by Wayne Curtis
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Phil Prichard was among the first wave of craft rum distillers, which over the past decade has continued to grow. Fewer than 100 craft distillers of all sorts of spirits were in operation in 2005. By 2017 around 1,400 craft distillers were licensed and either in operation or preparing to start. Vodka, whiskey, and gin remain among the most popular of spirits, but rum is well represented, with distillers producing a range of rums—that essence of the tropics—in such unlikely places as the Rocky Mountains and the southwestern desert.
Craft spirits—which can be loosely defined as liquor produced by those making fewer than 50,000 cases per year—have quite closely followed the upward track of craft brewing, lagging beer by about two decades. It’s been buoyed by a demand for local and regional products across the board, a thirst for authenticity, the Millennial desire to favor something new rather than stick with something familiar, and a soft spot among consumers to support those who take risks with experimental products.
Since 2005, small, regional distillers have been making rum that’s attracting national (and even international) notice. Montanya Rum in Crested Butte, Colorado, uses Portuguese stills and further ages their rum in casks at 9,000 feet above sea level. Rusticator Rum, made in a tiny coastal Maine town, is distilled with a German still and aged in new French barrels, producing another surprisingly sophisticated rum that’s as pleasurable to drink as it is hard to find. In southern Georgia, Richland Rum has set up a distillery in disused buildings in a former rail hub village, and is making rum from sugarcane syrup made from cane grown on their own hundred-acre sugar farm. Even rhum agricole from fresh cane juice—long a curiosity from the French West Indies—is getting some American competition, with producers in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Hawaii surfacing in recent years.
Perhaps the most impressive new craft rum I’ve come across in recent years is Privateer Rum, distilled in Ipswich, Massachusetts. The distillery was founded by Andrew Cabot, a descendent of early New England settlers. In doing some family research, he learned that his ancestors once owned a rum distillery. Well, why not, he thought, and started a distillery in a small, charmless industrial park just off a salt marsh.
Cabot had the good sense to hire an untested but serious new distiller in Maggie Campbell, who hadn’t yet turned thirty when she started making rum. Campbell had spent some time with whiskey makers in her native Colorado, and learned about brandy during a stint at the respected Germain-Robin distillery in Northern California. Although she lacked experience with rum, she knew the parameters of what made a fine spirit. In particular, she embraced the concept of elevage, which is French for “to raise.” She’s a firm believer that the distillation may mark the birth of the spirit, but the real character comes in how one chooses to raise it. She pays close attention to her barrels, constantly sampling and scrawling notes on them in chalk. She knows which barrels are good for taming an unruly distillate, and which are fractionally thinner and will let in some of the salty air from the adjoining marsh.
This may sound a bit precious, but the proof is in the bottle. Her standard white and lightly aged rums are excellent, but her releases of limited barrels—like her overproof Navy Yard rum, her double-pot-stilled rum, and her rare Queen’s Share—really stand out. In just a few years, Privateer has managed to produce some outstanding rums that will measure up against ones produced by distilleries with a century or more of experience. Privateer’s Queen’s Share, as of this writing, is my favorite rum—the best I’ve come across in tasting many over more than a decade.
Perhaps because of higher expectations and an increasingly sophisticated market—or perhaps because of fears that craft distillers will poach sales as they have in craft brewing—many larger and midsized producers have been digging deeper into their warehouses and finding top-notch barrels to release as limited editions. Mount Gay has its 1703 Master Select with a blend from casks between ten and thirty years old. And in 2017, Appleton released its Joy Anniversary Blend, marking the twentieth anniversary of master blender Joy Spence’s work at the distillery, with rums ranging from twenty-five to thirty-five years old. On Martinique, the makers of Rhum Clément rum and Rhum J.M have significantly stepped up efforts to put away more casks for long-term aging, so expect more elegant French rums to fill shelves in the coming years.
