by Wayne Curtis
The first fifty thousand cases of Government House rum arrived in New York in April 1937. To the relief of other West Indian distillers, it did not cause much of a stir among the new class of rum aficionados. “I have never yet tasted a good Virgin Island rum,” David Embury would later write in his 1948 bible of bartending, “but Old St. Croix and Cruzan are probably the best I have tried and Government House the worst.”
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Bacardi remained the rum to beat: It was so dominant that drinkers in the United States often used “Bacardi” interchangeably with “rum,” and would often order Bacardi and soda, or Bacardi and tonic. This was good news for a company in a market that increasingly depended on branding. But it was bad news in another way: “Bacardi” threatened to become a generic term—like Kleenex or FedEx—and bartenders increasingly felt free to substitute any rum on hand, even if a customer specifically ordered “Bacardi.”
Things were further muddied by the popularity of a cocktail called, simply, the bacardi—in essence a daiquiri made with a splash of grenadine syrup instead of sugar. American bars sold plenty of bacardi cocktails without a trace of actual Bacardi. This put the Bacardi family in an unpleasant mood. In 1936, Bacardi took the unusual step of suing two transgressors—the Barbizon Plaza Hotel and Wivel’s Restaurant, both in New York City—in an effort to get them to stop selling another company’s product under their name. The stakes were high, and the company flew in bartenders from around the globe to testify that, yes, any bartender worth knowing would put authentic Bacardi rum in a bacardi cocktail. The appellate division of the New York Supreme Court eventually agreed, ruling that a bacardi cocktail must contain Bacardi rum. And so it was. In 1946, the Stork Club Bar Book, among others, began specifying “Bacardi rum” in its recipe for the bacardi cocktail. (The company victory didn’t come without some backsliding. “Though bearing the proprietary Bacardi name,” reported Holiday magazine cheerfully in 1962, “it is not improper, or even adulterous, when made with any of the excellent dry Puerto Rican or Cuban brands.”) Hoping to eliminate the confusion altogether, Bacardi eventually launched a campaign to rename the cocktail the “grenadine daiquiri.” That didn’t catch on, but the crisis had passed. The bacardi cocktail followed the path of so many fine drinks and eventually slipped from favor, to live on mostly in musty bar books.
The daiquiri, happily, stuck around, although often in a form that Constantino and Hemingway would scarcely recognize. Havana’s El Floridita bar has changed considerably since Hemingway’s day, and customers now enter under a graceful neon sign that declares the bar to be El Cuna Del Daiquiri, or “the cradle of the daiquiri.” Tour buses crammed with Italian and Spanish tourists fresh off cruise ships idle outside the door. Inside, El Floridita has been nicely cleaned up, with bartenders in crimson vests and towering mirrors that give the place a sense of spacious elegance. (In the 1960s, large murals of Fidel and his colleagues in their field uniforms were installed behind the bar; they came out and the mirrors went in when Cuba decided to embrace tourism again after the Soviet Union collapsed.)
El Floridita has long capitalized on its connection with its most famous habitué. A bust of Hemingway was commissioned and installed above the bar while the great man still came in to order daiquiris. Giddy tourists often insisted he sit beneath the statue so they might take his picture. Hemingway, not surprisingly, found this odious. “How can you look at a bust of yourself in a bar?” he groused in 1957.
A long, graceful bar curves around the wall, ending in the cul-de-sac where Hemingway was said to perch. His bar stool was chained off and “reserved” for him for years after his death; in 2003, the bar replaced the bust of Hemingway and his stool with a life-sized bronze statue of the author leaning against the bar. A memorial daiquiri usually sits in front of him, along with a bronze book with a pair of bronze reading glasses. Photos cover the wall, most notably a shot of Hemingway sharing a light moment with a wispily bearded Castro. A steady stream of tourists line up to have their photos taken with Hemingway’s simulacrum.
