The Pursuit of Sweetness
The term sweet is used in our daily lives to describe or characterize many different things:
Taste: in juxtaposition to its bitter, salty and sour counterparts. In this context it may be an attribute of a food item or the category itself (“sweets”).
Aroma: describing fragrances that evoke the tastes associated with sweetness.
Feelings: describing stimuli or their sources, as being soothing to our intellect or our emotions.
Auditory: referring to pleasant melodies or voices.
Financial: as a way to describe job offers, raises and commercial deals.
Physical skills: describing golf swings, strides and other athletic feats.
Exaggerating: “He is taking his own sweet time”.
The numerous synonyms of sweet further highlight our reliance on this concept: beloved, cherished, darling, dear, favored, favorite, fond, loved, precious and special.
Our attraction to sweet things may have originated earlier in our evolution, as we recognized and felt the effects of ingesting easy sources of energy, such as honey and fruits with higher sugar contents.This predilection quickly took on a new dimension, as voices, personalities and transactions could be qualified based on how they made us feel internally, using the almost-innate sweetness compass.
Wines can be sweet when fermentation is stopped before all the sugars in the grape juice are transformed into alcohol. Rums, however, are stripped of any unfermented sugars when they are vaporized and re-condensed, leaving only a few options for those producers wanting to deliver a sweet distillate to eager consumers: a) retain the sweet aromas of the raw sugarcane juice or molasses, b) develop the sweet dimension through esterification inside the casks or c) incorporate sweetness (caramel and sugar) during blending.
Regardless of the approach, their pursuit is the same: to cater to our fascination with the concept of sweetness and whatever it is we feel it does for us.
Cheers,
Luis Ayala, Editor and Publisher