In fact, not wanting to depend on the taste of a bunch of uneducated strangers, the Minister has brought along a dozen bottles from his own collection—which consists of about sixty different types of rum from one end of the Caribbean to the other, stored aboard his 40-foot sloop, Tafia, whose name is a French word for (what else?) rum. I’m already getting the feeling this is a man possessed.
“If you’ve never had anything but a rum and Coke, I feel sorry for you,” he begins as he moves the bottles around on the table like a kid arranging armies of toy soldiers. “Rum is the most varied spirit that is bottled. It ranges from pure white alcohol just out of the still to fine aged spirits that will rival the best cognac.” I can see Steve raising an eyebrow: We’ve definitely had the fresh-out-of-the-still stuff—Nimrod’s comes to mind—but neither of us has tasted a rum that would come close to rivaling any cognac, let alone the best.
The Minister is sorting the bottles by their place of origin, French islands on one side of the table, everywhere else on the other. Then, within each group, he clusters them by their dominant raw ingredient, “the most easily recognizable factor affecting a rum’s taste,” he explains. He then gets down to business, pouring, swirling, and sipping as he talks.
Rum is made either from fresh sugar cane juice—“this kind of rum is called rhum agricole and comes almost exclusively from the French islands”; from cane syrup—“which is cane juice boiled down to remove some of the water,” much the way maple syrup is made from sap; or from molasses. “In the English-speaking islands, most rum is made from molasses, which is what’s left after crystallized sugar is extracted from sugar cane juice.” (In the French islands, molasses-based rum is called “rhum industriel,” and the islanders export most of it to France; they drink the rhum agricole themselves.)
As we had learned at Nimrod’s, aging (or lack thereof) is the next big determiner of taste. “It’s a pretty nebulous term,” the Minister says. “A rum can spend as little as three months in the barrel and be called aged. And rum doesn’t get any better once it’s in the bottle.” In the French islands, to be called rhum vieux—old rum—a rum must spend at least three years in a barrel. But in Spanish islands such as the Dominican Republic, there is no requirement as to how old rum has to be for the distiller to put añejo—aged—on the bottle. As an example, Ed picks up the Brugal Añejo we brought along. It’s probably been aged just a short while, he says. Its deep rich color comes from the addition of caramel rather than from barrel time. Perhaps the 45-peso price (about $3) should have given us a clue. “Even well-aged rums almost always have their color enhanced with caramel.” Except for aged white rums, of course, which are filtered to remove any color imparted by time in the barrel.
“The question I’m most frequently asked,” the Minister says, not waiting for anyone to ask it, “is what is my favorite rum? I have a lot of favorites. I haven’t found one that I want to drink to the exclusion of others.” Later, in private, he confesses he has a “shortlist” of twenty-five favorites, and if he really had to, he could pare it down to maybe sixteen.
“But I want you to taste each rum for yourself and not rely on me or anyone else to tell you what you like.”
This is what the crowd’s been waiting for. But before he turns us loose on his table, the Minister offers a final tip: Be sure to have a glass of water between drinks. Otherwise, don’t expect sympathy from him for your killer headache.
We look at the labels like Ed has told us to, noting the alcohol content, the distiller, the place of origin, and any information about the age of the rum. We pour a small finger in a glass, hold it up to the light to judge the color, swirl it, sniff it deeply, analyze the smell, and then take a taste. At least that’s what we do the first couple of times. Things get a little more, uh, haphazard once people have tried four or five rums. I distinctly remember, toward the end of the evening, one of the guests interviewing the rest of us to solicit our opinions on the various bottles, using a well-gnawed corncob as his microphone.
