Rouses_FINAL-November-December-2017

the Holiday issue

Rum’s the Word by Wayne Curtis

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.

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

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

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2017