rum is general term for any distilled alcoholic beverage made from sugar cane (Saccharum officinalis), whether it is from the juice of the cane, the sugar crystallized from it, or the byproducts of sugar making, including cane syrup (the juice boiled down almost to the point where the sugar in it crystallizes), skimmings (the impurity-rich froth skimmed off the juice as it boils down), or molasses (the concentrated, uncrystallizable syrup that drains off the sugar). Sugar cane’s high sucrose content (12–16 percent) makes it an ideal source for alcohol production, and rum making has emerged in nearly every area of the world where sugar cane grows.
Asian Origins
The early history of cane spirits is very murky indeed. Contrary to popular belief, rum was already old when it began to be made in the Caribbean. According to the Indian historian Ziauddin Baranî (1285–1358), “arrack” distilled from raw sugar was widely traded in the Delhi Sultanate at the turn of the fourteenth century, to the point where Sultan ‘Ala’uddin Khalji (1266–1316) made a decree prohibiting distillation, which he later had to reverse. Details of how the spirit was produced are recorded in the In the absence of a comprehensive history of distillation in Asia, we do not know the origins of this spirit. They are quite possibly very old: from about 200 bce to 200 ce, the Gandharan kingdom, at the headwaters off the Indus river in modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, appears to have maintained an active distilling industry. It was also one of the pioneers in crystallizing sugar. Were those two technologies combined? We cannot say: as sugar-historian J. H. Galloway notes, “There are lacunae in our knowledge of almost every aspect of activity of this ancient industry,” and they are probably unfillable. The Spanish had sugar cane growing in Hispaniola by 1500 and the Portuguese in Brazil by 1520. This was not the first experience with the plant for either: cane had been grown in southern Spain and (Spanish-controlled) Sicily since the tenth century, albeit poorly, and in the Canary Islands, the Cape Verde Islands, Madeira, and São Tomé—the Atlantic islands colonized by the two countries and on whose sugar industry the American one was modeled—since 1425. While the islands all eventually developed rum industries, as did Spain and Sicily (to a much lesser extent), there is no evidence that any of them were distilling cane spirits before the late 1600s. In fact, the first firm evidence we have of cane distillation in the Atlantic world comes only in the 1630s, from Latin America: in 1635, the viceroy of Nueva España—modern Mexico—put out an order banning distillation in general and the spirits being distilled from cane juice or cane syrups in particular (as well as those distilled from agave). See mezcal. That same year, the Brazilian state of Bahia also banned distilling from cane, as did the rest of Brazil (or at least the parts that weren’t under Dutch occupation at the time) in 1636. Clearly, these prohibitions were not the beginning of cane spirits in the Americas. As the viceroy noted in 1631, “These drinks have been made for many years.” For their early years, we only have circumstantial evidence. It is possible that cane products were being distilled in the Americas as early as the 1520s, when Bartolomé de las Casas bemoaned how the enslaved Africans working on the sugar plantations in Hispaniola would “draw death and pestilence” from the “beverages that they make from the syrups of the cane and drink.” Of course, those drinks could have been fermented only, but the especially deleterious effects of raw cane spirits were frequently noted, and there are other things to suggest that the sugar-plantation workers—enslaved Africans, indigenous Americans, and lower-caste Europeans—had found a way to turn the cachaza, or skimmings (the unwanted industrial waste from sugar making) to their advantage through distillation. See skimmings. In any case, by 1643, there were, as a Cuban official detailed, two kinds of cane aguardiente—“burning water,” the term used—being made in the region, one from cachaza and the other, less common one from fresh cane juice (which could be produced on small farms by people who didn’t have access to a mill). Unlike sugar, or even molasses, which had a market in Europe and was reserved for the plantation owners, rum was originally made by and for the working people. Certainly, making these spirits for private consumption took no specialized equipment, as the simplified falca still used in Peru to make grape aguardiente showed. See pisco. The knowhow could have come from Europe with the workers, or from Asia, just as the revolutionary vertical-roller sugar-cane mill did, which was evidently brought to Peru from China in the late 1500s by the Jesuits and from there spread throughout the region. But the resulting spirit was made and trafficked in the shadows and made no money for the grandees back home in Spain and Portugal. Only once it spread to the British Caribbean did it become a source of profit to the planters and investors and an article of international commerce. The British colony of Barbados and the French colony of Martinique were the cradles, if not the birthplaces, of Caribbean rum making. In the 1640s, Dutch migrants and planters from sugar-cane-growing regions in Pernambuco, Brazil, taught the Barbadians and Martiniquans how to cultivate sugar cane and produce sugar. They introduced