rum, distilled liquor made from sugarcane products, usually produced as a by-product of sugar manufacture. It includes both the light-bodied rums, typified by those of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the heavier and fuller-flavoured rums of Jamaica.
Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/rum-liquor
Rums originated in the West Indies and are first mentioned in records from Barbados in about 1650. They were called “kill-devil” or “rumbullion” and by 1667 were simply called rum. Rum figured in the slave trade of the American colonies: slaves were brought from Africa and traded to the West Indies for molasses; the molasses was made into rum in New England; and the rum was then traded to Africa for more slaves. British sailors received regular rations of rum from the 18th century until 1970. Rum, the major liquor distilled during the early history of the United States, was sometimes mixed with molasses and called blackstrap or mixed with cider to produce a beverage called stonewall.
How rum is made
Most rums are made from molasses, the residue remaining after sugar has been crystallized from sugarcane juice, containing as much as 5 percent sugar. Some countries import molasses for use in rum production. Where sugar industries are undeveloped, rum is often made with sugarcane juice. A low-quality spirit, called tafia, is made from impure molasses or other sugarcane residue, but it is not considered a true rum and is seldom exported.
The sugar necessary for fermentation is already present in the raw material, and rum retains more of the original raw-material taste than most other spirits. The characteristic flavour of specific rums is determined by the type of yeast employed for fermentation, the distillation method, aging conditions, and blending.
Dark rums
The heavy, dark, and full-bodied rums are the oldest type and have strong molasses flavour. They are primarily produced in Jamaica, Barbados, and Demerara in Guyana. Such rums are usually produced from molasses enriched with the skimmings, or dunder, remaining in the boilers used for sugar production. This liquid attracts yeast spores from the air, resulting in spontaneous, or natural, fermentation. The resulting slow fermentation period allows full development of flavour substances.
The rum is distilled twice in simple pot stills, producing a distillate of clear colour that turns to a golden hue as the distillate takes up substances from the oak of the wooden puncheons used for storage during the aging period. Colour is deepened by the addition of caramel after aging. The Jamaican rums are always blended and are aged for at least five to seven years. They are usually marketed with an alcohol content of 43–49 percent by volume (86–98 U.S. proof). New England rum, made in the United States for over 300 years, has strong flavour and high alcohol content. Batavia arak is a pungent rum produced on the Indonesian island of Java.
LIGHT RUMS
The production of dry, light-bodied rums began in the late 19th century. This type, produced mainly in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, employs cultured yeast in fermentation, and distillation is accomplished in modern, continuous-operation patent stills. The rums are usually blended and are aged from one to four years. Those rums marketed as white-label types are pale in colour and mild in flavour; a gold-label rum has a more amber colour and more pronounced and sweeter flavour, resulting from longer aging and the addition of caramel.
How to drink rum
Straight rum is a popular drink in rum-producing countries. Elsewhere, rum is usually consumed in mixed drinks, with light rums preferred for such cocktails as the daiquiri and dark rums used in such tall drinks as the rum Collins. Rum is frequently used as a flavouring in dessert sauces and other dishes. It is also used to flavour tobacco.
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The Tumultuous, Economy-Building History of Rum
Rum’s history isn’t an easy or pretty one, but it is an important part of the world’s history. Without rum I’m not sure how New England would have turned out…what their primary export and trade currency would have been to really kickstart their success in the New World. But I’m getting ahead of myself here…let’s take it from the start.
Sugar cane was first cultivated in New Guinea and first fermented as early as ~350 BC in India. Back then, however, these fermented drinks were primarily used medicinally and with purpose. Fast forward to the 1400s, where the explorers we all learned about in grade school started opening up the worlds trade routes through their explorations. As remote islands began to be discovered, so was a perfect climate for growing sugar cane. Sugar, similar to spices of that time, was highly valued on the trade route, yet it required incredible manpower and water.