Ed has written several books on rum, and he’s brought along copies of his most recent one, his self-published Rums of the Eastern Caribbean—a useful refresher in case any of the details of the tasting are a little foggy the next morning—but given the frugality that abounds in cruising circles, he doesn’t have many takers. “I’d rather spend the money on rum,” whispers one crusty old salt. But, in fact, the book is an island-by-island guide to distilleries and rum shops, stuffed with “visas” that entitle the bearer to discounts throughout the entire Caribbean. A “passport to rum,” Ed calls it, and a determined cruiser could easily recover his investment in reading material by using the visas for a free drink here, and a half-price bottle there. There’s even a visa for a free shot of rum at Nimrod’s—not a big incentive for me, I’ll tell you, but of course we buy the book to add to Receta’s by now overstuffed bookshelf. “Keep the wind behind you and your glass half full,” Ed writes in the front. Steve senses an epiphany.
It had come out in conversation at the tasting that we had worked in publishing in the “real world,” and Ed had asked if he could pick our brains. Sure enough, a few days later, he rows his wooden dinghy over to Receta at sunset, a couple of rum bottles tucked between his knees. Trade tastings for publishing advice? Sounds fair to us.
He immediately heads belowdecks to Receta’s galley, to mix us each a ’ti punch to start things off. The before-dinner drink of choice in the French West Indies, ’ti punch has the same mystique there that the martini does in North America. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, it’s said you can judge the quality of a restaurant by its ’ti punch. And, like the martini, it demands a glass all its own—a small, squat tumbler that often bears a colored decal advertising the brand of rum the drink contains. Ed is forced to make do with our standard acrylic boat glasses. He has brought us a proper swizzle stick, though: one of his trimmed twigs with its propeller-like end for stirring.
’Ti is a contraction of the French petit, he tells us, which refers to the size of the drink—just a couple of ounces over maybe one ice cube—not to the size of the punch it packs, which is decidedly grand. It’s a deceptively simple combination of rhum agricole, freshly squeezed lime juice, and pure cane syrup; the trick is getting the proportions right, when “right” is a matter of personal taste. One ’ti punch can taste dramatically different from another, depending on the balance of sour, sweet, and strong, and, most importantly, the brand of strong you use.
A couple of sips and Steve has declared a mission: As soon as we get to Martinique—the first French island on our way up the island chain—Receta will acquire a set of proper ’ti punch glasses, and the rhum agricole and cane syrup to go with them. He can’t wait to start experimenting.
We talk more about rum than publishing, but that seems fine with Ed: This is a man who loves to talk about what he does for a living and how he does it—a rarity among cruisers who are escaping the “W word”—and, besides, it gives him a reason to row back again the next night, with a different selection of bottles tucked between his knees.
Ed admits he started the Ministry of Rum and appointed himself minister as an excuse to keep sailing the Caribbean and visiting distilleries—but he also wanted to raise awareness, he says, of what he felt was an underappreciated form of alcohol. Sure, sure.
“When I started traveling around learning about rum, people started giving me rum. The more I learned, the more rum they gave me. And the better the rums were.” During his ten trips up and down the island chain, he’s been shown private stills, sampled rums that are older than he is, and been served special home brews in off-the-beaten-path rum shops.
“There is no substitute,” he tells us, unequivocally, “for seeing how the rum is made. Going to the distilleries and meeting the people who make the spirits will enhance your enjoyment of their efforts.”
We take his words to heart and start to use his book as he really intended: as a travel guide to the world of Caribbean rum.
Th
e narrow dirt road is shaded by stately old mahoganies and “deh tourist tree,” as islanders call the gumbo limbo, the tree with the red-orange peeling bark. The dust we kick up as we walk is sticking nicely to my sweaty legs. We had started out from Receta in the relative cool of early morning, but that was three tightly packed buses and more than two hours ago, and I’m now feeling anything but fresh. When we changed buses for the last time in the town of Grenville on the other side of the island, halfway up the coast, we had asked the driver to let us off at Dunfermline Estate.
“All the bus drivers know where to stop,” Ed had assured us. “When you get off, take the left fork of the dirt road to the distillery.” That we’ve done, but there are no signs, no buildings, and no people in sight. “I don’t know about this,” I say to Steve.
“Yeah, but just take a whiff,” says he of the sensitive nose. “This is right.”
