by Amy Stewart
Mao-tai, and particularly a premium brand called Moutai, is the beverage of choice for banquets and celebrations. It made the news in early 2011 when prices hit two hundred dollars per bottle in China while selling for half that in Europe and the United States. The distillery is state run, so the high prices caused protests by citizens who felt their national drink should be more affordable to them. (Meanwhile, of course, people brew their own in homemade stills.) Although government secrecy makes Chinese markets notoriously difficult to analyze, liquor industry experts believe that if the most popular baijiu brands reported their sales, they would easily outstrip the world’s other top-selling brands, including the current leader, Jinro soju, and other popular brands like Smirnoff vodka and Bacardi rum.
The mao-tai served to President Nixon was surely the best China had to offer. At the state dinner, Prime Minister Chou En-lai held a match to his glass to show the president that the spirit could be lit on fire, a fact Nixon filed away for future use. In 1974, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger told another Chinese official that the president tried to repeat the trick for his daughter when he returned home. “So he took out a bottle and poured it into a saucer and lit it,” Kissinger said, “but the glass bowl broke and the mao-tai ran over the table and the table began to burn! So you nearly burned down the White House!”
BEWARE THE WITCHWEED
Sorghum is vulnerable to attacks by a bizarre parasitic plant called witchweed, or Striga spp. (Fans of the Italian liqueur Strega will recognize this Latin word for “witch.”) The seeds of witchweed can only germinate in the presence of strigolactone hormones given off by the roots of sorghum. Once the seeds encounter that hormone, they send out a tiny, hairlike structure to penetrate the roots. Soon they colonize the roots, so that by the time the striga plant emerges aboveground, the sorghum is mostly dead.
Striga flourishes alongside its dying host, producing beautiful red flowers while the sorghum turns yellow and dies. An individual striga can produce fifty thousand to half a million seeds, enough to decimate a sorghum crop. Botanists are working on breeding new varieties of sorghum that don’t produce the hormone, which would render the witchweed seeds powerless.
SUGARCANE
Saccharum officinarum
poaceae (grass family)
There is a kind of coalesced honey called sakcharon found in reeds in India and Arabia the happy, similar in consistency to salt, and brittle enough to be broken between the teeth like salt. It is good dissolved in water for the intestines and stomach, and taken as a drink to help a painful bladder and kidneys. Rubbed on it disperses things which darken the pupils.
This odd passage from Dioscorides’ five-volume book of medicine, De Materia Medica, described a sweet grass that had only been known in Europe since about 325 BC, when Alexander the Great brought it from India. (“Arabia the happy,” by the way, refers to Yemen, which is not to be confused with “Arabia the desert” and “Arabia the stony,” common terms for other parts of Saudi Arabia.) Sugarcane, and the crystallized sugar that could be extracted from it, was a novelty to the Greeks at that time, but it was well known in India and China, thanks in part to a unique anatomical advantage that allowed it to travel well.
the birth of sugarcane
Botanists believe that sugarcane was cultivated in New Guinea as early as 6000 BC. The tender young reeds were probably simply cut and chewed for a source of sweetness, but the more mature plants served another purpose: they could have been used as a building material. It’s easy to see how someone could have cut a number of sturdy canes, stuck them in the ground as supports for a thatched hut, and noticed how quickly the canes put down new roots and kept growing. Sugarcane, like bamboo, turned out to be astonishingly easy to propagate. No special knowledge was required: just cut a piece, keep it damp, and put it in the ground somewhere else. Imagine, then, how easy it was to move the plant around. Sugarcane could have simply floated to Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia, and India. In fact, much early trading and cultural contact happened exactly like that. Any number of early exchanges were the result of flotsam, jetsam, and rafts blown off course. A sturdy, lightweight reed, suitable as either a building material or food, would have traveled well.