sugar-cane plants, sugar-making equipment, and capital into Barbados and Martinique, which spurred the rise of sugar production in those two colonies. While in Brazil, the Dutch may have experimented with rum distilling and disseminated that knowledge to planters in Barbados and Martinique, to date there is no clear evidence to support such claims. Numerous terms have been used for alcoholic beverages made from sugar cane. In the French Caribbean, tafia, eau-de-vie de canne, and clarin all refer to alcoholic beverages made from sugar cane. In the Spanish Americas, aguardiente de caña, guaro, and chinguirito have been used. Kill devil referred to distilled sugar-cane-based alcoholic beverages in the early British Caribbean, and this name transferred to the French as guildive. Rum became the most common term for a distilled sugar-cane-based alcoholic beverage in the Caribbean. It originated in Barbados in the seventeenth century and derived from the English word “rumbullion.” In 1651, Giles Silvester, a sugar planter in Barbados, wrote, “The chiefe fudling they make in the Iland is Rumbullion, als Kill-Divill, and this is made of suggar cones distilled a hott hellish and terrible liquor.” Rumbullion was a word commonly used in Devonshire, England, to mean “a great tumult,” and its origin probably reflects the volatile effects rum had on the large number of West Country English who settled Barbados in the early seventeenth century. By the mid-1650s, rumbullion was shortened to “rum,” much like the English shortened genever to “gin,” uiscebeatha to “whisky,” and brandewijn to “brandy.” Sugar planters in the French and Spanish Caribbean adopted rum as the term for a distilled sugar-cane-based alcoholic beverage, translating it to rhum and ron, respectively, although at first these terms were generally restricted to the drink when it was made with molasses and aged in the English style. In the seventeenth century, Barbados and Martinique initially developed the most advanced rum industries. At first, distillers in these islands made their rum from skimmings in the Latin American style. By the late seventeenth century, however, the Barbadians and the Jamaicans, who had quickly come to rival them, began supplementing the skimmings with molasses, recognizing the greater profit that could be made from rum than from selling the molasses (the practice is first recorded in 1687). By the middle of the next century, they were commonly supplementing the skimmings and molasses with “dunder,” the spent wash from the stills, a technique that was known as early as 1690. As the Jamaican planter Leonard Wray wrote in 1848, “Rum is the spirit which is made on sugar estates from the molasses and skimmings resulting from the manufacture of sugar … and, together with them, the exhausted wash commonly named dunder.” This triumvirate of ingredients would represent the industry’s best practices until well into the twentieth century, producing a rum rich in texture and with a certain inimitable “hogo,” or funk, to it. See hogo. With distillation a developing art in the seventeenth century, the capacity of early Caribbean stills was small, perhaps 100–300 gallons. Yet, despite their small size, by the end of the seventeenth century Barbados was extracting about one million gallons of rum from them annually, and Martinique was probably producing about half that amount. In the Caribbean, rum making was largely confined to sugar plantations. Rum making had emerged to meet the alcoholic needs of Caribbean colonists, the high cost and limited availability of imported European alcoholic beverages having led colonists to the search for local alternatives. Early settlers in Barbados and Martinique produced a wide variety of alcoholic beverages from local resources, especially cassava and sweet potatoes, and turned to rum making at the start of the sugar revolution in the 1640s. Sugar production provided an enormous amount of waste material, which colonists distilled into rum. Sugar planters doled out huge amounts of rum to the indentured servants and enslaved peoples on their estates. It was given as part of weekly rations, as a prophylactic against colds, and as part of a rewards system. By the 1650s, however, Barbados had moved beyond local consumption and was exporting its rum to England’s North American colonies, and in quantity; indeed, in 1654 Connecticut moved to ban “Berbados Liquors, commonly called Rum, Kill Devill, or the like.” Sugar planters, preoccupied with the profitability of their estates, pursued rum making to supplement plantation revenues. Rum distillation, therefore, highlights the resourcefulness of sugar planters and the efficiency of an industry that turned its waste products into a highly profitable alcoholic commodity, no matter what the human cost.Latin America
Caribbean Rum
The growth of the Atlantic maritime trades also helped to fuel the expansion of rum making in the Caribbean. In early modern Europe, seamen considered alcohol a necessary provision on trading ventures; indeed, a supply of it was customary and considered theirs by right. While wine and brandy filled the hulls of ships departing Europe, sugar planters in Barbados and Martinique exploited the maritime demand for alcohol on the other side of the Atlantic and sold rum to traders for the return voyage. In 1655, the British Royal Navy began issuing rum to some of its sailors, making it an official ration for ships on long voyages in 1731.
