Rum – Origins of Style

Rum, by any other name, would still taste as sweet...

WORDS ° Ben Davidson & Chris Middleton

“Rum embodies a worldly character like no other spirit. It’s growth cannot be confined to national borders, geographical climates or socio-economic strata. It is the drink that has built countries. Through its production, it has given many a livelihood; used without care, it has taken life away.” - Dr. Nicholas Feris, International Rum Council

Rum is one of the three great aged spirits, along with brandy and whisky, that accompanied the renaissance and the age of discovery. While the three original rum-producing empires, England, France, and Spain - all had a profound influence on the rum we drink today, the pre-history of rum can be traced back to Papua New Guinea, where sugarcane was first cultivated by humans over 7000 years ago.

EARLY BEGINNINGS

Known as the noble cane, Saccharum officinarum was selectively cultivated over thousands of years from grass to intensify its sweetness. Many of our favourite alcoholic beverages such as beer, whisky, bourbon, gin, and even vodka, evolved from early grass grains including barley, wheat, rye, and later corn. Grass and grains are rich in starches and carbohydrates, so they can easily be converted into sugars, from which yeast ferments into base alcohol.

Sugarcane is one of the highest sources of sucrose in the world, with about 12-15 per cent sucrose content. Europeans began to develop a sweet palate at the same time the three quintessential hot beverages arrived in Europe: coffee from the Levant, tea from China, and chocolate from the Americas – all of which required sugar to mask their bitterness. So, Christopher Columbus took sugarcane to the West Indies in the late 1490s, after which plantations slowly began to populate the islands and the mainland Americas. Soon after this, the process of distilling rum to utilise leftover molasses expanded, effectively kick-starting the rum industry. The West Indies were quickly exploited by all the major European naval powers - the Spanish, Portuguese, French, English and the Dutch - who all seized colonies to grow sugarcane. On the Brazilian coast, the Portuguese were probably the first to distil a proto-rum in the 1540s in primitive alembic still heads, and the term cachaça was coined there in 1555. While the Caribbean, along with Central and South America, became the centre of rum production and remains so today, rum is made wherever sugarcane is grown - all in tropical climates and across the globe from the Americas to India, Asia to Africa, as well as Australia. Five hundred years after its discovery, rum remains the world’s second most popular spirit; 60 countries produce rum at over 170 commercial distilleries, with another 30,000 small cachaça distilleries in Brazil.

EMERGENCE OF COLONIAL TYPES

The three most popular rum types arose from the cultural histories of the three major European powers in the West Indies and Americas. Today, however, there is increasing product blurring as individual distilleries start to make a range of basic styles (white, gold, dark) and different types (English, French, Spanish), and to attract different segments and growth opportunities. This said, the underlining production techniques and flavour profiles based on each country’s colonial heritage, still remain.

ENGLISH: This style is made from molasses and uses pot still and column still distillation to make gold and dark rums. The heaviest rums come from Guyana (El Dorado) on the Demerara River; creating rich, powerful and aromatic

rums. Jamaica (Appleton Estate), Dominican Republic (Matusalem) and other previously British controlled islands also produce rich and aromatic spirits, using both blended pot still and column still aged rums, while Barbados (Mt. Gay) and Trinidad (Angostura) make a lighter, golden style. Multi-Island rums, like the exquisite yet robust Plantation rum have English inspiration, as well as, the irrepressible Pusser’s, which has connections to the Royal Navy when the rum ration was distributed by the ship’s purser. The English style also directly shaped Australia’s style; this is evident in Bundaberg, and Beenleigh, which still retain the pungent signature of and English type of rum

FRENCH: The French have two classifications, being rhum industrial - made from molasses - and the other being rhum agricole – made from pressed sugarcane juice. Martinique (Clement) and Guadeloupe prefer cane sugar juice; whereas Haiti (Barbancourt) mainly produces heavier flavoursome rum from molasses that is aged for several years. Appleton Estate Barrelhouse

SPANISH: The Spanish type emerged later in the piece and is typified by the use of the column still, giving rise to a lighter, more delicate style. These are usually the white to gold rum styles that are characterised by light, smooth and crisp rums from Cuba (Havana Club), Puerto Rico (Bacardi), American Virgin Islands (Cruzan) and, to the aged and medium bodied rums from Panama (Abuelo), Nicaragua (Flor de Cana), Venezuela (Diplomatico) and rich sweet rum from Guatemala (Zacapa). The colonial legacies and consumption preferences for different styles of rum can also be attributed to the different production techniques and practices that result in many differing flavour vectors. The three styles (white, gold, and dark) can generally be described as light bodied, medium bodied and full bodied in flavour.

COLONIAL CHARACTERISTICS

As we have discovered, the colonial influence determines the type of rum, and greatly influences the style of rum a country manufactures. The world’s leading rum producing and exporting countries can generally be clustered against the colonial heritage that influenced its predominant styles, even if they operate in the Indian and Pacific oceans. One break away style noted earlier, is the Portuguese in Brazil; they have distilled

cane spirit called cachaça, since the sixteenth century. 99 per cent of cachaça is consumed in Brazil, which is around 1.5 billion litres annually. Brazil has the largest sugar industry in the world, and produces a great deal of molasses, which forms part of the 30 billion litres of ethanol biofuel used in Brazilian cars. Brazil also exports large volumes of molasses to Caribbean distillers for rum production. Because most of the cachaça consumed is under two years of age, it is not qualified as rum in Australia.