By 2005, Hemingway’s beloved daiquiris were served frozen and dispensed from a blender. The drinks were delivered in a gracefully tapered cocktail glass and cost $6—or twice as much as daiquiris in bars in the surrounding neighborhood. Blender daiquiris were no doubt the only way to accommodate the crowds that came and went by the busload; the old-style shaken daiquiri required an undeniable amount of labor. There was the squeezing of the fresh lime, the measuring of the sugar, and the shaking of the drink. (Cocktail authority David Embury even insisted on moistening the rim with lime and dipping it in powdered sugar.) Shortcuts naturally appeared to accommodate bartenders pressed for time and talent. In 1937, the Seven-Eleven mix was created—a first step toward the mass-marketing of the bartending craft. Bartenders, like workers everywhere, had become assembly workers rather than individual artisans.
The same year that Seven-Eleven mix was introduced, the Waring Blender, named after and promoted by a popular big-band leader (Fred Waring of Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians), premiered at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago. It proved wildly popular as a time-saver. But it also led to the misguided belief that a proper daiquiri should have the consistency of a sherbet, something to be eaten with a spoon. Daiquiris were “improved.” Some New York bartenders not only whipped their daiquiris into a fine slurry with their mechanical aids, they also added egg whites such that “these frosted Daiquiris could stand up in an ice cream cone to the last nub,” wrote Hugh Foster in 1962. Foster noted the chief defect of the sherbet daiquiri was that the extreme cold “anesthetizes the whole apparatus of taste, and markedly that of smell.” This effectively removes the alcohol taste from an alcoholic drink, and leads drinkers down an old and familiar path to intemperance.
Busy bars now feature apparatuses the size of small washing machines that dispense frozen daiquiris at the tug of a lever. Those who succumb to the easy, slushy charms of the premixed, frozen daiquiri miss out on the subtle, complex quality of a gently made original, shaken briefly but vigorously with crushed ice—just enough to chill it thoroughly and dilute it slightly. Small, sharp crystals of ice persist for those first two or three sips. The daiquiri should always be served in a stemmed cocktail glass, like a martini, so that the heat of one’s fingertips doesn’t warm the drink. A well-made daiquiri does not produce brain freeze.
If one needs an example of how to drink a proper daiquiri, one need only go back to the 1960s. On the night he was elected president in 1960, John F. Kennedy sat sipping daiquiris in the dining room of his house in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. When dinner was over, Kennedy rose and walked to a nearby room to watch a small television with bad reception. Here, he checked in on the election returns, and here—infused with the glow of a daiquiri—he learned he would be the next inhabitant of the White House.
This, to my mind, was the perfect daiquiri moment: a blend of power and understatement, edged with upper-crustiness like sugar on a rim. From these heights, rum had only one direction to go.
Rum and Coca-Cola would escort it into the netherworld.
[ RUM AND COKE ]
Place one-and-a-half ounces RUM into a tall glass with ice cubes. Fill with COCA-COLA. Garnish with a slice of LIME.
Chapter 8
[ RUM AND COCA-COLA ]
Our American public has an eccentric habit of jumping from one extreme to another. One year the whole population goes daft over the teasing perplexities of midget golf and becomes wildly excited while trying to wham the ball through hollow logs and gas-pipes and around sharp curves and over all kinds of misplaced bumps. Next year the Tom Thumb pleasure grounds are as dead as night clubs.
—GEORGE ADE, THE OLD TIME SALOON: THE NOT WET–NOT DRY JUST HISTORY (1931)
War is hell on liquor. Just when the citizenry finds itself in need of a stiff drink, drink becomes scarce.
On November 1, 1942�
�less than a year after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor—the U.S. government banned domestic production of gin and whiskey at the nation’s 128 distilleries. (The domestic production of brandy and rum, both inconsequential, was permitted to continue.) Distilleries were ordered to produce high-grade, 190 proof industrial alcohol, a vital ingredient in producing butadiene, used to manufacture aviation fuel essential to the war effort.