Islands have plenty of access to water. Manpower though? Not so much. By this time, slaves were an obvious and unfortunately easy choice. Explorers began to increase sugar cane production on islands such as the Azores, Canary Islands and eventually the Caribbean. In order to do that they also needed to bring in more slaves. While the African slavers accepted many forms of payment to supply slaves to the European colonists the most highly sought after payment was alcohol. And while beer, wine and mead were easily made in certain regions of the world they didn’t fare well on the long ocean journeys. Nor were they very strong. Brandy was one of the early spirits to step up and fill the need for lower volume with a higher punch, but as the trade routes allowed for increased supply of sugar a new spirit became a fast-favorite of slave traders, slaves and explorers alike.
THE ISLAND OF BARBADOS
The discovery of Barbados in the early 1600s was an important gate to rum’s soon to be global popularity. Given the perfect climate of Barbados, explorer Richard Ligon brought in sugar cane expertise from Brazil including equipment, slaves and, most importantly, distillation know-how. In less than 10 years the sugar barons of Barbados became some of the richest in the world, with a prospering sugar and rum export industry. Rumor has it, this spirit was initially known as “kill devil” for it’s strong effects with a less than desirable taste. While the poor drank it straight, others began mixing it with sugar, lime and other ingredients to make early rum punches and cocktails. As time went on, there are indications of the spirit also being referred to as Rumbullion or Rumbustion. Both of these terms meant upheaval or violent commotion – likely for the effect that this spirit had on those who drank it. Eventually shortened to Rum we have our modern name for this spirited drink.
THE DEVEOPMENT OF RUM IN NEW ENGLAND
Around this same time in the mid-1600s there were roughly 3,000 colonists living in New England. When they first settled, roughly 20 years earlier, there were dreams of a mediterranean bounty coming from this new world. Little did they understand the harsh climate of New England…not exactly suitable for the wines, grains, fruits and valuable silks/gems they were hoping for. It was a tough revelation and to make matters worse there was also a beer shortage in England. Meaning New Englanders weren’t getting as much beer imported as they hoped to help soothe their disappointments. We’re starting to get restless people! They started to try to make alcohol from anything that grew there…pumpkins, apples, twigs, you name it. Some of it was somewhat successful but nothing scratched their itch for drink the way the introduction of rum from Barbados and the other Caribbean islands did. Yay rum!
You see, rum was much cheaper than the little bit of brandy they were importing due to the shorter trade routes and cheaper ingredient base of molasses given, outside of wartime, it had relatively low demand compared to the supply available. Plus, rum was quite a bit stronger. Cheaper and stronger?! Rum quickly became the drink of choice in New England, warming the colonists from the inside during the cold winters and lessening their reliance on European imports. Soon enough those clever New Englanders got the idea to import molasses, a by-product of the sugar making process, from the islands instead of rum and start distilling themselves. This is now the late 1600s and towns like Salem, Newport, Boston and Medford became rum distillation epicenters with over 100 distilleries by the mid 1700s.
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Enslaved People’s work on sugar plantations
English planters first began growing sugarcane in Barbados in the 1640s, using a mixture of convicts and prisoners from the British Isles and enslaved people from Africa. Sugar agriculture was very profitable and it quickly spread throughout the Caribbean and to Louisiana and Mississippi in North America. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved men, women and children were brought from Africa to the Caribbean and America so that Europeans could have sugar and rum, the main products of sugar cane.
Sugarcane was an unusual crop. Europeans were used to growing crops such as wheat, which they then harvested and sent to other people who would turn the crop into flour. But on Caribbean and American plantations enslaved labourers had to do everything. They sowed, tended and harvested the crop, and then worked to extract the juice from the sugar cane and boil and process the juice in order to turn it into sugar and molasses, and later they might work to distil some of the waste products into rum. The sugar plantation was both a farm and a factory, and enslaved men, women and children worked long days all year round.