In the eighteenth century, mercantilism shaped the growth of Caribbean rum industries. In 1713, Louis XIV of France followed the lead of Spain and Portugal, both of whom did everything possible to discourage the rum trade, and issued a royal decree that prohibited, except for ports in Normandy, the import of French Caribbean rum into France. The declaration specifically argued that rum was pernicious to health and threatened to compete with French wine and brandy. French Caribbean sugar planters, who had no home market for rum, had plenty of cheap rum for North American traders. They also had plenty of molasses, which they sold to New England distillers who used it to make their own rum. In contrast to the French, British officials embraced British Caribbean rum as an ally in their war against foreign spirits that had drained England of capital for centuries. They opened the home market to British Caribbean rum and offered incentives to rum makers, including low import duties.
In the nineteenth century, competition in the distilled spirits industries and the growing global demand for alcohol spurred technological advances in rum making. While the introduction of the continuous still in Europe led to great improvements in the efficiency of distilling, at first it was resisted in the Caribbean, and few sugar estates installed such devices, instead turning to things such as increasing the size of their pot stills and adding retorts or doublers to them to increase efficiency. See doubler. Meanwhile, by the middle of the century the rise of government subsidized beet sugar industries in Europe had glutted world sugar markets. The profitability of Caribbean sugar production declined, and some planters chased greater and greater consolidation and efficiency to achieve economies of scale in sugar production, while others turned increasingly to rum making to help keep their sugar plantations solvent.
These responses were largely antithetical: the more sugar that was extracted from the cane, the less there was for molasses and skimmings, and the more centralized sugar production became, the less access distillers had to things like skimmings and cane juice. European and North American distillers had long made spirit from molasses and water alone. In England, this had been labeled “molasses brandy,” to distinguish it from true rum (with which unscrupulous merchants had been blending it since at least the 1720s); in New England, it was “Medford rum” or “Boston particular,” and its reputation was a villainous one. See rum, Medford. Now, distillers everywhere (or everywhere but Jamaica, which stuck stubbornly to the old ways) were adapting to the new realities and making pure molasses rums, and even beginning to turn to continuous stills to do it. See
In the mid-nineteenth century, the serial, and devastating, attacks of the oidium fungus and phylloxera aphid upon European vineyards greatly reduced wine and brandy production. France was hit especially hard. In 1854, Napoleon III suspended the duty on French Caribbean rum imports in order to replenish alcohol supplies. The move helped introduce rum to the French public on a wider scale. During this time, French Caribbean planters began to distinguish between rhum agricole made from pure sugar-cane juice and rhum industriel made from molasses. By the end of the century, Martinique was the world’s leading rum producer, while Jamaica was being displaced among British holdings by the Demerara region of Guyana and its column-stilled molasses rums.
Rum making also followed the expansion of sugar production in Cuba in the nineteenth century. In 1830, Facundo Bacardi, a Catalonian immigrant, migrated to Cuba and settled in Santiago de Cuba. In 1862, Bacardi, with financial backing from his brother José, purchased a distillery and started what was to become a rum empire. See Bacardi. Cuban rum making expanded in the early twentieth century, and Cuban rum found a strong market in the United States. In order to stimulate the Cuban economy after the Spanish-American War, Cuban goods, including rum, received favored trade status in the United States. Between 1898 and 1902, US forces stationed in Cuba were introduced to Cuban rum and the specialty rum-based drink known as the Daiquiri, named after the southern port town of the same name. During Prohibition (1920–1933) thousands of American tourists flocked to Cuba to indulge their alcoholic desires. As with US troops two decades earlier, they brought back a taste for Cuban rum. Smuggled Cuban rum was one of the spirits most available during prohibition.
In 1898, Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States, and American corporations quickly financed the expansion of sugar-cane cultivation in the island. The new interest in sugar production fueled the growth of Puerto Rican rum making, which challenged Cuba for control of the North American rum market. The Cuban Revolution (1959) closed trade between the United States and Cuba and further spurred the growth of Puerto Rican rum making.
By the 1960s, with the end of colonial status, producers in the emerging countries of the Caribbean had to do their own aging, blending, bottling, branding, and marketing—functions that previously had for the most part been done in Europe. With the further consolidation of the sugar industry, most distillers had to abandon skimmings for good, if they still used them, and buy their molasses as a commodity. What’s more, they had to buckle down and install column stills: the market in America and Europe had shifted decisively toward light, “clean” rums, ones where the barrel was more influential on their flavor than the cane, and rum makers had no choice but to follow. Even Jamaica, which had built its reputation on huge, full-flavored pot still rums, had to adapt.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, rum, which comprises about 11 percent of the world’s spirits market, continues to foster economic growth in a number of sugar-cane-growing regions of the world. After three or four decades of retrenchment, when the most popular varieties of rum were the least flavorful, the 2010s brought a renewed interest in the spirit and its history and saw new attention paid to the more traditional, fuller-flavored varieties of rum.
See also cane-based spirits; spirits trade, history of; and sugar cane.
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By: Frederick H. Smith and David Wondrich