And a Bottle of Rum, Revised and Updated
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“We call it aqua vitae, and this name is remarkably suitable, since it is really a water of immortality,” wrote Arnauld de Villeneuve, a thirteenth-century professor in Spain. “It prolongs life, clears away ill-humors, revives the heart, and maintains youth.” In France, the spirit was called eau de vie; in Scandinavia, aquavit.
The art of Western beverage distillation is generally credited to an Italian known as the “Master of Salerno,” who regarded his experiments as important enough to record his results in a secret code. Brandy was initially the most common distillate, and word of its health-giving properties crossed the continent. A slug of brandy every morning was believed to ward off illness. A spoonful of brandy poured into the mouth of a dying person, it was also thought, would allow that person to utter a final word or two before taking his last breath.
The first whiskey—or “whisky,” as the British and Canadians prefer—may have appeared as early as the twelfth century, distilled from a coarse beer made of fermented grains mixed with malted barley—that is, barley that had been partially germinated and dried. Whiskey was most likely first produced in Ireland (“whiskey” is a corruption of usquebaugh, the Gaelic term for aqua vitae), although the first documented records don’t surface until 1494 in Scotland. By the thirteenth century the frequent consumption of spirits had spread widely enough that laws had to be passed in central Europe to curb unruly schnappssteufeln (“schnapps fiends”), and the first known taxes on liquor were imposed. During the Black Death of 1348 and later plagues, alcohol was frequently (if ineffectively) prescribed as a cure, and strong drink marched in the wake of wholesale death from the cities into the smaller towns of Europe.
Early distillation methods were rudimentary at best. One seventeenth-century text offered a simple brandy recipe for northern climates: Store Canary wine in “warm horse dung” for four months, then set it outdoors in the frigid air of winter for another month. Remove the congealed “phlegm” (or slushy ice) and enjoy what’s left: the “true spirit of wine.” (This method would yield a drink of about 25 percent alcohol, if the ice were removed gingerly.)
A more practical way to make brandy was to heat the fermented low-alcohol mash in a sealed kettle with a single pipe for an outlet, from which the steam could be captured and condensed. Since alcohol is not only slower to freeze but faster to boil than water (about 173 degrees Fahrenheit compared to 212 degrees Fahrenheit for water), what first emerged from the condenser contained mostly alcohol, along with trace impurities that lent the spirit a distinctive taste.
Distillation concentrates and intensifies the subtle tastes found in the original low-alcohol product. Brandy has thus been called the distilled essence of wine, and whiskey the distilled essence of beer.
And rum? It is, as we shall see, the distilled essence of fermented industrial waste.
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A successful sugar planter needed many skills. He had to be a knowledgeable farmer and an efficient factory manager. He had to discipline slaves strictly to keep them in order, but not so harshly that they rebelled. He needed to know how to deal with agricultural diseases that blighted the cane and the human diseases that afflicted slaves and servants. He needed to know how to deal with the mechanics of the sugar works, as well as the mechanics of international politics to ensure a reliable overseas market. And he needed to be uncommonly knowledgeable about rats. Even when under control, rats often destroyed 5 percent of a sugar crop through incessant gnawing. The rats were wily, defeating even the most clever efforts to eradicate them, which included extensive use of poisons, ferrets, trained dogs, and slave children delegated to the task of clubbing them. In one rat roundup on a single West Indian sugar estate, some thirty-nine thousand rats were killed in a six-month period.
There remained one other issue the planter had to master: what to do with the waste generated in the sugaring process.
Sugar wastes were considerable. A mass of useless scummings would be skimmed off the boiling cauldrons during the cane juice reduction. Once cane juice was boiled down to a nearly crystallized syrup, it was cooled and cured. The curing process involved storing the crystallizing sugar in clay pots with holes in their bases, which allowed the waste matter bound up between the sugar crystals to ooze out. What emerged was molasses—a dark, sticky, caramelized liquid that resisted crystallization or further refining. The amount produced during the curing process varied widely, but a frequently cited ratio was one pound of molasses for every two pounds of marketable sugar. With the more refined sugars, that amount might rise to as much as three pounds of molasses for every four of sugar.
In the mid-seventeenth century, molasses was a nuisance: It was too bulky to ship economically, and there was no demand for it anyway. Some could be mixed with grain and fodder to feed the cows and pigs, and some could be fed to slaves to supplement their meager diets. Molasses could be mixed with lime (or eggshells), water, and horsehair to make a crude but serviceable mortar. Molasses was also blended with various nostrums and injected into the urethras of both men and women as a cure for syphilis. But more often, it was simply discarded. One traveler noted of molasses produced on sugar plantations in the French West Indies that it is “never esteemed more than Dung; for they used to throw it all away.” In the 1680s, the French were said to be discarding a half-million gallons of molasses each year. As late as 1665, molasses accounted for less than 1 percent of exports from Barbados. Molasses was industrial waste, an effluent best gotten rid of by dumping it into the ocean.