China had its own kind of sugarcane, Saccharum sinense. Although it was smaller than the New Guinea species, it was also tougher and able to withstand colder temperatures, poorer soils, and drought. India had its species, S. barberi. Some amount of cross-breeding took place between these and a few earlier, wilder species, although botanists disagree on exactly how this happened. What we do know is that the hybrids traveled well and thrived throughout warmer climates in Asia and Europe. By the fifteenth century, Europeans had a sturdy, robust, and powerfully sweet form of sugarcane to take with them on spice trading routes. The Portuguese took it to the Canary Islands and West Africa, and Columbus brought it to the Caribbean.
Once it arrived in the New World, sugarcane gave us rum, but it gave us something else, too: slavery. Starting in the early 1500s, European trading ships sailed to West Africa and went from there to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, introducing human cargo to their trading partners and opening one of the most monstrous chapters in our history. There was nothing pleasant about work in sugarcane fields. In blistering heat, the canes had to be cut by hand using enormous knives, pressed in powerful mills, and boiled in ferociously hot kettles. There were snakes and rodents and vermin of all sorts living in the fields. It was dangerous, exhausting, back-breaking work. The only way to get people to do it was to kidnap them and force them to, under penalty of death—which is exactly what happened. Slavery was abhorrent to some Europeans and early Americans: British abolitionists, for instance, refused to take sugar in their tea to protest the way in which it was manufactured. But hardly anyone refused to drink rum.
SUGARCANE CULTIVARS
Modern sugarcane varieties are given decidedly unromantic names like CP 70-1133. But some older varieties are still grown by tropical plant collectors. Many sport vivid colors, wild stripes, and far more interesting names, such as:
Asian Black
Batavian
Bourbon
Cheribon Creole
Georgia Red
Ivory Stripes
Louisiana Purple Pele’s Smoke
Striped Ribbon
Tanna
Yellow Caledonia
the botany of a cane
Sugarcane seems, at first, like a simple plant. It’s just a tall, sweet grass. But look closely and it’s easy to see that quite a lot goes on inside a single stalk. The cane that emerges from the ground is segmented into joints separated by nodes. Each node holds “root primordia”—tissue that could turn into roots under the right circumstances—and a single bud, ready to grow into a stem and leaves. These highly charged little bands of tissue explain why it’s so easy to propagate sugarcane. Just place a single joint with an intact node (a cutting like this is called a sett) underground, and it will unfurl “sett roots,” which provide temporary nutrition, and then more permanent “shoot roots” that will anchor the plant in place and keep it alive. The bud will unfurl and become a new cane.
The stalk is made up of concentric layers, similar to a tree trunk. The outer layer, a hard, waxy rind, protects the plant from water loss. It might be yellow, in the case of a young, growing plant, or green as the chlorophyll starts to show. Red and blue anthocyanins—plant pigments that, in the case of sugarcane, protect the plant from sun damage—might turn the stalks a bright purple or burgundy red. Some varieties are even striped like candy canes. In the center of the stalk are soft, spongy plant tissues that transport water up from the roots and carry sugar down from the leaves. This is where the magic happens. Each joint ripens separately, which is to say that the joint closest to the ground matures until it holds the most sucrose it possibly can. The joint above it holds slightly less, and the one above that holds even less, and so on. Under ideal conditions—a long, warm season with lots of sunshine and high humidity�
�sugarcane elongates quickly and fills with sugar. Growers call this the grand growth period. At the end of that period, the cane is cut as close to the ground as possible, to get the joints with the highest concentrations of sugar.
If the stalk doesn’t get cut, sugarcane will bloom. It produces a loose, feathery plume, sometimes called an arrow, which sits high above the leaves to catch a breeze. This is how the pollen is spread. Each plume holds thousands of tiny flowers that could each produce a single tiny seed—but on sugarcane plantations, the cane is harvested before it can reproduce, and setts are buried in the fields to start the next generation.
