hogo is an English rum merchants’ term of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries denoting the sharp, sulfurous, meaty “funk” peculiar to raw sugar-cane spirits. The term is derived from the French haut goût, “high taste” (like that which is produced in game birds by hanging them for some days before eating them), and was originally used chiefly to describe either that “flesh somewhat tainted” (as Francis Grose defined it in 1785) or the odor of the unwashed human body.
The term made it into the world of rum in 1708 when John Oldmixon, in his study of Britain’s American colonies, wrote that the rum made in Jamaica had “a certain Twang or Hogo that it receives from the Juice of the Cane” that kept it from reaching the perfection of French brandy. In 1740, we find Charles Leslie noting that the cane juice was itself “without any ill Taste or Hogo”; in 1788, it is James Newport of Philadelphia advertising that the rum he was making was “very well flavoured, and free from hogo”; in 1886, it is the novelist Grant Allen having a Trinidadian planter define it as “the strong and somewhat offensive molasses-like flavour of new rum.” After that it crops up, albeit infrequently, until the 1920s, when Laurence Green heard it used in Mauritius.
esters. Long aging will break up some of these molecules, but if they are present in sufficient concentration, as in certain high-ester Jamaican rums, not even that will eliminate them.As can be deduced from the above examples, those aromas have not always been considered desirable. Indeed, with the work of Rafael Arroyo and others making it all too easy to remove them, the last half of the twentieth century saw cleaner fermentation, column distillation, and long barrel aging make hogo largely a thing of the past in sugar-cane spirits, although there were holdouts: rhum agricole, cachaça, Batavia arrack, and a few examples of Jamaica rum and demerara rum still exhibited the quality to varying degree. See Arroyo Valdespino, Rafael; rhum agricole; cachaça; arrack, Batavia; rum, Jamaica; and rum, demerara. The story, however, does not end there: with the cocktail renaissance, some consumers wanted more from their rum, particularly for punch and tiki drinks, operating on the old Norman principle that andouillette—chitterling sausage—“doit sentir un peu la merde, mais pas trop” (must smell a bit like excrement but not too much). See cocktail renaissance; punch; and tiki. Too much, and one cannot dispel thoughts of tainted meat and unwashed bodies. A little hogo, however, makes rum interesting and keeps it from being a mere sugar-cane vodka or brandy; it is what makes rum rum. Since 2010, not only has the term been revived, but increasing numbers of rums on the market display some hogo—a few of them even perhaps too much.
Allen, Grant. In All Shades, vol. 3. London: Chatto & Windus, 1886.
Green, Lawrence G. Harbours of Memory. Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1969.
Leslie, Charles. A New and Exact Account of Jamaica. London: 1740.
Oldmixon, John. The British Empire in America, vol. 2. London: 1708.
Wondrich, David. Punch. New York: Perigee, 2010.
By: David Wondrich