But somewhere someone figured something out: The scummings and the molasses contained enough residual sugar to attract the attention of yeast. “As the use of the still was then known,” wrote Samuel Morewood in An Essay on…Inebriating Liquors…(1824), “it may be conjectured, that not long after this period the distillation of rum suggested itself, as the only means to compensate the planter for loss incurred in disposing of the scumming and molasses…”
Exactly where the distillation of rum first “suggested itself” is unknown. Medieval alchemists, busy with their search for an elixir of life, no doubt concocted a proto-rum from sugarcane juice or molasses. But since sugar was a scarce luxury at the time, it made little sense to continue to use sugar or molasses to manufacture spirits when more abundant and cheaper grapes and grain were available. If the alchemists invented rum, they just as quickly forgot it.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both extensive sugar cultivation and the knowledge of distillation made their way through the New World tropics, like seeds scattered across fertile land. At some point, the two came together and germinated, producing rum. No one yet knows where the first dram of New World rum dripped out of a still.
Yet an argument may be made for Barbados’s cultural paternity. The first documented appearances of both the words kill-devil and rum surfaced in Barbados. In 1652, a visitor to the island observed that “the chief fuddling they make in the island is Rumbullion, alias Kill-Divil, and this is made of sugar canes…” A 1658 deed for the sale of the Three Houses Plantation included in the sale “four large mastrick cisterns for liquor for rum,” which is the first known official appearance of the word rum on any of the islands. (Laws governing liquor had previously been passed by the Barbadian assembly, but these referred only to “this country’s spirits.”)
Barbados can also claim to be home to the oldest-known continuously produced rum—from the Mount Gay distillery. A sugar plantation has existed at the northern tip of the island since the earliest years of settlement, on land where the Mount Gay currently distills rum from both modern column stills and old-fashioned pot stills. Records suggest that a still house was producing rum here as early as 1663, but the first solid evidence dates to February 20, 1703. On this date, a deed listed equipment transferred in a sale to include “two stone windmills…one boiling house with seven coppers, one curing house and one still house.” (In comparison, the oldest continu
ously operating Scotch distillery is believed to date to the 1780s, and the oldest registered whiskey distillery in the United States to the 1770s.)
The island’s immense sugar profits allowed planters to make extensive investments in up-to-date technology and production methods. By reducing operating costs through the building of windmills, planters could reap even more profit from sugar and then invest their gains in still houses that would wring out even more cash from the sugar fields. A still house was expensive; each cost about the same as constructing and outfitting a sugar-boiling house. But the money from rum paid for the investment and more. The economist Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that “a sugar planter expects that the rum and molasses would defray the whole expense of his cultivation”—the substantial sugar sales were almost entirely profit. Smith likened the situation to a farmer covering his cultivation costs through the sale of chaff and straw. Where you’d find a boiling house for sugar, a still house was probably not far away. A well-managed sugar estate of four hundred acres might have four stills in operation; smaller estates might have one or two.
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Here’s how an early rum distiller would turn industrial waste into cash. He began by mixing in a large cistern a liquid mess composed of three ingredients: the blackish scum that rose to the surface during the sugar-boiling process; the dregs remaining in the still after a previous batch (called lees or dunder); and water used to clean out the sugar-boiling pots between batches. This mixture—called wash—was then left to stand in the tropical heat. Since it was contaminated with yeasty bits of stalks and dirt, the stew would begin to ferment and bubble. Once the first bubbles appeared, the distiller would feed the fermentation by mixing in six gallons of molasses for every one hundred gallons of wash. (These ratios were prescribed by the planter Samuel Martin, who wrote that the “judicious distiller” could profitably tinker with these measures.)
The wash would ferment for anywhere from several days to a week. The temperature of the wash had to be closely monitored, since fermentation would slow or cease if it grew too hot or too cold; windows in the still house were opened and closed to regulate the air temperature. Martin recommended that when the wash rose to near “blood-heat,” pails of cold water be added to cool the fermentation’s fever.
If the fermentation was cool and sluggish, pails of hot water could be added, or “a little hot, clean, sea-sand” to bring up the temperature. Distillers could add lemons, tamarinds, or tartar if the wash was not acidic enough. If it was too acidic, live coals or “new-made Wood ashes” could help. George Smith, the author of The Nature of Fermentation Explained…(1729) also noted, “the same effect will be produc’d by an Onion dipped in strong Mustard; or a Ball made of quick Lime, Wheat Flower, and the White of an Egg beat up into a Paste.” Carcasses of dead animals or dung could be tossed in the vats to kick-start a batch that resisted fermentation. On Jamaica, according to an account by John Taylor, other substances were added to the wash, but for other reasons: “Perhaps the overseer will empty his camberpot into it…to keep the Negroes from Drincking it.”
When the wash temperature fell and the bubbling stopped after a few days, the mildly alcoholic brew was ready for distillation. The wash was conveyed to the still via taps placed several inches from the bottom of the fermenting cisterns, a technique to leave the sediment behind. (“If the sediment passes into the still,” wrote Samuel Martin, “it will not only give the spirit extracted, a fetid smell and taste, but incrust the bottom of the still, and corrode the copper.”) A low and even fire was applied to the main vat of the pot still, and the steam generated would rise and progress through a bit of copper tubing called a worm. The worm had to be constantly cooled to get the steam to condense. If a stream flowing with cool water could be diverted around it, all the better. If not, as was the case on water-scarce Barbados, the steam-warmed water had to be refreshed with water cooled in the yard, a chore performed by slaves with pails or, later, by wind-powered pumps.
