Contents Chapter 1: A Purist and a Modernist Walk into a Bar Chapter 2: Working in the Rum Factory Chapter 3: Why Rum Matters Chapter 4: The Taste of Rum Chapter 5: What Does Drinking Mean? Chapter 6: Rum Recipes Chapter 7: Rum and the New Alchemy Chapter 8: Further Rum Reading (and Travel) Chapter 9: The Short Course in Rum Tasting (SCIRT) Kit About the Author CHAPTER 1 A PURIST AND A MODERNIST WALK INTO A BAR W hen I started working on this book, I was pretty sure what I wanted to do. I wanted to look at noble, fragrant, complex, wood-aged rums: the type of liquor that’s served in snifters and consumed slowly, even reverently. I had the suspicion—maybe even the conviction—that rum was a serious, big deal sort of thing, somewhere above single malt scotch and maybe (just) below cognac. The suspicion was fed by tastes of great, budget-priced rums (Mount Gay) and exquisite and exquisitely-expensive ones (Zacapa). I was infused with missionary zeal. I think I was hoping to find the rum snobs of the world and go off in a corner where we could all talk about esoteric little bottlings and feel quite content with ourselves. I was a purist and I wanted to meet other purists and convert the uninitiated. My own drinking history (see chapter 5) has only lately been touched by purism. I was never a wine snob: I was just as happy with a grapey-ripe fruit bomb as I was with an elegant super-Tuscan. I’d love a d’Yquem one day and then trot off happily with a Banyuls the next. Beer was different. There was a lot of product out there that didn’t taste very good. Some of it was so bad that the only thing it could be compared to was nauseating, sweet cocktail confections made with cheap rum. I was a beer snob almost from my first bottle of Saison Dupont. Purism is a kind of ingredient-specific thinking. The best X must be the most reverently produced, additive-free example of its kind—an original recipe that outdoes others only in its adherence to some antique ideal. The real beef lover will only allow some salt and perhaps a crank of pepper. A true baseball fan despises the designated hitter. A proper rum enthusiast will allow nothing but sugarcane in the bottle and maybe a splash of water in the glass. And so on. The thing itself: sugarcane. When I started some serious tasting, what I discovered made me abandon the purist approach. It even led me to question and finally reject the whole notion of purism. What derailed my approach to purism was a sudden appreciation of Modernist cooking. This epiphany happened at a tavern in Philadelphia called Kraftwork, and I’ll tell you more about it in minute, but first let’s talk about the Purist and the Modernist. The Purist You know this guy: he drinks single malt scotch, maybe the occasional cognac. He takes his liquor straight at cellar temperature in a thin-walled glass—a tumbler for the scotch, a snifter for the brandy. He (it’s usually a man) is horrified at the thought of soda, visibly pained at the notion of a cocktail. He is a connoisseur—someone proud of his knowledge of the difference between good and bad. He’s also a purist—someone who revels in, even worships the idea of a pure, uncompromised thing in itself. He likes the solos at the jazz club, the consommés at the restaurant. He also takes a certain pleasure in the elevation of his purism above your trashy compromise. He almost needs to snort at your Brandy Alexander in order to fully enjoy his VSOP. He’s an easy object of fun, both because of the supercilious attitude that often accompanies his pronouncements and for the shaky intellectual ground on which they stand. (Was the scotch purer the minute it came out of the still? What about the adulteration of it by aging then diluting?) But there is something sweet, almost romantic about the purist—some quality that we have to admire and to which many of us aspire. Admiring things in their simplicity, he turns our attention to the beauty in less, encourages a restrained horror of more. There is an elegance in the drink from the artisan’s still or the winegrower’s vat or the brewer’s barrel. There is also a suitable humility in our recognition of that elegance by simply leaving it the hell alone as we put it in a glass. The first part of our ratings is devoted to rums for the purist. These are mostly wood-aged rums that have spent five or more years thinking about themselves before they came to a liquor store near you. They are the products of sugarcane, wood, time, and skill. The best thing about having a purist category is that these rums give us a chance to see what the cane has in it. Beef Wellington. The Modernist Suppose you could take a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich on a brioche and extract all its flavors and textures and rearrange them. Imagine further that you transformed smoky bacon into a chewy roll and made crispy strips of tomato and layered them with leaves of brioche and doughy, eggy, buttery slabs of lettuce. Does that sound awful? Does it offend the purist in you? Hmm. Looks odd; tastes great. The modernist position on food is that no food owns its own properties and that any manipulation we can do in service of foodie fun is not only justified, it’s holy, worthy, artistic work. The aim is to create a new experience, not to honor old ingredients. So let’s compress a slab of cucumber in a vacuum bag and turn it into pemmican. Then, let’s sprinkle it with gin and serve it before dinner where the cocktails used to be. You’re not defiling the cucumber; you’re helping it realize its potential. Once you make the sensation the center of culinary effort, you change the whole view of ingredients. Can you imagine a single-malt sorbet? Could you imagine its taste as it melts on a jelly-soft square of sous vide cooked salmon that’s waiting for it in a nest of deep fried dill leaves? One of the loveliest things about rum is that it seems to invite collaboration. It wants to drench pound cake and pull the flavor out of fruit or freeze itself with raisins into ice cream. Rum is pretty fond of other liquids too. It adds dimensions