DAIQUIRI
1½ ounces white rum
1 ounce simple syrup
¾ ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice
A classic daiquiri is made with nothing but these three ingredients. Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
A SUGAR PRIMER
Sugar—or the simple syrup made by heating equal parts sugar and water—is a vital cocktail ingredient. But there are many kinds of sugar, some better suited to drinks than others.
Brown sugar is refined sugar with molasses sprayed on for flavor and color.
Demerara or muscovado sugar are two forms of large-grained raw sugar with some molasses coating or residue.
Powdered sugar contains a small amount of cornstarch or flour to prevent clumping, which is nice in baked goods but will gum up a drink. Avoid it in cocktails.
Superfine sugar (also called baker’s sugar or caster sugar) is ordinary, granulated sugar that has been finely ground so that it dissolves quickly. Ideal for cocktails.
Turbinado or raw sugar is made from the first extraction of cane juice. The granules tend to be larger and contain some molasses flavor. Makes a richer simple syrup, although it may take longer to cook.
making rum
Hacking into a dense field of cane was difficult enough without the leaves, sharp as blades, cutting into the skin of the workers. The creatures living the fields—snakes, rats, fat fleshy centipedes and stinging hornets—delivered another round of unwelcome surprises. One solution was to set fire to the fields before the harvest, driving the vermin out and clearing most of the vegetation away. This is still done in some cane fields today, even on modern farms that use heavy equipment to do the harvesting.
Once the cane is harvested, it is highly perishable and must get to the mill quickly before bacteria start eating the sucrose and robbing the sugar factory of its product. So as soon as it is cut, the cane is chopped, crushed, and milled to extract the juice. On the French Caribbean island of Martinique this fresh juice is fermented and distilled directly to make rhum agricole; in Brazil the fresh cane juice becomes cachaça (pronounced “cachasa.”) But most of what we know as rum comes from molasses, not cane juice.
When sugar is processed, the juice is filtered, purified, and heated to crystalize the sugar. Left behind is a dark, rich syrup: molasses. If it’s going to be made into rum, the molasses is then fermented with water and yeast to make a wash of 5 to 9 percent alcohol. That is then distilled, originally in simple pot stills, and now in more sophisticated column stills.
On plantations, rum was a cheap drink for the workers, not a fine export. The owners of those farms probably drank port or brandy, not rum. The first colonists arriving in New England, lacking a quick and easy way to make alcohol, imported molasses from the Caribbean to turn into rum. But that was an act of desperation and, later, an act of defiance. The Molasses Act of 1733 was an attempt by the British to force the colonies to buy British, not French, molasses, by imposing heavy import taxes on French products. Such laws only fueled the colonists’ outrage and kindled the American Revolution. John Adams, writing to his friend William Tudor in 1818, said, “I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes.”
Sugarcane cultivation became an American enterprise as well. It grows on nine hundred thousand acres in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Hawaii. But most rum still comes from the Caribbean. The reason for this is, in part, an accident of history—the oldest and best-known distilleries are by necessity located where the sugarcane grew first. It is also an accident of climate. When rum goes into a barrel, the same wonderful interplay of alcohol and wood that makes whiskey so mellow and smooth also happens with rum. But in the tropics, it happens much, much faster. A barrel of rum (often a used bourbon barrel) loses a whopping 7 to 8 percent of its alcohol per year as the wood expands and softens in the steamy heat. What might take twelve years to accomplish in Scotland happens in just a few years in Cuba. For this reason, dark, well-aged Caribbean rums are astonishingly rich and complex after just a short repose in wood.
Bagasse: The sugarcane residue left over after the juice is pressed from the stalk. Used for fuel, livestock feed, building materials, and compostable packaging.
A FIELD GUIDE TO SUGARCANE SPIRITS
Aguardiente: A generic Spanish term for clear neutral spirits or brandy; in many Latin American countries it refers to a sugarcane-based spirit.
Batavia arrack: A high-proof (50 percent ABV) Indonesian spirit distilled from sugarcane and fermented red rice. A key ingredient in classic punch recipes.
