by Wayne Curtis
For all the worshipful attention, there’s a little secret behind the mojitos you get in Havana bars: they’re sort of crappy, or at least they were when I visited in 2004. The mojitos I sampled at La Bodeguita del Medio and a number of other Havana bars—and I sampled a scientifically valid number—were oddly disappointing, and in much the same way. It was as if they had been manufactured in a centralized tall-drink facility somewhere beneath the cobblestone streets of Old Havana, then distributed via a rusting pipeline. They were insipid, off-tasting, slightly metallic. There was an aftertaste of cleaning fluid. The mint wasn’t minty, the lime wasn’t limey, and the bubbly water wasn’t bubbly. Perhaps the guarapo was sour. I don’t know. Some of my disappointment may be ascribed to my American-trained taste buds, which expect bigger, fresher, more robust flavors. But even so, I had to force myself to drink them after a day or two. I’ve had better mojitos at airport bars.
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Bacardi is no longer the rum that defines Havana. That responsibility has been taken up with considerable zeal by Havana Club, a rum manufactured by the Cuban government. The simple, circular logo is splashed on bar signs, umbrellas, swizzle sticks, and cocktail glasses, and is every bit as omnipresent as Cinzano in Italy. The Havana Club Rum Tour is in a historic building at the edge of Old Havana, just across the road from the shipping port. No rum is actually made here, but artifacts of rum-making are on display, and on multilingual tours you cross a catwalk over a Disneyesque model of a sugar-processing plant and distillery. The tours end—as is customary on such adventures—at the factory store, where you can buy bottles of rum or T-shirts or cocktail glasses while sampling some of Havana Club’s aged rums. (The Havana Club headquarters during Prohibition was on Plaza de la Catedral, but that building is now a museum of colonial art. Sadly, free rum drinks no longer flow for tourists seven days a week.)
Havana Club rum was for decades produced by the Arechabala family in Cuba. Owner José Arechabala proved not quite as nimble as the Bacardis when Castro came to power; Havana Club—both the name and the facilities—was expropriated by the Cuban government in October 1960. The Arechabalas moved to Spain and left the rum business.
In 1995, the Bacardis approached the Arechabalas and purchased the rights to the Havana Club name, then started producing a Havana Club rum out of the Bahamas. One problem: the Arechabalas technically no longer had any rights to sell. The Cubans had taken it over on the island, and in 1973 registered the trademark internationally after the Arechabalas—believing it no longer had any value—ceased paying fees to maintain it. In 1994, CubaExport entered into a joint agreement with Pernod Ricard, the French liquor giant, to distribute Havana Club globally. (This, of course, didn’t include the United States, which has maintained an embargo on all Cuban products since 1963.)
Bacardi’s effort to wrest control of the name made perfect business sense. Havana Club’s agreement with Pernod Ricard made it likely that the pair could offer serious competition to the dominant Bacardi brand—the largest-selling single brand of any liquor of any sort. Havana Club was selling briskly in Italy, Canada, and elsewhere. It didn’t require any special powers to foresee that if the United States eventually dropped its Cuban embargo, then Havana Club would be in a good position to make a run at Bacardi’s dominance.
And so Bacardi embarked on an elaborate multifront campaign to ensure that Havana Club would never cross the Straits of Florida to America. After noting that it had legally acquired the name from the Arechabalas, it launched a Byzantine lobbying campaign in the U.S. Congress to block the sale in the United States of any good whose trademark had been expropriated. In 1998, Florida Senator Connie Mack introduced a tiny amendment to the huge four-thousand-page appropriations bill, effectively nullifying Cuban-owned U.S. trademark registrations without the consent of the original owners—an amendment narrowly tailored to the Bacardi–Havana Club dispute. (Bacardi had been generous donors to Mack’s campaign.)
The Bacardis also became entangled with then-prominent Texan Republican Tom DeLay, donating $40,000 to political action committees he supported. Whether by coincidence or design, one of DeLay’s Texan allies, Representative Lamar Smith, introduced legislation that would further ensure that Bacardi controlled the Havana Club trademark. (Since it was attached to a defense bill rather than a trade bill, the move sent up red flags and was ultimately killed.)
