, no, it's like, what is the bourbon?
01:37:33
Speaker
adjacent cocktail community. What is this cocktail? But in the rum world, there's this enormous crossover between rum and Tiki. People like Martin Kate of who owns Smuggler's Cove in San Francisco. Some people say the best Tiki bar in the world. He has
01:37:51
Speaker
something over like 1500 rums in his collection, his rums going back to the 1800s. He owns a bottle of rum that now is valued at like $50,000. There is just like, they said, you don't see this in any other spirit category of like, this whole sort of almost like twin sons of Robin Tiki. You don't see that with bourbon or single malt scotch or cognac or anything else.
01:38:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's definitely an industry in and of itself. And I don't want to put Martin on the spot, but I've.
01:38:24
Speaker
reached out to him and we're trying to figure out when to talk to each other. What is the one thing that I have to ask him? What do you think I need to talk to him a bit? And I feel like you maybe touched on something a little bit earlier on. I've heard him passionately talk about the way that Rama's described or defined in the commercial space and how it's basically meaningless. So I know I need to talk to him about that. Yeah, so I have a question to ask him.
01:38:54
Speaker
And he's a friend of mine. So the categorization thing is a whole other thing that I've railed against. The way consumers and stores categorize rum, does it no good in the sense of like, imagine if
01:39:14
Speaker
You know imagine if you went into your liquor store and you saw like and basically oh, here's your scotch whiskies We have we have brown and clear And there's this weird like gold in between. No. Yeah. Yeah brown clear gold. There's no there's no Highland. There's no there's no Isla There's no single malt scotch versus single versus blended scotch. It's just like my color Or like overproof scotch and not overproof scotch
01:39:41
Speaker
It's like, that would never fly. It's not suburban, cognac, but in rum. It's OK. That we like, oh, it's a white rum. Or, oh, it's an overproof rum. Like, this would never fly in any other spirit category. So Martin has certainly railed against that. He has his categorization scheme that he used in his book. He's one of his co-book. I have a categorization system in my Minimalist Tiki book.
01:40:10
Speaker
a little more flavor organized rather than production organized. Lucio Gargano has a categorization system, which is kind of akin to like the Scotch whiskey. And you sort of like, you know, the different tiers of single malt Scotch and single blended Scotch or whatever. But there's sort of like a more
Choosing Rums Under $50
01:40:30
Speaker
technical basis to it. The challenge of the technical basis with rum is that two rums can be made
01:40:38
Speaker
in that same technical description identically and have completely different flavor. A pot still overproofed Jamaican rumble tastes nothing like a pot stilled rum, distilled to higher ABV made in Florida, for example. You can't account for flavors in technical
01:40:56
Speaker
categorization like that. So yeah, I know Martin's caution about that. But if you're asking one question, ask him like, so that one bottle he owns, some Ray and nephew 17, it's sort of it's like the white whale of the rum world that there's essentially, there's only like, five or 10 left in the world, that it was the original rum used into Mai Tai, which is sort of like the
01:41:21
Speaker
The ultimate tiki cocktail was the Mai Tai and basically the bar, the gentleman who invented it. Basically they drank the world's supply of it. They drank the world out of out of it in the 1940s and 1950s. And so now there's only like five of these bottles left. This was the original run used in these cocktail and
01:41:44
Speaker
And so Martin owns, owns, says he owns a bottle. I believe them are basically like, when is he going to open up bottles? That's your question. Yeah, that's, that's exciting stuff. Yeah. Speaking of bottles.
01:42:00
Speaker
and paint this in the light of both being able to sort of explore the expanse of the rum world, drinking meat, but also being able to just, let's say, be flippant enough with something that's maybe, I don't know, like sort of $85 or less per bottle for cocktails or something. That's funny. I would give you that, I'd say like a rum $40 or less and still give you fantastic selections. Yeah. But go on.
01:42:29
Speaker
five bottles that are going to convince someone that rum is worth getting into. And so for me, I haven't had a lot of rum. And I, growing up for a long time, I had rum pegged as Bacardi. Okay, whatever. I'll throw it in Coke if I have to.
01:42:49
Speaker
But that's about it. And then I can't remember why or how, but someone convinced me to buy Smith and Cross. That's a good one. That blew my mind in terms of, Oh, okay. That's an example of a higher Esther, not the highest, but it is maybe like
01:43:12
Speaker
here, maybe $30. Yeah, it's kind of stuff down here is kind of expensive. Well, I mean, there's a vision, I think it was like 95 bucks or something for me. So yeah, for five bottles, I would, you know, if I was trying to give you a survey of like, what's out there? Exactly. Yeah. How I can do it for like $50 or less. 50? Like, yeah, even better. Let's get a 50. Make it easy. So I would say, um,
01:43:41
Speaker
for your, for somebody who's like, you know, love bourbon, like the bourbon people who come to rum, they love the Barbadian rums, which are basically a blend of pot and column rum, but they use extra bourbon cast. And they, they sort of, the bourbon people come to rum and they go like, and they go like, this, I can rec, I recognize this. Like I just sort of close enough for my comfort zone.
01:44:07
Speaker
The big ones from Barbados that people gravitate towards are, for example, Mt. Gay, it's like Mt. Gay XL, and then also the Foursquare run the story. So something like Doralee's 12, or, you know, the Foursquare has their Exceptional Cask series, which those are those, you know, could be 100, 150 sometimes. Those are the ones that are like consistently winning like best run in the world every year.