There are picture from this period, showing sugar agriculture and production. But we must remember that the artist who created these pictures wanted to make the system look good: they were defending slavery, trying to show people back in Britain that it wasn’t too bad. Therefore we cannot take these pictures at face value, and must always remember how terribly hard this work was. Young men and women joined the First Gang in their late teens, once they were strong enough, but within ten or twelve years the hard work had wrecked their bodies and they were relegated to the Second Gang, which worked hard but not as hard as the First Gang. After perhaps twenty years in the Second Gang, a person now about 40 years old would appear old and worn out, and would join other old people and young children in the Third Gang (the ‘Grass Gang’), which weeded the crops, and gathered weeds and grass as feed for animals. White owners and overseers watched over all of these processes, and enslaved ‘drivers’ also organised work. Overseers and drivers had whips, and they used them to force enslaved people to work harder.
In the early summer the First and Second Gangs prepared the fields for planting, turning over the soil with hoes. Then in the late-summer and early-autumn the First Gang would plant the sugar cane, often using the cane-holing process.
Cane-holing
Cane-holing was back-breaking work. First Gang slaves marked out squares of between 4 and 6 feet square, then dug out each square to a depth of 6 to 9 inches. They used only hoes, not spades, making this work even harder. A First Gang slave was expected to dig out between 60 and 100 squares each day, which involved moving as much as 1,500 cubic feet of soil. The soil taken out was built up as a bank around each square. Two young sugar cane plants were then planted in each hole, and First and Second Gang slaves then carried huge baskets of animal manure on their heads to the squares, placing sufficient manure around each plant. This was both hard and disgusting work, and was hated by the slaves. One large basket of dung, containing as much as 80 pounds of manure, was sufficient for two holes (four sugar cane plants). One acre of sugar cane plants might require as much as 1.25 tonnes of manure.
In the Caribbean weeds grow quickly, and if left alone they will quickly strange and destroy other plants and crops. Throughout the year the older people and children in the Third Gang constantly weeded sugar cane fields, and they also set traps and hunted the thousands of rats who enjoyed feeding on young sugar cane plants. Some white masters gave rewards to the enslaved people who caught and killed the most rats.
Sugar cane plants were often much taller than a man when it came time to harvest them in February or March. The men and women of the First and Second Gangs used ‘bills’ (billhooks), very sharp curved knives. Men and women of the First Gang had to constantly bend over and hack through the thick sugar cane about six inches from the ground. They then used the bills to cut the top and the leaves off the cane. Second Gang slaves would tie the canes into bundles and load them onto wagons.
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A Barbados Family Tree With ‘Sugar In The Blood’
(radio interview)
My guest, Andrea Stuart, is the descendent of a slave owner and one of that man’s slaves. She has a bloodline that she describes as blending the history of both oppressed and oppressor. She suspects this is true of many families, which, like hers, are mixed-race on both sides.
Stewart has written a new book called “Sugar in the Blood,” which traces her family tree beginning with her white ancestor who left Ireland for Barbados in the late 1630s. His great-great-grandson owned a plantation in Barbados and fathered children with several of his slaves, including the woman who became Stuart’s forebear.
Stuart’s book also describes the history of slavery in the Caribbean, where she was born and raised. Her father became dean of the medical school at the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica. As a child, she spent her summers with her extended family in Barbados, where her grandparents owned a plantation.
Andrea Stuart, welcome to FRESH AIR. When did you start thinking about the fact that one of your ancestors was owned by another one of your ancestors?
ANDREA STUART: I don’t think I actually thought about that until quite late in the process of writing my book. It was really one of those things that kind of hits you sort of later on. I mean, it very much began as a process of being interested in my family history. So it wasn’t until quite late in the day that I had this moment of clarity, maybe four years into the research, that I realized that this was the truth of it, that was the reality of my life, of my family’s story, that we – you know, one side of my family had owned another.
GROSS: And what did that mean to you?
STUART: I think I found that a real kind of one of those aha moments, you know, where you sort of think that is the quintessence of the hideousness of slavery, isn’t it, that a family member could own their child and – or you know what I mean, or own series of children and live with that and remain – and keep them in continued slavery. And it made me understand slavery or see it in a very, very personal, intense way.
