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42
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2017
the
Holiday
issue
A
s the holidays approach, our thou-
ghts turn to rum. At least mine do,
and if yours don’t, I suggest you re-
think how you’ve structured your life.
Rum fraternizes well with eggnog and party
punches, and makes a welcome holiday gift.
Interestingly, rum also happens to be the spirit
of summer — lighter, brighter variations of it
go into beach drinks with little umbrellas, and
swizzles and Collinses. But rum is perfectly
fine for sipping in the dusky winter and the
blushing spring too. As a writer for
Fortune
magazine put it in 1933, “Rum makes a fine
hot drink, a fine cold drink, and is not so bad
from the neck of a bottle.”
Rum, in short, is the ultimate shape-shifter.
And as you reach for that second cup of
punch, I’d encourage you to pause briefly to
consider how rum — not bourbon, not rye
— is in so many ways the spirit of America.
Not only in its endless versatility, but in
how it has played momentous roles in our
political and cultural past. Rum was created
in the New World, for the New World, by
the New World. It is America in a glass.
Rum, as you may know, is a byproduct of
sugar processing. Sugar making produces
molasses, and molasses — when fermented
and distilled — produces rum.
So rum was basically the younger sibling of
the sugar industry. As the island colonies of
the West Indies became sugar kingdoms in
the mid-1600s, rum was there — sales of
rum and molasses provided enough capital
to keep plantations running, making sugar
sales pure profit.Which also means that rum
is deeply connected to an unfortunate part of
that boom: the slave trade. Without captive
labor bought and sold, sugar would not have
prospered as it did, and rum would likely
have been a minor actor. As with the history
of cotton, it’s not a bright nor particularly
noble part of the New World’s history, but
it’s an indelible part of it, and a bit of it is also
in every glass. Any effort to gloss over that
fact would be dishonest.
Once established on the islands, rum proved
too footloose to remain confined to West
Indian grog shops, and so it made its way to
Rum’s
the Word
by
Wayne Curtis