The war over the trademark moved to the courts. The U.S. courts have regularly upheld the legislation favoring Bacardi’s ownership of the trademark; world courts have been mixed. Interestingly, some large U.S. corporations have opposed the Bacardi legislation, noting that it puts at risk long-standing international trademark agreements. (Castro once threatened to start producing a soft drink called “Coca- Cola” and exporting it worldwide.) Bacardi’s version of Havana Club expanded production and its reach across the United States around 2016, and is now widely distributed, although how this ultimately will play out remains unclear.
Nonetheless, the tussle has resulted in a fascinating spectacle: two foreign-owned companies battling in U.S. courts for the rights to a name for a product that has no connection with the United States.
And perhaps that’s emblematic of what’s become of rum. In the mid-eighteenth century, the fight over rum imports to the colonies was based on actual rum or the ingredients to make rum. Today, it’s a far more ethereal battle over intellectual property rights, rather like something in The Matrix. Rum disputes have become unmoored from the underlying product, which exists only as a symbol.
The same could be said of much of the rum that lines the shelves at liquor stores today. The liquor industry went through a sweeping consolidation in the 1990s, when regional firms were bought by national firms, and national firms by international. The ten largest producers worldwide now own some 70 percent of all liquor brands, and that concentration is certain to rise. Almost every widely known brand of rum sold in America today is owned by a major international player.
Captain Morgan—the number two rum worldwide—is owned by the world’s largest seller of alcoholic beverages, Diageo, which controls nearly one in five of the top-selling premium spirit brands. This includes the number one vodka (Smirnoff), the top two Scotches (Johnnie Walker and J&B), the leading stout (Guinness), the top tequila (Jose Cuervo), and a bestselling liqueur (Baileys Irish cream). Diageo was formed in 1997 by the merger of two European companies, Guinness and Grand Metropolitan. The new company was so huge it attracted the attention of antitrust regulators in the United States, which feared a near-monopolistic dominance in the rum market. Regulators required that Diageo divest itself of its Malibu brand.
So Malibu rum, produced on Barbados, was sold to Allied Domecq, then the world’s second-largest spirits company, which was subsequently acquired by Pernod Ricard, which also owns Beefeater, Jameson, and Absolut Vodka, among others. A few miles from the Barbados distillery where Malibu is made is the blending and aging facility of Mount Gay rum, now owned by the Rémy Cointreau group, which was formed by a merger of two venerable French firms in 1991. Malibu’s siblings include Cointreau liqueur, Piper-Heidsieck champagne, and Rémy Martin cognac.
The largest-selling rum brand worldwide remains Bacardi, the family-owned company that arguably started modern rum on its current path nearly a century and a half ago. Bacardi not only acquired Bombay Gin and Grey Goose vodka, making it the fifth-largest spirit company in the world, but it has aggressively subdivided its rum category, focus-grouping rums to appeal to every style of drinker.
With rum, as with so many aspects in the life of an American consumer, it’s unclear where freedom of choice ends and tyranny of choice begins. When Bacardi began producing rum in the mid-nineteenth century, only one rum was available; it was called Bacardi. By the early 1960s, Bacardi sold seven kinds of rum in the United States, ranging from a light two-year-old to an extra-dry six-year-old introduced to compete with whiskey. With
ongoing market fragmentation, it’s hard to maintain a count: in recent years there’s been Bacardi 8, Bacardi Superior, Bacardi Gold, Bacardi Solera, Bacardi Anejo, Bacardi Black, Bacardi Light, and Bacardi Reserva.
Major rum manufacturers, with state-of-the-art column distillation facilities, are so efficient that they can now strip out virtually all the natural flavors associated with rum, creating a product with the aroma and personality of a well-managed medical clinic. The resulting spirit is so free of the natural congeners that give rum its rich, evocative smell and taste that flavoring elements often need to be added back in to give it character.