Jamaica has also been undergoing renewed interest, and the funky, high-ester fruity rums that the island has long been famous for are in increasing demand among those who value the authenticity of the past. Hampden Estate is a nineteenth-century distillery that has been famed for it superfragrant rums, which have been mostly sold to third-party bottlers for blending. (Habitation Velier, an Italian importer, began releasing aged Hampden Estate rums in the United States in late 2017.) Another Jamaican distillery with a long lineage as a sugar plantation and a more recent history as a rum distiller is Worthy Park. Examples of both are easier to find these days—look for Scarlet Ibis or Smith & Cross, or Hamilton rums, all of which reward those searching for what distillers have historically called “hogo”—that is, haute goût, or “high taste,” a term typically used to describe the funk of wild game meat aging en plein air.
Several quiet, medium-sized outfits are also amid expansion into the premium rum market. Foursquare on Barbados is an influential producer that you’ve likely not heard of; much of their output goes to brokers in Europe to sell to merchant bottlers. But owner Richard Seale has been venturing into limited bottlings of rum finished in port or zinfandel wine casks, which can give their already rich rum (a blend of pot and column still) a sort of opalescent glow. Plantation Rums, which is part of noted French cognac maker Pierre Ferrand, started in the 1990s when its president, Alexandre Gabriel, began shopping for select barrels of aged rum at more than a dozen distilleries in the West Indies. He then shipped these back to France for additional aging in used cognac barrels with remarkable results. (They also recently released a funky, high-proof rum called O.F.T.D. (Old Fashioned Traditional Dark), and Stiggins’ Fancy Pineapple Rum, named after a Dickens character and with a multidimensional taste of fresh pineapple, making it seem like flavored rum with a doctorate.) In early 2017, Plantation acquired a historic distillery in Barbados (complete with four antique and unused stills), along with a share in a famous but shuttered Jamaican distillery called Long Pond, which was recently brought back on line.
The rum industry at times seems to be taking several steps back into history in its efforts to move forward, reviving lost production methods. For any intrigued by rum’s history, that’s good news. But rum isn’t ignoring the future.
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I had barely awoken on my first morning in Los Angeles in December 2016 when Bryan Davis rang me up at my hotel and asked if I wanted to drive down to Costa Mesa to check out an old British telephone booth he’d found on Craigslist.
I said sure, but hesitantly, because I was actually pretty sure I didn’t want to do that. I’d flown out from my home in New Orleans to see Davis’s new rum distillery and to have a close look at his patent-pending reactor, which has been generating considerable buzz in the liquor world. Essentially, he’s invented a process (with encouraging results, he claims) that can create the equivalent of a twenty-year-aged rum in less than a week. It’s a potentially disruptive technology that could roil the spirits industry. Heading off to the suburbs to chase after a phone booth seemed like a diversionary ploy, an effort to put me off the scent. But then it occurred to me that starting out my search by stepping into an old phone booth was an honorable way to begin an adventure in time travel.
About four hours later, we finally drove back to his distillery, but without a phone booth in tow (it turned out to be a cheesy knockoff, not a legit portal to other dimensions). Davis is a self-taught polymath, with a background in arts and a stint as a theme park designer. He and his longtime girlfriend, Joanna Haruta, had started an absinthe dist
illery in Spain in their twenties, but sold that and returned to the United States to begin making rum in California. One day Davis noticed the backyard decking had cracked under the intense California sun. It was his eureka moment—the sun could break down the polymers in wood much as alcohol did over years in a barrel, but far more quickly. He set about experimenting with glass jars filled with alcohol and oak fragments, all subject to harsh light at varying intensities.
Davis also obtained a bottle of thirty-three-year-old Guyana rum, had a chemical lab analyze it to the parts-per-million level, and then set about trying to re-create the same molecular fingerprint in days rather than years. After a year or more of trials, he arrived where he set out—at a dense, classic rum, created in just six days. To my taste, it’s not an exact replica of a traditionally aged rum, but it was flavorful and tasty, and I’d certainly choose it over any other six-day rum. Davis was awarded a patent for his technology in the spring of 2017.