FOUNDATIONS OF FLAVOUR

There may only be six basic flavour sources used to make rum, but together they create endless combinations to make it the world’s most versatile spirit. White or dark, spiced or flavoured; rum can be drunk straight, mixed or in cocktails and from these six flavour sources endless varieties of rums are made.

WATER: Water is used throughout the rum making process, from cleaning the cane and making the wash for fermentation, to condensing the spirit, to diluting the alcoholic strength for bottling. While water has the greatest presence of all the ingredients, its flavour neutrality means it has very little contribution to rum’s flavour. A good distillery will use the cleanest water possible, making it virtually taste neutral.

SUGARCANE: This is where the flavour trail starts; the flavour foundations come from cultivation techniques, soil agronomies, climates and cultivars used. These combined factors are referred to as the ‘terroir’. Some cane fields are set on fire and some are not. Some countries still cut the cane by hand, while others harvest mechanically. The speed to the mill affects the quality as delays cause bacterial infection in the cane sap. Another question is whether the distillery will use cane juice or molasses to make rum. The efficiency of the sugar refinery in extracting sugar will affect alcoholic yield, and the concentration of residual salts and other compounds trapped in the molasses will also affect the flavour of the finished rum.

YEAST: Yeast is the most important flavour builder in rum, as the strain of yeast, the length of fermentation, the alcoholic yield and the amount of different flavour compounds found in the wash before distillation will directly fashion the flavour direction of the spirit. Light rums have short fermentation, meaning less flavour is created, whereas dark rum fermentation can last weeks and produce a rich variety of flavours. Some producers of dark rum add ‘dunder’ - the refuse from previous distillations, in order to enrich the flavour.

COPPER STILLS (POT & COLUMN): The batch method of copper pot distillation results in more congeners and flavour being captured in the new spirit, which then results in greater complexity during wood maturation. Continuous column stills, on the other hand, strip out most congeners, which make for a lighter and cleaner spirit such as white rum. In the middle are copper retorts, doublers and column stills that distilleries have traditionally used to make house styles of rum. Each distillery has its own slightly unique still shape, configuration and design, meaning its particular fermentation processes will produce its own characteristically unique flavour profile.

WOOD: Some distilleries rest their new-make spirit in large vats of old oak or pinewood, finishing it in cask. Others mature in American or European oak casks, and using ex-bourbon or brandy casks imparts some original spirit flavour from the wood into the rum. Environmental factors such as warehouse design and location (whether the distillery is by the ocean or in the mountains) affect oxidisation and the rate of evaporation.

TIME: The maturation process mellows the spirit by softening its fiery and sharp taste, replacing it with smoothness, richness and flavour complexity. Time extracts its price and repays its debt with flavour, as up to eight per cent of the cask contents can evaporate each year in the tropics; although this does advance oxidisation in the cask and encourages interaction with the wood, creating more complex and nuanced flavours in the rum. FILTERING & COLOURING: Light rum is charcoal filtered to remove any vat or wood cask colour, ensuring the rum is crystal clear in appearance. Dark and gold rums, on the other hand, usually have burnt sugar or caramel (E510) added to make the rum seem more appealing and consistent, batch to batch, bottle to bottle.

DEVELOPMENT OF FLAVOUR

We all perceive the world a little differently; it may be its psychological, cultural or personal circumstances that make us idiosyncratic creatures of our own senses. Behind our sensory subjectivity are our biological chemoreceptors that analyse thousands of chemical compounds, molecules and stimuli. Molecular compounds may be unique, however, nature’s produce share these flavour molecules. What we smell in rum or other spirits have the same or very similar structures to flavour molecules that are commonly found in the day-to-day foods we consume. Even the language we use to describe what we sense is usually a metaphor for something else, e.g. smells like pineapple. To expand upon this, the smell of pineapple is the compound ethyl butyrate. Pineapple may dominate the scent of this molecule, yet some can detect a hint of apple or blue cheese, evidencing how complicated this can be at both a chemical level and using sensory descriptors to identify this particular aromatic. In rum making, this flavour compound is created as a by-product - when particular yeast strains convert sugars to alcohols, they also generate a soup of acids and proteins that will form organic esters during fermentation. This is where the pineapple-like ester is born, and maintains sturdy chemical bonds to ensure it survives the rigours of distillation and maturation. In some cases, ethyl butyrate can be accentuated, punching through other flavour molecules, resulting in the rum producing this delicious note among many others.

Rum’s flavour compounds will vary by the different production processes used, meaning the spirit has a rich palette of potential flavour compounds to endlessly make different flavour combinations.

PARTING SHOT

The category of rum is fast growing, freedom loving and doesn’t seem to be stopping to wait for more regulations and inflated prices. So, until then, find your favourite bottle, pour a glass with friends and toast to the charms of rum.