Cachaça: The main ingredient in a Caipirinha, this Brazilian spirit is distilled from fresh sugarcane juice. (The other ingredients are sugar and lime juice.)
Charanda: A Mexican spirit, often called “Mexican rum.”
Lakang Hari Imperial Basi: A sugarcane-based wine from the Philippines.
Punch au rhum: French liqueur made with a rum base.
Rhum agricole: Rum from the French West Indies distilled from sugarcane juice, not molasses.
Rum: Alcohol distilled from fermented sugarcane juice, syrup, molasses, or other sugarcane by-products, distilled to less than 80 percent ABV and bottled at or below 40 percent ABV.
Rum-Verschnitt: A German mixture of rum and other alcohol.
Sugarcane or molasses spirit or vodka: A generic term for a clear, neutral, high-proof spirit distilled from sugarcane.
Velvet Falernum: Rum-based sweet liqueur that is flavored with limes, almonds, cloves, and other spices, a key ingredient in tropical rum-based drinks like the mai tai.
the naval spirit
Although rum is a drink of the Americas, its history is inextricably tied with that of the British navy, and a surprising number of recipes, colloquialisms, and strange bits of technology came out of the navy’s long relationship with its favorite spirit.
In the 1500s, sailors were given beer to drink, in part to keep them happy and in part because water, without any alcohol to kill bacteria, spoiled quickly at sea. But even beer went bad on long voyages, so rum became the ration of choice. Giving sailors an entire pint of rum turned out to be a bad idea—they’d drink the whole thing and ignore their duties—so the solution was to mix it with water, lime juice, and sugar, which improved the taste and combated scurvy. This grog (it was not strong enough to call a daiquiri, even though the ingredients were more or less the same) could be doled out twice a day without imperiling the ship.
It’s easy to see how disgruntled sailors might start to wonder if their rum had been diluted a little too much. They demanded proof that they were getting the rum they were entitled to. There were no hydrometers in those days (a hydrometer is an instrument that measures the density of a liquid as compared to water, thereby measuring alcohol content), so a method was developed using a material ships always had on board: gunpowder. A quantity of gunpowder, mixed with rum, would not ignite if the rum was watered down. It would have to contain about 57 percent alcohol to catch on fire. In the presence of the crew, the ship’s purser would mix the rum and gunpowder and light it on fire, offering “proof” of its potency.
British proof is still based on this standard: a bottle is 100 proof if it contains 57 percent alcohol. In the United States, the math is easier: 100 proof is the equivalent of 50 percent alcohol.<
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In 1970, the British navy discontinued its rum rations. Sailors protested, wearing black armbands and appealing to Prince Philip, a retired navy man himself, to “save our tot.” But it was no use. Eliminating the rations saved money and helped make sure that the sailors steering submarines were at least as sober as civilians driving cars. The tradition has been gone for over forty years, but some rum distillers continue to offer a “navy strength” version bottled at 57 percent alcohol.
MOJITO Y MAS
3 sprigs fresh spearmint
¾ ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice
1 ounce simple syrup
1½ ounces white rum
Soda water
For the variation: Sparkling wine (a dry Spanish cava works well) and fresh fruit
In a cocktail shaker, muddle 2 spearmint sprigs, the lime juice, and the simple syrup. Add the rum, shake with ice, and strain into a highball glass filled with crushed ice. Top with soda water and garnish with the remaining sprig of spearmint.
Variation: The Mojito y Mas makes use of any garden-fresh, seasonal fruit available. Peaches, plums, apricots, raspberries, and strawberries work best. Make the recipe as usual, but fill the highball glass with a mixture of crushed ice and chopped fruit. Add the rum, top with sparkling wine instead of soda (a dry Spanish cava works well), and go sit in the sun.
SUGAR BEET
Beta vulgaris
chenopodiaceae (goosefoot family)