To get to the room where his reactor is housed at his distillery, Davis ushered me through some black curtains into a dark space that for all the world could have been a backcountry encampment deep in a tropical jungle—leafy plants everywhere, the sounds of cicadas and beasts of the night. He poured me a swig of his rum from a rustic bar, then excused himself. A few moments later, something large and slow appeared out of the darkness, lit by candles. It was a barge big enough to seat eight, with two sphinxes like mastheads, floating on a shallow, elevated river and piloted by Davis, who invited me aboard. You can take the boy out of the theme park, but you apparently can’t take the theme park out of the boy.
He’d needed to install a massive water tank to use for cooling his still and fermenters, and he thought, well, why wouldn’t you build a river? The lights at the encampment dimmed, and we started quietly motoring toward some dimly seen copper fermentation tanks at the distant end of his river, beyond which lay the high-tech reactor, and, quite possibly, the future of aging.
The story of rum is one of change, evolution, and adaptation. Rum resurfaces with each era, sometimes hardly recognizable from the last. It’s the true American spirit. Rum has been with Americans since our inception, and like us, rum has learned to work with whatever history gives it.
Rum doesn’t like endings. And for a good reason: rum is nothing but a series of fresh beginnings.
[ A Thumbnail Guide to Rum ]
Thousands of rums are available around the world, and their flavor profiles vary so widely that you’ll often swear you’re sipping different spirits. And that’s part of the adventure of rum sampling. Spirits made under one jurisdiction, like bourbon, which by definition has to be made in the United States and under one set of laws, are limited in what they can do. Sipping your way through them can feel like the equivalent of touring from Louisville to Lexington—the view doesn’t change all that much. Sampling rums, on the other hand, is like going from Martinique to Maui by way of Medford—you just never know what surprises the next sip will bring. In part, this is because rum is produced in so many places, each with their own regulations and traditions, but also because there is no international oversight board; if it’s made from sugarcane or its by-products, it can be labeled as rum. The result is a vast and untidy marketplace of rum products.
When shopping for rum, a few key distinctions should be kept in mind.
Unaged or aged? In theory, white rum is unaged and dark rum is aged. And, in theory, the change in color comes from the inside of the charred barrels.
The reality is different. Some white rums are aged in oak barrels and then filtered to remove the color. And some lightly aged rums are colored with caramel to make them appear darker. (Black rums like Myers’s and Cruzan Black Strap are rendered dark as molasses with additional agents.) Aging also mellows rum, and an older rum tends to have fewer burrs to catch in your throat on the way down. A general rule of thumb is that older rums are more complex than unaged rums—they’ve had time for additional oxidization, and the longer they’ve sat in oak, the more flavors they pick up. The fun comes in finding exceptions to the rule.
Sugarcane juice or molasses-based? The French islands, more often than not, make rum from freshly pressed sugarcane juice rather than molasses. Martinique exports the most of what’s called rhum agricole. (Rum industriel is the somewhat disparaging French term for rum made from molasses, which accounts for most rum worldwide.) Rhum agricole has been increasingly making its way into American markets.
Unaged rum from sugarcane juice has a distinctive flavor—you can taste and smell the grassiness of the cane. That’s largely because sugarcane distillate comes out of the still at a lower proof than most molasses-based rum, allowing for those defining qualities to shine through. (Fermented molasses is typically distilled at a higher proof to strip out unpleasant aromas that can carry over at lower concentrations.) Aged sugarcane rums, which mellow and take on the flavors of the barrel, veer closer in taste to that of their aged molasses-based counterparts.
