American Rum 6: Plentiful, Cheap and Strong

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American Rum 6: Plentiful, Cheap and Strong 

Puritan New England was therefore the cradle of American rum and, throughout the XVII Century, the center of rum production and consumption was the very “city upon the hill” of the Saints in America: Boston. It is worth stressing that Puritans, so suspicious of almost all the pleasures of life, were not opposed in principle to alcohol. Drunkenness was strongly condemned and severely punished, but not drinking itself, quite the opposite: “Drink is in itself a creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness”, wrote Increase Mather in 1673.

Undoubtedly this cultural climate, together with the traditional Puritan industriousness and the role of the port of Boston in overseas trade, favored the development of distillation. During the first decades, distilleries were small craft enterprises, usually set up at home. Distillation was a means of supplementing a family’s income, and among the first distillers we can find merchants, inn-keepers, craftsmen and numerous widows. Gradually, though, things changed and at the beginning of XVIII Century a real distillation industry was distilled. At the beginning of XVIII Century, while rum was still practically unknown in England, in the colonies it was already commonly and largely drunk, until it became the typical local drink.

“However, I called a servant, and got him a little glass of rum (which is the usual dram of that country), for he was just fainting away”; so says Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, published in London in 1722. 

Importers of molasses and big rum producers were often the same people, so a new class of rich, influential merchant-distillers was born, different from the simple artisan-distillers. Rum was consumed by the city dwellers, but it was also exported all over British North America and it became one of the fundamental commodities in the trade with the Indians and in the slave trade. The growth of the industry created new, serious problems to the city. In particular, there was a constant danger of fires and  the increasing quantity of waste from rum production filled up the ground and polluted the air. So, the first safety measures and the first laws to protect the environment were introduced. Sparsely populated areas were chosen to build the distilleries; it was prescribed that they should be made of bricks and equipped with systems for collecting and draining waste liquids or leachate. Around 1740 in Boston these new distilleries were no longer small -scale household activities, but real factories, and they represented one of the most important manufacturing sectors.

In the meantime, though, even in New York, Pennsylvania and other colonies new distilleries were born and flourished and on the Eve of the Revolution, Boston had lost its supremacy in rum production.

But, what was New England Rum like? What did it taste like? How strong was it? Of course we don’t know, but it’s highly likely that today we would find it undrinkable. All contemporary accounts agree, the quality was very poor.

“The quantity of spirits which they distill in Boston from molasses which they import is as surprising as the cheapness at which they sell it, which is under two shillings a gallon; but they are more famous for the quantity and cheapness than for the excellency of their rum”, so Edmund Burke wrote around 1750.

In those years, West Indies rum started to be exported to Great Britain where it was consumed and also exported again to other European countries. New England rum, however, had no place in European markets. In the Colonies themselves, the well -to-do would drink West Indies rum, and only those who could not afford it made do with local rum. Moreover, local rum was used in the trade with Indians, who certainly were not connoisseurs, and in the slave trade in Africa.

Its alcoholic strength also gave slave traders the possibility to save on the cost of transports, both across the American mainland and in Africa: it was possible indeed t\y fewer barrels and then add water on the spot.

It was not good, but it was plentiful, it was cheap and it was strong; that was enough for most drinkers. Intoxication was now accessible to all. “It is an unhappy thing that in later years a kind of drink called Rum has been common among us. They that are poor, and wicked too, can for a penny or two-pence make themselves drunk ”, so an increasingly worried Increase Mather wrote as early as 1686. It should also be borne in mind, however, that at the time rum was not generally drunk neat, but in concoctions which hid its original taste with sugar, molasses, fruit and all kinds of other ingredients. They drank Punch, Flip and many other mixtures.

That American rum should be cheaper than the one from the West Indies is only logical, because production costs in the colonies were lower. As we know, Barbados and the other sugar islands imported all they needed, in particular the food for the slaves and the timber they used as fuel and to make barrels, from those very colonies. But it certainly didn’t have to be downright worse. Does that mean that in Barbados they were more skilled at making rum than in Boston? Or perhaps Bostonians were not interested in producing good-quality rum? Since importers and local producers were often the same people, was that an early example of product diversification, so as to reach different kinds of customers by means of different prices? Or maybe it simply depended on the fact that it took some months to carry it from the islands and this short period of aging improved the quality of the distillate. We don’t know. What we do know is that early American rum was plentiful, cheap and strong.

-Article written by Marco Pierini- 

My name is Marco Pierini, I was born in 1954 in a little town in Tuscany (Italy) where a still live. I got a degree in Philosophy in Florence and I studied Political Science in Madrid, but my real passion has always been History. And through History I have always tried to know the world, and men. Life brought me to work in tour ism, event organization and vocational training. Then I discovered rum. With Francesco Rufini, I founded La Casa del Rum (The House of Rum),that runs a beach bar and selects and distributes Premium Rums in Italy, www.lacasadelrum.it. And finally I have returned back to my initial passion: History. But now it is the History of Rum. Because Rum is not only a great distillate, it’s a world. Produced in scores of countries, by thousands of companies, with an extraordinary variety of aromas and flavors; it has a terrible and fascinating history, made of slaves and pirates, imperial fleets and revolutions. All this I try to cover in this column, in my FB profile, www.facebook/marco.pierini.3 and in my articles on the Italian webpage www.bartender.it .