A few moments later I pick it up, and the air soon becomes heavy with the scent of rum being made: a smell that’s part burned sugar—from the pots of boiling cane juice and the burning sugar-cane stalks used to feed the boilers—and part sweet fermenting syrup.
Eventually the laneway opens up to reveal a collection of old stone and wood buildings with sugar cane, bananas, and cocoa growing on the cultivated hillsides behind them. Clearly, Dunfermline Estate doesn’t get many tourists. There’s nothing quite so obvious as a visitor center, store, or even an office, and as we debate which building to head for, a bone-skinny man in ragged pants and T-shirt heads toward us. Both his long hair and his even longer beard are styled in dreadlocks, and when he speaks, it’s a strong mumbled patois. Not your typical tour guide. “Good day,” says Steve. “Is it possible to see the distillery?” We don’t understand a word of his response, but his body language indicates he’s agreed to show us around.
For the next half-hour we follow him from one building to the next, and listen to him “explain” what we are seeing. Dunfermline is the third distillery we’ve visited, and by now we, as Ed puts it, “speak a little rum.” Fortunately. Braided Beard points to something, mumbles incomprehensibly, and we respond as if we’ve understood perfectly. Yes, of course, the piles of bagasse, the sugar-cane stalks from which the juice has been pressed. Yes, the water-powered cane mill that does the pressing job and delivers the fresh juice to the stone boiling house, where the fires are fed by the bagasse from the first step of the process. Yes, I nod knowingly, the fermentation vats, where the “wash”—the cane juice mixed with water and yeast—sits until the distiller determines it’s ready for the still. At Dunfermline, where the rum is fairly heavy-bodied, that’s ten to twelve days, though light rums are fermented for as little as twenty-four hours. We even manage to ask appropriate questions (at least we think they are) at what we think is the appropriate time.
The highlight of the tour comes when Braided Beard swings open the door to the still house, to show us the yellowed sight glass used for determining the alcohol content of the raw rum. The simplest still—the type beloved by backyard bootleggers—is the pot still, which consists (in simplest form) of a kettle heated over a wood fire and attached to a condenser. It makes alcohol in batches, a kettle at a time, and is labor intensive. To increase production, most distilleries use a variation on the continuous distillation column, which is fed by a continuous stream of fermented wash, heated by steam. Not Dunfermline. It uses a copper pot still, as it always has. The doorway of the still house is low, the interior dim. I duck and follow our guide into the darkness. Whup-whup-whup-whup-whup-whup-whup-whup. An extended family of fruit bats brushes past me into the light as I stifle a scream.
Dunfermline has been in operation since 1797, and the facilities don’t appear to have been cleaned very often in the intervening two centuries. But neither that, nor the dirt floors, nor the open vats, nor the bats hanging in the rafters give us any pause about the sanitary condition of the finished product. Nothing could survive in Dunfermline rum. It’s bottled at 70 percent alcohol, which makes it 140 proof. “Strong rum,” the locals call it, which officially means any brew that’s more than 50 percent alcohol.
We’ve got a choice between adding a bottle of the regular Dunfermline—aged “up to six months”—or the comparatively ancient three-year-old “Spicy Jack” to our growing onboard collection. Jack gets the nod, and Braided Beard digs out a bottle from the boxes piled in a corner. Just in case the “70 percent alcohol” doesn’t make the point, the laughing mule on its garish label reinforces that the stuff has a wicked kick.
Ed’s book continues to give a focus to our land excursions for months to come, and a further excuse to explore beyond the beaten paths. Its inside back cover becomes plastered with a series of Post-it notes: a shrinking–expanding–ever-changing key to the location, taste, and preferred usage of the various bottles in Receta’s stash of spirits. “Macoucherie Dark: Top shelf under sink in head; for rum punch.” “La Mauny: Forward can locker; white rhum agricole; for ’ti punch.” “Rhum J.M.: Starboard aft locker; TOP-OF-THE-LINE AGED RUM—FOR SIPPING ONLY—DO NOT MIX UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH.” Steve is serious about this one.