01:44:36
Speaker
So basically a Mount Gay or a Foursquare, a good 10 to 12 year Mount Gay or Foursquare run is like smack straight down the middle for the bourbon drinker. For, let's say, another important style of the cane juice style, let's say the front,
01:45:01
Speaker
French rums from Martinique and Guadalupe, but basically anything you buy from Martinique is going to be fantastic. The way their regulations are, they all make really fantastic rum. Any Martinique rum agrocol, and I would say you should try it both as the unaged version, what do you call it, agrocol blanc, basically. It's like king juice rum.
01:45:31
Speaker
It's it's sort of like it's equivalent of like a white tequila like it's flavorful It's unlike anything you've ever tasted. It's it's Not you know, you're not tasting oak from the calf. You're tasting like the the cane itself So like I would say both an unaged rum agriculture again, that's good 40 hours bottle
01:45:55
Speaker
And then like something like a nice, like a five or six year age, I recall, um, rum, Vermont, from J. M. Uh, St. James, uh, Lamoni, um, any of them are really fantastic. And, and again, for people who don't know this, like six years in the Caribbean is closer to like 20 years. So don't look at it. Oh, this is only six years. It's like, no, this is 20 years equivalent aging and angel share and everything. Um, from, from a.
01:46:25
Speaker
colder climate. Certainly a funky Jamaican. So something like Smith and Cross, or if you want to single the story like Hampton State, like I think the sort of the, they have like a bunch of little different limited editions, but sort of like the mainstream Hampton State. I think I have one up here.
01:46:54
Speaker
Oh, it's fighting. But basically, there's a, there's like a more readily available Hampton estate, this, I don't know, 50 or $60. Definitely not like that's an example of like a higher Esther pot still Jamaican run, it's like very straight down the middle.
01:47:11
Speaker
Funky Jamaican. If you want something a little, it sort of gives you a more, sort of a gentler introduction to Jamaican funk, something like Plantation Zaymaka, which is X-A-Y-M-A-C-A. And here's Zaymaka, sort of like it's the gentle introduction to what Jamaican is. Everything across, sort of like Zaymaka sort of turned up, you know, two or three notches. This is what the process finds. Both of those are like $30 a bottle.
01:47:41
Speaker
So as we've covered, you know, the mainstream, the Barbados stuff, the running folks, you're making one more. So like something, if you want to do something wild, well actually, you can go two different directions. So something either wild and crazy, like these caronies, which are sort of like, we'll go head to head with any of your P-bombs. These caronies are just like,
01:48:10
Speaker
insanely heavy and vanilla and smooth. So that's one direction. Fortunately, those are getting spendy. Those are starting around $200 a bottle. But that's one direction. Another direction is to go very sort of a classic Spanish heritage style. So this one here, this is Havana Club, which are basically the Cardi Havana Club or Dicana.
01:48:40
Speaker
Basically, the companies who are in these former Spanish territories, Latin America, they tend to make rum in a similar style. But one of my favorite banana clubs, selection de maestros, can't buy this in the US. So how I got four bottles, I don't know. But
01:48:59
Speaker
But in Cuba, or in most places in Cuba, this is like $40 bottle in the UK, maybe $50 or $55 or so. But this is a beautiful Spanish heritage style that shows you that these sort of light Spanish heritage drums do not have to be short of flavor there. This is just amazing to sit on. So yeah, you know, and I can give you 20 different bottles that will give you an even broader palette. But I think there we sort of covered
01:49:30
Speaker
mainstream British, funky British, the cane juice, French style, and the Spanish style. So. Perfect. Five bottles.
Unique Rum Experiences and Conclusion
01:49:40
Speaker
Absolutely perfect. And then you get weird stuff like this, which is just like, this is from Grenada. Basically, this distillery could have existed in 1780. And just the most wild stuff that no bourbon drinker or Scotch whiskey drinker has ever
01:49:56
Speaker
ever encountered anything like this. It's just, it will blow your mind when you taste. It's like, unlike anything you've ever had. So. So for people that are listening and can't see what is that bottle? Oh, um, that is, so it's Ripper's, it's hard to get, a little hard. It's the Ripper's, Royale, Royal Grenadian Rum. I think in Grenada, I think I paid
01:50:22
Speaker
$8 for it. A little more wins gets exported somewhere, but it is a, as an unaged rum, uh, made in a double retort pop still fired, fired by local would be scrapping scavenge. Um, it's just a wild, like when they talk high Esther, that's the kind of stuff we're talking about. So awesome. I'm going to have to track some of these down. All right. Thank you.
01:50:48
Speaker
Thank you so much, Matt. This has opened my eyes, and I don't know, man. We'll see how the listeners feel about this, and we'll see how you feel about it. I'll never talk to you afterwards, but I'm getting the feeling that there are a whole lot of other topics that we could do this on again. Absolutely. Thank you very much. Yeah, I've just scratched the surface here of my nerdery.
01:51:11
Speaker
Thank you so much for doing this, Matt. I had a whole lot of fun talking with you, mate, and actually a whole lot of fun editing it as well. There's a little bit of information that I missed the first time around talking to you, being able to go back and edit it. Thank you also to Adventures in Home Brewing. You can check them out at homebrewing.org slash CTC. And thank you to the Patreons. You make this stuff possible. Thanks so much, guys.