GROSS: In trying to find documentation of your slave-owning ancestors and of your ancestors who were slaves, one of the things you found was that there was documentation of your white ancestors, but for the slave the only documentation you found was what?
STUART: Well, the irony of slavery is that – and I think it’s true whether it’s on mainland America or in the Caribbean or South America, is that the system is such that you only know what the white planter who owns you has recorded about you. So it’s always through the conduit of this other person.
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Decolonizing the Whitewashed World of Caribbean Rum
If you’re a rum drinker, you’re almost certainly aware that spirits made from sugar cane in one form or another are most often produced in the tropical and subtropical climates in which the stalks have thrived for centuries. Rum and sugar are inextricably linked, and the relationship between the two is one that’s habitually romanticized by spirits brands and their loyal evangelists.
What is almost always excluded from the narrative, however, is that the industry surrounding rum, a spirit produced primarily in the Caribbean, has continued forth from its colonialist beginnings without confronting the truth that these lucrative crops were often a death sentence for the enslaved people forced to tend them. Furthermore, the industry has thus far neglected to take adequate measures to make reparations.
Put simply, a sip of rum should not be taken without understanding and acknowledging the numerous exploitative factors that created the spirit’s industry. Ideally, that knowledge should serve as a catalyst for change.
Caribbean Rum, Colonization and Slavery
The first printed mention of rum in the Caribbean dates back to around 1651 and was made by a visitor to Barbados, which was first colonized by Europeans in the late 15th century and eventually claimed long-term by the English in 1625. Artifacts and other evidence indicate that Indigenous peoples had inhabited the island of Barbados as early as 1623 BC.
According to the University of Glasgow’s Saint Lauretia Project, a research-based virtual recreation of Caribbean plantations during the slave-trade era, sugar cane for industrial planting was brought to Barbados in the 1640s by the English, who put enslaved Africans (along with convicts and prisoners from the British Isles) to work in the fields. The work was, needless to say, grueling and extremely cruel, and it continued around the clock.
“We’re talking about roughly three centuries of enslaved people meeting violence, whether they were taken from Africa and brought to the Caribbean or were born there,” says Dr. Natasha Lightfoot, the author of “Troubling Freedom” and an associate professor at Columbia University who specializes in Caribbean and African diaspora history, and slavery and emancipation studies.
Once a person became the property of a sugar estate, says Lightfoot, they were put to work from about five years old and assigned tasks according to age and physical ability. Children and the elderly were forced to clear trash from cane fields or scare birds away from the crops, while those in-between were typically either made to plant, tend and harvest the cane (often with very rudimentary tools or no tools at all) from sunup to sundown or work overnight at the sugar mill, where the potential for brutal and fatal accidents awaited at every turn.
Denial of access to the basics of living on top of the imposition of these horrendous working conditions translated not only to frequent deaths among the enslaved but also to negative birth rates because women could not carry pregnancies to term. For owners, the answer was to buy more slaves in a vicious circle that further bolstered the trade.
The brutality endured by enslaved people in general, according to Lightfoot, was not limited to the physical realm. “There is psychological violence in making people work for free; slave owners were also very much comfortable with the concept of creating obedience through the use of force,” she says. “Owners were dealing with people whom they didn’t even regard as human. Their blackness meant that they were not worthy of any sort of wage or ability to reap profits from their labor, and there are still massive imbalances in society today that stem from all of this.”
Slavery in Barbados officially lasted until Britain’s 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which did not take effect until the following year, and despite having been “freed,” the enslaved were forced to continue working for their former owners as apprentices for the next four years. As part of the Act, £20 million (which would be worth £2.4 billion, or $3.4 billion, in 2021) was set aside for slave owners in the British Colonies to compensate for their “losses,” though no such reparations have ever been paid to the enslaved or their descendants.
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