The ten-year-old J.M., from the J.M. Rhumerie on Martinique—the island with more distilleries than any other in the Eastern Caribbean—is the proof for Steve that rum can indeed “rival the best cognac.” Could there be a better reason to drive all the way to the island’s northernmost edge? The drive along the twisting road that cuts through spiky pineapple fields is spectacular, but one sip of the decade-old J.M. in the old stone tasting room is more spectacular still. The aging warehouse has row after row of oak barrels, each one clearly stamped “Kentucky” and formerly used for bourbon. Regulations requiring other liquor producers to use barrels only once ensure a steady supply of “once-used” barrels for the rum industry in the Caribbean, where they’re kept in service for ten to fifteen years—or until they begin to leak, whichever comes first.
At the La Mauny Rhumerie, also in Martinique, we get not only rhum agricole but also—finally—our set of ’ti punch glasses. “I set a personal best here by sampling three rhums before 11 A.M.,” I crow to my journal, although I do tack on: “Good Lord, what are things coming to?”
At Shillingford Estates, near Mero, Dominica, it’s purely because of the name and the label that we opt to buy the Macoucherie Dark and the Macoucherie Elixir of Bois Bandé rather than the blandly named West Coast Rum. “Macoucherie,” after all, is patois for “come into my bed.” The Macoucherie Elixir of Bois Bandé is a blend of rum, spices, and an extract made from the bark of the locally grown bois bandé tree, yet another reputed aphrodisiac. The island’s indigenous people are said to have discovered the uplifting effects of bois bandé (“hard wood,” in patois) centuries ago. “To be consumed moderately,” the label on the bottle advises, but whether this is to avoid exhaustion or drunkenness isn’t specified. However, I never see another rum in the West Indies with a similar warning.
Shillingford Estates is home to one of the few water-driven wheels for crushing sugar cane remaining in the Caribbean—we’d seen another at Dunfermline—and the manager offers to show us around: “You know a little something about how rum is made?” he inquires. I should hope so; this is, after all, now Distillery Tour 7.
Ed has more than seventy recipes for various punches and cocktail concoctions in his book, but perhaps the most basic, and the easiest to remember, is this one, which he claims comes from Barbados, the first island to export rum: One part sour/Two parts sweet/Three parts strong/Four parts weak/Five drops of bitters, and nutmeg spice/Serve well chilled with lots of ice. Five liquid ingredients and a sprinkling of spice. “It is agreed, as much as anything in the islands is agreed,” Ed writes in the book, “that the word punch comes from the Hindustani word for five—panch.” The strong, of course, is rum. The sour is usually freshly squeezed lime juice, and the sweet is traditionally cane syrup, sold in bottles, though a simple sugar syrup can stand in. The weak can be fruit juice, water, or a combination.
&nbs
p; In this part of the world, bitters can mean nothing but Angostura Bitters, made in Trinidad. This “unique blend of herbs and spices,” as the small paper-wrapped bottle trumpets, is made from a secret formula developed in 1824 by the surgeon-general of Simón Bolívar’s army, Dr. Johann Siegert, to improve the appetite and digestion of the soldiers. Only five living people are said to know the formula, and there are rumored to be only two written copies in existence: one in a bank vault in New York, and one hidden in Trinidad. Among the ingredients the potion apparently does not contain is the bitter bark of the angostura tree; it takes its name from the town of Angostura, a trading port on the Orinoco River in Venezuela, where the good doctor was based.
The nutmeg dusting the top of a well-made rum punch is indelibly associated with Grenada. The air even carries a hint of the sweet spice, especially in the countryside where the fruit trees grow. Local lore says a doctor who had lived in the East Indies imported the first nutmeg to the West Indies in the early nineteenth century—to enhance the taste of his planter’s punch, of course. The trees came to Grenada in 1843 and proved well suited to the hilly terrain and volcanic soil. Nutmeg became so important to the island—Grenada produces one-third of the world’s supply and is the largest single supplier—that it is depicted on the country’s flag. In fact, it’s the only object represented on the flag, besides seven stars, one for each of the country’s parishes.
An Embarrassment of Mangoes Page 15