And so we see the rise of flavored rums, the fastest-growing sub-category, which account for about one in every three bottles sold in the United States. These rums come in many flavors, mostly tropical, which play off the spirit’s Caribbean heritage. Malibu’s coconut-flavored rum and Captain Morgan’s spiced rum (a vanilla-cinnamon-cloves-and-sugar blend) are among the best known, but most major spirits companies have joined the hunt for the younger drinker brought up on intense, Jolly Rancher–style flavors. Bacardi Limón, introduced in 1995, proved to be one of the most successful spirit launches in history, and now sells upward of a million cases a year. Bacardi later added citrus, coconut, raspberry, orange, “dragon berry,” apple, mango, pineapple, melon, peach, and vanilla rums to its stable. Cruzan Rum Distillery, which traces its roots back to 1760 and is now owned by Beam-Suntory, has been quietly exporting an economical palatable Virgin Island rum for decades. It now markets no fewer than fifteen flavored rums, including pineapple, mango, banana, and orange.
Infused rums have been traditional in the West Indies and beyond for centuries—and commercially flavored vodkas were offered as early as 1960. (These were often pulled from the market because the flavors weren’t stable and tended to go off.) The current crop of coconut rums, however, have about as much in common with a coconut as a Glade scented air freshener has with an alpine meadow. It matters little if they’re flavored artificially or naturally—they’re soft drinks for adults who like the concept of exotic drinks but may never have tasted an actual mango or papaya or fresh coconut. Malibu coconut rum with pineapple juice makes a sort of piña colada; Bacardi O with heavy cream and orange juice makes a drink called a Creamsicle.
In 2004, Mount Gay teamed up with ScentAir Technologies, which produces promotional scent machines, to roll out a new in-store marketing campaign. ScentAir gave customers sample scents of products for sale, which were designed to cause the unsuspecting to drift into a dreamy reverie and then instantly reach for his or her wallet. (“Just as Muzak provides retail sound, ScentAir scent systems provide retail scent,” said their marketing copy.) When you approached a Mount Gay display at select liquor stores, a motion detector signaled a small machine to send a dry scent of either Mexican Mango or Madagascar Vanilla your way.
The scent machine is the perfect match for the modern flavored rum. The aroma is wholly independent of the spirit itself, thrown on like a bright but ill-fitting housecoat. What we have now are bitter fights over brand names, and rums divorced from their island heritages and their natural flavors.
But there was also good news in the rum world. Some distillers were happily letting rum be rum—and coaxing the best from it. And serious cocktail drinkers, part of a sweeping cocktail revival, have rediscovered how sophisticated rums can make immensely sophisticated drinks. It’s as if William Morris had suddenly appeared with a handcrafted cocktail shaker amid the cogs of industrial alcohol production.
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“Would you like to sniff my bung?” asks Phil Prichard. He’s a tall, gregarious sixty-four-year-old with a booming voice and thinning red hair, and he’s holding out a wooden plug that was, until very recently, used to seal a cask of Prichard’s Fine Rum. This line is delivered with a wry smile; he uses it all day long when touting his rum, which he manufactures in a distillery in a shed attached to a disused schoolhouse in Kelso, Tennessee. His whole operation occupies a space about the size of a moderately serious woodshop. State or local laws often prohibit Prichard from offering samples to passersby at liquor stores and meetings of package store associations, where he spends the bulk of his waking hours signing bottles and talking up rum. But there’s no law against sampling the aroma.
“People are always interested in history,” Prichard says. “When you weave the quality of this rum with its historical aspect, I sell more with sniffs than with tastes.”
Prichard is a pioneering representative of another welcome trend: the return of the American rum distiller. Dozens have appeared in the continental United States over the past decade, producing spirits in the old tradition. Prichard’s operation, just a short drive from the Jack Daniel’s distillery, is among the most unlikely. After whiskey poached on rum’s terrain and drove it out two centuries ago, rum now appears to be launching a rear-flank action on whiskey’s turf.
