-THE RUM HISTORIAN'S TIMELESS REVIEW-
MODERN CARIBBEAN RUM
With this article, the column The Rum Historian is enriched with a new sub-category, which we have decided to call TIMELESS REVIEW. As the name suggests, it is dedicated to book reviews, but a rather special kind of review. Usually, reviews are written about newly-published books, to make them better known, praise them or criticize them. Instead, I will be focusing on books that came out some time ago but that, in my opinion, still deserve to be read, or read again. The first article is about a book that is “only” 4 years old, but I’m also going to review books that are decades or even centuries old. Books of all kinds, which I believe are important too, in order to understand rum and its history, but with two shared characteristics: they must be published in English and they must be easy to find, that is, books that our readers can actually get and read without problems. Let’s begin.
“A big book is a big problem” the great British logician Bertrand Russell used to say. To-day he is almost forgotten, but when I was young he was a word-wide famous philosopher, popularizer, pacifist, and Nobel Prize-winning writer, a true maître à penser. He often used humor and sharp aphorisms to critique intellectual habits and this phrase captures his skepticism toward unnecessarily long works. He valued concise, precise arguments rather than sprawling volumes. And undoubtedly the book I am going to present today is big, very big indeed: Matt Pietrek and Carrie Smith’s “MODERN CARIBBEAN RUM A Contemporary Reference to the Region’s Essential Spirit”. Published in 2022, the book weighs about eight pounds/ roughly 3.6 kilograms, reflecting its 850-page, image-rich, oversized format.
Marco Pierini
For its size, the wealth of its photographs, the care put into its design and printing, and its price, at a first glance it may seem like yet another coffee-table book. Yes, because the rum world is full of coffee-table books: beautiful, expensive books meant to be given as gifts, displayed, flipped through, but not truly read, and even less studied. Basically useless.
Instead, “MODERN CARIBBEAN RUM” is a genuine guide to understanding rum: rich in all kinds of information, accurate, authoritative, and well written. It deserves to be read carefully by every rum enthusiast who wants to know more, much more, about our favourite spirit. I recommend reading it all the way through first, and then returning to individual chapters to delve more deeply into the topics that interest you the most. Given its size, it’s impossible to summarize it, so I will limit myself to presenting a few excerpts that clarify some fundamental aspects, starting with what rum actually is, and what the book is really about:
“we can define rum as a distilled spirit made from the sugarcane plant; freshly distilled rum should have the aroma, taste, and essence of sugarcane. You may have read that rum is made from molasses, but that’s an incomplete definition. Molasses is just one form of sugarcane resulting from removing some of its sugar content. Some rums are made directly from sugarcane juice, and others are made from cane syrup, a less-processed version of molasses. … However, not all sugarcane spirits are known as rum in their countries of origin. Cachaça, aguardiente de caña, charanda, clairin, and grogue are also distilled spirits made from sugarcane. We call the group of distilled spirits made from sugarcane cane spirits. Rum is a subcategory of cane spirits. … The focus is Caribbean rum today, not a historical perspective.”
The topic of the rules, which change from country to country and only in a few cases have international recognition, is well addressed: “Spirits like bourbon, Scotch whisky, and cogñac have regulations that are broadly recognized in major markets, this isn’t the case of rum.”
The book then covers the fundamentals of rum-making, and correctly starts with the fermentation process:
“Because the input and outputs of the fermentation process are both liquids, it’s important to differentiate. We do this by using specific terminology for each. The input to fermentation is a liquid containing sugar but no alcohol. This liquid is typically referred to as mash, must or wort. … When fermentation is complete, the resulting liquid has little or no sugar; most of the sugar has been converted into ethanol. This liquid is variously known as wash, wine or beer.” In this book they use mash and wash.
“Most rum fermentations take between 24 and 120 hours to consume all the fermentable sugar in the mash. When fermentation completes, the wash is usually between six and nine percent ABV. … In general, shorter fermentation yields a wash lower in flavor compounds and higher in alcohol, e.g., nine percent ABV or higher. These washes are typically column distilled to 90 percent ABV or higher, making ‘light rum’. Spanish heritage producers like those of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Panama favor this fermentation style and focus on flavor creation in the aging process. We might call these rums aging-forward. Longer ferments generally create a more flavorful wash at the expense of alcohol strength. Typically such washes measure around five or six percent ABV: These fermentations are typically pot-distilled to create a ‘heavy’ rum; such fermentation are commonly found in Jamaica and other regions where pungent rums are favored.”
About sugar in rum, “Our simple distillation model suggests any type of molecules can pass out of the still; in reality many don’t. These molecules are categorized as non-volatile, meaning they don’t vaporize and pass into the final distillate. Among the many non-volatile compounds is sugar. Any unfermented sugar molecules in a wash prior to distillation do not vaporize, so they cannot be found in the resulting distillate. Regardless of whether you are distilling whiskey, brandy, vodka or rum, no freshly made distillate contains sugar. Any sugar in your rum bottle was added after distillation”
After briefly describing batch distillation, here is the often little-known Retort:
“Most Caribbean distillers use an elegant evolution of the simple pot still, which enables a single distillation pass to provide a spirit of sufficient alcoholic strength. The key to this improvement is a vessel known as a retort. A retort is a closed vessel that acts like another pot still. Retorts are squat, cylindrically shaped, and connected in line to the main pot still. … Retorts generally are smaller than the pot still they’re connected to. … The pot’s lyne arm doesn’t go to the condenser. Instead, the arm travels through the top of the retort and plunges below the surface of the liquid. Picture a plastic straw inserted into a full juice box. …In short, a retort-enabled still effectively performs two distillations – the first in the pot still, the second in the retort. The distillate from the first distillation feeds immediately into the second without being cooled first. The process is more energy-efficient than traditional double distillation.”