The government sought to assure Americans that diverting distillery production to the war effort would not unduly inconvenience them. Domestically, 500 million gallons of whiskey remained at bonded warehouses as a sort of strategic whiskey reserve. At the prewar rates of consumption, the government said, whiskey reserves were expected to last for four years, by which time the war would be concluded. Imported Scotch was also available from time to time, although it was becoming more rare and expensive. Scotch was shipped only when chance permitted from Great Britain, in the holds of otherwise empty homebound Liberty ships that had ferried wartime supplies to England. Prowling German submarines in North Atlantic shipping lanes made the export of Scotch unpredictable at best, and it fell from 7 percent of the American market prior to the war to about 5 percent during the war.
With imports down and domestic production sharply curbed, liquor soon found itself subject to rationing, like nylons and rubber tires. The seventeen states with state-regulated liquor sales all rationed sales—in Washington State, customers were entitled to just one pint of liquor per week; in Iowa, topers were allowed a quart. In noncontrol states, prices rose as supplies shrank, and shortages made it hard for liquor vendors to survive. About a thousand package stores, taverns, and bars closed in Ohio alone; an equal number were shuttered in San Francisco.
Faced with the shortfalls of bourbon and Scotch, American tastes proved fungible. Whiskey bottlers stretched out their inventory of aged liquor by ramping up production of blended whiskeys, using imported neutral spirits distilled from molasses and potatoes. This was not without problems. Alcohol poorly distilled from molasses sometimes retained the heavy aroma of rum, prompting consumers to grouse about the off-smell. Seagram—the big Canadian distiller—sensed an opportunity, their ads bellowing about “ersatz” whiskeys flooding the market while boasting that their own blends were made of pure grain spirits. Prior to 1941, blended whiskey accounted for less than 40 percent of the U.S. whiskey market; in 1946, the peak year for blends, they accounted for 87 percent.
United States consumers faced with declining stocks and a diminished quality of whiskey retooled their palates. Retailers reintroduced their customers to a spirit from Mexico that had been smuggled in during Prohibition, made from fermented agave cactus. Tequila made a reasonable replacement for now-scarce gin but was generally regarded as a nasty bit of business, something to be consumed only in grave emergencies. (“In general,” wrote David Embury in 1948, “the only liquor I have ever tasted that I regard worse than tequila is slivovitz.”) Tequila had a rank, rotten-egg odor, displacing old-time rum as the most evil-smelling of liquors. According to Embury, the overpowering tequila aroma could be partially offset by first downing a dilute acid, which helped to counteract its foul taste and smell. Such an acid could be concocted simply by mixing salt and the juice from a citrus fruit. A routine called the “Mexican Itch” arose, which involved first licking salt from the back of one’s hand, then sucking on a lemon before downing the tequila, usually with one’s face twisted into a look of extreme distress. Tequila has improved immeasurably, yet the routine persists in college bars and elsewhere. Why the routine has shifted to the present order of salt, tequila, then lemon or lime is unknown.
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The West Indian rum industry worked overtime to fill empty U.S. liquor cabinets. Distilleries produced more rum and neutral spirits for blending, and Cuba even started distilling gin—although Cuban gin was regarded as generally unpotable.
The renewed demand for West Indian alcohol came at a welcome time for the islands, as the war had proved devastating to distillers. Barbados had seen its exports to Europe and Great Britain plummet, and Jamaica, which had found a niche supplying Germany with heavy rum to be blended with alcohol from sugar beet, watched helplessly as this profitable market imploded.
The thirsty United States made up for the evaporation of the German market and then some. Rum came flooding north in quantities unimagined prior to the war. The production of beverage alcohol increased fivefold in Puerto Rico, Barbados, and Trinidad. In 1944, Puerto Rico exported 3 million cases of rum to the United States. Cuba sent 5 million. And even the struggling Virgin Islands accounted for 1 million cases. (The U.S. War Production Board had mandated that distilleries in the U.S. territories, like those on the mainland, produce only industrial alcohol during the war. But the outcry from Puerto Rico—which stood to lose $12 million in taxes alone—forced the feds to relax the decree, so that distillers were permitted to produce 90 percent of their previous year’s rum output.)