At $36 a bottle (in 2017), about three or four times the cost of a mass-market rum, getting Prichard’s off the store shelf and into the home liquor cabinet has taken some work. Building consumer demand for aromatic, quality rum has been a gradual process—one bung sniff at a time. What’s more, Prichard has to grapple with a larger, more metaphysical obstacle: He has had to convince the consumer that rum isn’t solely about sunny beaches and palm trees or swaggering pirates muttering, “Yarrr.” Rum can be pure Early America, Prichard says, as American as white church steeples and New England village greens. When Prichard talks about rum, it’s not reggae playing in his head, it’s a fife and drum. In his brochures, Prichard even features a rendition of The Spirit of ’76, the famous painting of three bedraggled Revolutionary musicians marching beneath a tattered flag. “We lay no claim to being the only rum made in America,” Prichard explains. “But we do stake our claim that we are producing an authentic American rum. I don’t know anyone else who’s doing that.”
Prichard took an interest in rum in the mid-1990s, after a thirty-year career manufacturing dental implants and running a gift shop with his wife in Vermont. He got the notion of opening a microdistillery, and noticed that sales of premium rums were growing at an appealing rate compared to other liquors. His first thought was to distill a rum made from the sweet syrup of Tennessee-grown sorghum. Federal liquor regulators told him he was welcome to do that, but he just couldn’t label it as rum. By definition, rum sold in America must come from sugarcane or its by-products.
So Prichard scouted around and ended up contracting for molasses from Louisiana. At first, he drove the molasses north himself in a thousand-gallon plastic tank strapped on the back of his truck. But after sliding out of control through a slick intersection one rainy day, he went professional and bought a four-thousand-gallon stainless steel tanker trailer and hired a trucker. Prichard buys a high-quality, table-grade molasses, which he swears is not all that different from the stuff American rum distillers imported from the islands in the eighteenth century. He ferments the molasses in three stainless steel fermenting tanks, then double distills the wash in a five-hundred-gallon copper pot still that he bought from a defunct New England distillery. He casks the distillate in fifteen-gallon, new, white oak barrels that have been charred on the inside. Prichard says that colonial distillers would have done the same thing, trying to burn out the taste of salt fish or turpentine or whatever else merchants might have shipped before selling the used casks to the distillers. Prichard’s rum, about a million dollars’ worth at any given time, is aged in a pair of forty-foot steel cargo containers that sit in the distillery’s yard surrounded by a chain-link fence. Weeds sprout lavishly, stray dogs wander through, and you’d need an exceedingly fertile imagination to conjure up the Caribbean.
Prichard isn’t beholden to colonial distillation methods. For instance, he doesn’t use the lead pipes that caused the dry gripes, and he pays closer attention to his yeast than his eighteenth-century counterparts would have. (N
o dung in the fermenting vats.) Before bottling, his rum passes through a series of filters of the sort found in the plumbing aisles of Home Depot. But he stands by his product as the genuine article. “We spend almost every waking hour attempting to define the American rum, versus what we refer to as the tropical types of rum.” And it does taste different from most of today’s West Indian rums—more austere and less sweet, perhaps bringing to mind the better sipping bourbons made just north in Kentucky.
Prichard has a warm chuckle that’s a shorthand way of saying, “Get a load of this.” He seems to take a special delight in beating the system and making rum without all the overpriced equipment to which the larger distillers are addicted. His shipping-container warehouses cost just $2,000 apiece delivered, and he bought the still and doubler at a distress sale for less than half of what it would have cost to buy a smaller one new. He designed the gravity-fed bottling line himself, and often fills bottles on Sunday, when he’s not traveling the liquor store circuit. His wife sits beside him, gluing yellow ribbons over the top of each bottle.
“You know what that is?” Prichard says, pointing to the top of a small Rube Goldbergesque apparatus in a dim corner next to the fermenting tanks. “That’s a salad bowl.” Indeed, a restaurant-sized stainless steel salad bowl is inverted atop a restaurant-sized stockpot, held in place with C-clamps. A copper condensing tube extends upward from the bowl’s apex nearly to the ceiling, then curves downward through a copper sleeve connected by a green garden hose to a sink faucet. This crude device was Prichard’s first experimental still, and he still uses it when brewing up test batches. Prichard’s operation has an engaging bootstrap inventiveness that’s extremely American, even if the product is more refined than what you would have guzzled in Boston or Philadelphia three centuries ago.