And about continuous distillation:
“The first column, where the alcohol and congeners vapors are separated from the liquid wash, is called a stripping column or analyzer. The second column, which further enriches the vapor from the first column, is called a spirit column or rectifier. …The liquid removed from the plates is the distillate. … Each plate develops its own congeners ratios, which don’t change much over time. Due to gravity’s effect, the lowest plate has nearly all heavy congeners and very few light congeners. Likewise, the top plate is nearly all very light congeners and very few heavy congeners. The plates in between have their own their own ratios that favor lighter congeners the higher up in the still they are placed. … continuous distillation has vastly more reflux, so it can much more effectively separate organic compounds. This allows column stills to create rum at up 96 percent ABV. Such rum has fewer flavor congeners, so it is traditionally known as light rum.”
Naturally, ample space is dedicated to aging:
“Today the vast majority of spirit casks are 200 liters, a size known as barrel. Other common cask sizes are the hogshead (250 liters), butt (500 liters) and pipe (650 liters). … The vast majority of rum ages in American Standard Barrel, a 200-liter cask made from oak, nearly always American white oak (Quercus alba). This wood is known for imparting vanilla-like notes that are very familiar to bourbon and chardonnay drinkers. … Aging is a slow transformation of the congeners in rum. During aging, new flavors form, while others diminish.” Concerning the long-standing, troublesome issue of the years of aging declared on the label by many brands, I refer you to the book; it’s much too important, and much too delicate, a topic to be summarised here in few words.
The clarification on congeners is particularly important:
“A rum at 40 percent ABV (80 proof) contains 40 percent ethanol, around 59 percent water, and less than one percent of other organic flavor compounds. For a typical bottle, that’s at most 7 ml or one quarter of an ounce. … This flavor compounds form at different points during rum making – some are created during fermentation, others during distillation, and many more are introduced during aging. … Congeners are the organic compounds other than ethanol that form during fermentation, and they are a subset of the organic compound present in rum. Other organic compounds will join the mix during distillation and aging, but those are not considered congeners. Here we shall use congener or organic compounds appropriately for each context.”
A large section is devoted to the rum produced in Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries:
“Spanish heritage rum dominates worldwide sales, yet this type of rum is the most mischaracterized and misunderstood. … some rums developed substantial quantities of flavor congeners during fermentation … Other rums develop much of their flavor during aging; Spanish heritage rums are in the second camp. Aging transform these relatively light distillates into the flavors we associate with the Spanish heritage style. Such rums trace their lineage to the multifaceted aging traditions of Spanish sherry and brandy, techniques utilizing aging in multiple types of casks, re-oxygenating rum between aging steps, blending rums of different weights and ages, and solera aging. It’s far more complex than, ‘Put it in the barrel and forget it. … A fermentation that lasts for 24 or 32 hours and finishes at 9 percent ABV is quite common. … Some rum makers, notably those in Cuba, age fresh distillate for a few years, then pass it through carbon filters before returning it to a different cask for further aging. Why undertake this extra step? Typically, the first aging cask is newer, so it imparts more wood extracted flavors such as vanilla and tannins- similar to what you’d expect in bourbon. Some of the flavors are pleasing, while other are not. By carefully filtering with the right filtration media, unpleasant flavors are reduced while most desired flavors remain. The casks used for subsequent aging are older and provide less wood extract flavors. In this stage, oxidative aging is the goal. This process is aided by the oxygen reintroduced to the rum after being dumped from the first cask. The geographical indication for Cuban rum requires this two-stages process.”
I owe a lot to this book because it taught me things I didn’t know and clarified others that I knew only in a somewhat confused way. In particular, I appreciated the consistency and precision in the use of technical rum-making terminology, which for me has always been a challenge. Let me explain. My native language is Italian, but when it comes to rum I read and write mostly in English. However, my first and most fundamental training happened in Spanish, back in the days of the never-praised-enough International Rum Congress in Madrid. And to top it off, add a sprinkle of French and Portuguese from my research into the origins of rum. So yes, sometimes things get a bit muddled in my head. Thanks therefore to Matt and Carrie, whose limpid prose offers me a sort of standard in English, thus helping me bring order to my knowledge.
The book rightly devotes plenty of space to Cuba, where the authors encountered the same problems I did: “DISCLAIMER In researching this chapter, numerous requests for information were made to Cuba Ron and Tecnoazúcar. However, Cuba’s government tightly controls its communications. As a result, this chapter’ information regarding distilleries and brands substantially draws upon unofficial sources such as newspaper articles or obscure documents on Cuban websites. No representatives of Cuba’s rum industry have vetted what follows. The distillery details are far from complete and may not be correct in all cases.”
In conclusion, it’s a big book, but it’s not a big problem, on the contrary, it’s an enjoyable read that helps one better understand the complex world of rum. I have only one complaint: its weight obliged me to read it sitting at my desk, rather than snugly sunk into my comfy armchair, in front of my favorite window!
Marco Pierini