The war aided rum distillers in other unexpected ways. The London blitz sent more than a quarter million gallons of rum up in flames at the Deptford storage yards, and the Admiralty scrambled to contract for emergency supplies from Cuba and Martinique—which scrambled to meet the demand.
Smaller rum companies, which had closed their doors as the larger companies dominated in the post-Prohibition years, swept out the cobwebs and resumed production. Puerto Rico alone saw seventeen distillers in operation during the war. The newly invigorated rum economy was hampered only by the lack of a merchant fleet to freight the spirit north, since cargo ships had been dragooned into supplying Europe. So the buyers and sellers of West Indian liquor scratched together an improvised fleet, sending retired schooners and fishing vessels of questionable seaworthiness to haul rum from the islands. Business Week reported in 1943 that the rum shipping fleet serving Cuba “made rum-running look like a House of Morgan transaction.”
Alas, the wartime rum trade bore another similarity to the rum-running era: Much of the product was strikingly bad—unaged and produced hurriedly by out-of-practice distillers. Few drank this rum by choice, so distributors forced wholesalers to buy three cases of it for every one of hard-to-find whiskey. (The practice was both illegal and impossible to stop.) Liquor store owners, who bought from wholesalers, were also required to stock more rum if they wanted whiskey for their shelves. They would sell for $2 rum that cost them $4, but they made up the loss on Scotch or Canadian whiskey, which could bring a profit of $6 or $7 per bottle. Buying cheap, unpalatable rum was simply the cost of doing business. As a result, rum was again dragged into the gutter, consumed by those who couldn’t afford better. John Adams would have recognized it.
Consumers who bought the wartime rum struggled to mask the taste. Fortunately, a popular and inexpensive soft drink with elements both bitter and sweet was widely available and eager to rise to the occasion.
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The Angostura bitters plant is in Laventille, Trinidad, on the southwest side of a low ridge that separates it from the sprawling city of Port of Spain. Laventille is an industrial suburb of snarled traffic, dun-colored warehouses, bland factories of concrete block, and hardscrabble hillside homes with galvanized steel roofing. The Angostura compound is large and modern and consists of a great many low buildings; the company’s 250 employees attend to inscrutable industrial activities, much of which involves tankers of molasses. Stainless steel columns soar skyward under corrugated tin roofs, and the din of steam being vented is constant. The factory would not be out of place within sight of the New Jersey Turnpike.
This is both unsurprising, because Trinidad is one of the more industrial of the West Indian islands, and surprising, since the flagship product, virtually unchanged for nearly two centuries, is sold mostly in four-ounce bottles and only rarely served more than a few dashes at a time. It is hard to imagine a business built on a less substantial foundation.
; Bitters are made by infusing sharp-tasting herbs, seeds, bark, fruit peels, or roots—like orange peel, hops, calumba, or cascarilla—in alcohol and extracting their essence. Like many ingredients of recreational drinking, bitters were first produced as an elixir and only later embraced for their flavor.
Angostura bitters are brewed in a room not much bigger than a suburban shoe store. This is the second ring of the bitters inner sanctum, filled with stainless steel tanks and gauges and a tangle of shiny pipes. In the corner is a chute that leads from a room upstairs—the first ring of the inner sanctum, “the Sanctuary.” Only five company directors are authorized to enter the Sanctuary, as this is where the secret ingredients of Angostura bitters are actually mixed.
The company orders as many as twenty herbs, roots, seeds, and whatever else from around the world, although how many of these are actually employed is a mystery. Maybe only a half dozen. Maybe more. “Who needs to know?” asked Everard “Chippy” Roberts, fixing me with a long, neutral stare.
Once the directors mix the herbs according to a proprietary formula, the potpourri is sent down the chute, then infused—or “shampooed,” in company parlance—in vats of alcohol. Following this, it is filtered, bottled, and exported worldwide, with markets in more than a hundred countries. Every drop sold globally is produced in this one room.