Pot still or column still? Most rums worldwide are made in efficient column stills, which allow continuous production and economies of scale. Many of the newer craft rums are made in pot stills, and many rums, such as those from Jamaica and Barbados, are usually a blend of pot-still rum and column-still rum. There’s an effort underway to reclassify rum based on production methods—instead of light or dark, of English or Spanish, it would differentiate rums based on whether they were produced with a pot still (“pure single rum”), a column still (“traditional” or “modern”), or a blend of the two (“single blended rum”), and if they came from a single distillery or a blend of multiple distilleries. (If interested, google “Gargano rum classification.”) This bears watching, although so far it’s chiefly of interest to only serious rum aficionados.
For the most part, though, improvements in distillation technology and barrel-aging techniques have evened out many of the differences between the two distilling methods, so whichever still is used today can be of small consequence to what you taste in the glass.
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Listed on the pages that follow are some of the rums that impressed me. I’m inclined toward the heavier rums and prefer those with denser flavors, so these suggestions probably lean in that direction.
I’ve tried to include rums that can be found fairly widely in the United States, because recommending rums you won’t be able to taste seems unsporting. But I’ve also included a selection of modern craft rums, which are typically available in limited markets. Rum availability varies widely from state to state; some stores are still overseen by a feudal, government-run distribution system, and some are more free market. But even among the free-market states, you won’t find all the smaller labels, since few distillers have the budget to roll into all markets at once. The inconsistency can be aggravating, but it also adds a welcome element of suspense when traveling across the United States. My rule of thumb: never visit a new state without stopping by a liquor store to see what’s in stock.
Homebodies can also cheat: a number of big retail outfits maintain online storefronts, and will ship to many (but not all) states. Check Astor Wines (astorwines.com) in New York; Binny’s Beverage Depot in Chicago (binnys.com); and Caskers (caskers.com), which works with liquor stores in several states.
You may notice that I don’t include many flavored or spiced rums on this list. Some of these may be perfectly fine in a mixed drink or two, and a handful are actually delicious (see: Plantation Stiggins’ Fancy Pineapple Rum). But I assume that you’re interested in rum, not candy.
APPLETON ESTATE [JAMAICA]
Appleton is Jamaica’s largest producer of rum, and has a line of rich, full-bodied, slightly peppery rums ranging from mixable rums perfect for tiki drinks, to luscious, well-aged rums that should be sullied with nothing other than an ice cube. Appleton Estate Signature is a fine all-purpose rum for most mixed drinks. Splurge on the Rare Blend 12 Year if you
’re looking for a touch of big Jamaican flavor with a measure of sophistication.
BANKS [FIVE-NATION BLEND]
Banks is a relatively new company (2009), which launched with an unaged white rum created by blending rums from five distilleries in five nations into one product—four West Indian producers along with Batavia Arrack from Indonesia. Because rum can vary so much from place to place, the blended result is a more supple, complex spirit than one would expect from a white rum. More recently, Banks introduced an aged product blended with an additional two rums.
RHUM BARBANCOURT [HAITI]
Barbancourt is made from fresh sugarcane on an island with a strong French heritage, but it’s not marketed as a rhum agricole. Barbancourt is a sublimely dry rum, wonderfully austere and nicely oaked. (It’s aged in French oak, not American bourbon barrels.) Note the stars on the label—three stars mean it’s aged four years and five stars for eight years, while the Réserve du Domaine is aged fifteen years.
RON DEL BARRILITO [PUERTO RICO]
The tasty rums produced by Barrilito in Puerto Rico are a good example of crossover rums. Puerto Rico has long been famous for its light, almost vodka-clear rums, and a half-century ago such a full-bodied rum wouldn’t be commonly available on the island. But tastes and markets change, and Barrilito has responded well. Aged in used wine casks from Spain, both the two-star and three-star rums have distinct qualities. The two-star is lighter and makes a wonderful mixing rum; the three-star (aged six to ten years) has a slight smokiness to it and is good for sipping as well as for mixing in drinks that call for bringing more of the rum flavor forward.