The spirit that came out of that first distillation could be drunk as is or run through the still a second or even third time. Barbadians preferred the “spirit of the first extraction” and usually had their rum casked after just one pass, resulting in “a cooler spirit, more palatable and wholesome,” according to Martin. The island of Jamaica, which would overtake Barbados in rum production in the nineteenth century, produced a double-distilled rum, which was as strong as it was harsh. Martin noted that the Jamaican approach “seems more profitable for the London-market, because the buyers there approve of a fiery spirit which will bear most adulteration.” The higher-alcohol Jamaican rum contained more benders per cask, and thus was more efficient to ship overseas than single-distilled rum.
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Production is only half a market; consumption makes up the other half. And in this the early residents of Barbados admirably filled a need. Planters could expand their estates, confident that the drinkers of Barbados would purchase what rum they produced. By 1655, an estimated 900,000 gallons a year of kill-devil was being produced on Barbados. Yet virtually no export market existed. Small amounts were shipped abroad as early as 1638, but distillers hadn’t yet established any major outlets. As late as 1698, a mere 207 gallons of rum were officially exported to England from Barbados. This figure is likely low, given smuggling to England and unrecorded sales to the crews of visiting ships. Even so, Barbadians drank something on the order of 10 gallons per person per year. That is a feat not to be underestimated.
Who made up this market? Ninety-four percent of those setting off for Barbados in 1635 from England were male, and most were young and poor. While the gentry did fabulously, the majority of islanders lived rough lives. In 1631, Henry Whistler described Barbados as “the dunghill whereon England doth cast forth its rubbish. Rogues and whores and such like people are those which are generally brought here. A rogue in England will hardly make a cheater here.”
Disappointment among early settlers was as endemic as smallpox. Those who came with a little cash hoping to start a small plantation soon discovered that they were too late—the land had been snapped up by larger landowners—and their dreams went unrealized. Indentured servants likewise found that the English promises of upward mobility were overblown at best. The small plots granted to freed servants were of use only to scratch out enough vegetables for a subsistence diet. Few other jobs were available; landowners had made the discovery that slaves imported from Africa could perform the work of sugar- and rum-making more economically than hired workers. Although slaves initially cost twice as much as indentured servants, they needn’t be freed in seven years and were less prone to tropical disease; and if slothfulness proved a problem, a whip could cure it.
For disheartened British settlers, quaffing rum provided relief from chronic disappointment. And those in need of a drink didn’t need to look far. Captain Thomas Walduck in 1708 neatly summarized the development of the West Indies: “Upon all the new settlements the Spaniards make, the first thing they do is build a church, the first thing ye Dutch do upon a new colony is to build them a fort, but the first thing ye English do, be it in the most remote part of ye world, or amongst the most barbarous Indians, is to set up a tavern or drinking house.”
Tippling houses, as they were generally known in the West Indies, emerged as a social and political issue as early as 1652 when the Barbadian assembly first licensed them. (At the time, Bridgetown had roughly one tippling house for every twenty residents.) In 1668, an act was passed “preventing the selling of brandy and rum in Tippling Houses near broad-paths and highways.” The legislation noted that on the Sabbath day, “many lewd, loose, and idle people do usually resort to such tippling-houses.” The early British settlers had a fondness for drinking that was unmatched by any other nation, with the possible exception of the Dutch. As the historian Alison Games writes, “inebriation was hardly limited to Barbados, al
though all visitors there seemed thoroughly impressed by the island residents’ commitment to drink.”
Sir Henry Colt, who arrived on Barbados in 1631, was one such visitor. He noted he had long been accustomed to downing two or three drams of spirits daily in his native England. But his new companions on Barbados, he said, soon had him up to thirty drams daily. Had he remained on the island, he reported, he would no doubt be downing sixty. “Such great drunkards” was how another Barbadian settler described his new companions in 1640, noting that they would scratch up enough cash to “buy their drink all though they goe naked.” A traveler, Thomas Verney, wrote home that Barbadians were often so potted that they passed out where they stood, and in their benighted state were savaged by the tiny land crabs that plagued the island. “The people drink much of it,” echoed Richard Ligon, “indeed, too much; for it often layes them asleep on the ground, and this is accounted a very unwholesome lodging.”
The islander’s commitment to drink seems all the more impressive given the likely quality of the product. We can never know what exactly it tasted like, but it was no doubt a coarse and uneven liquor, varying widely from plantation to plantation and batch to batch. It might be agreed that early rum was horrid, but each batch was horrid in its own way. The French priest Jean Baptiste Labat deemed kill-devil “rough and disagreeable,” and an anonymous visitor to the West Indies in 1651 noted that kill-devil was “a hot, hellish, and terrible liquor.” Richard Ligon wrote that it was “not very pleasant in taste.” Indeed, no seventeenth-century account has surfaced that has anything nice to say about the taste of kill-devil.