Rum Historian by Marco Pierini
HISTORY OF CUBAN RUM
10. THE QUEST FOR QUALITY
For our new readers, I’d like to state again that, until the mid-1800s, in Cuba rum was commonly called aguardiente de caña (sugar cane burning water) or, more often, simply aguardiente. Other names were used too, but that is an issue that we’ll look into another time.
Well, as we have seen in the previous articles, plenty of rum was produced in Cuba in the early decades of the 1800s, and significant quantities were exported. The general opinion, quite prevalent today among academics and enthusiasts alike, is that Cuban rum was a very low quality, cheap product, intended only for the lowliest people, who couldn’t afford anything better. I’m not entirely convinced about that, but there is no doubt whatsoever that the Cubans of the time thought the same and the upper classes wouldn’t drink it.
Often, the most important and most enlightening historical documents are those that did not pretend to be such, for example novels. One of the classics of the Cuban literature of the 19th century, and indeed of all time, is “Cecilia Valdès” by Cirilo Villaverde, written in a large part in 1839. In the novel, which tells the tragic story of a young, beautiful, mulatto girl, aguardiente is often mentioned as the slaves’ drink. Let’s read some extracts from the book. “While he was waiting for the Master, or was sleeping, or had in his skull more aguardiente than necessary.” And later “Did you go to the innkeeper of the village to swap with aguardiente the raspadura (a sort of raw sugar) which you steal from the plantation?”
Instead, the masters drank wine, brandy, champagne and also rum, but Jamaican rum. “From the beginning to the end of lunch, they poured wine with great liberality; at the end of which, the tablecloths were removed to serve the desserts (postres) on the bare mahogany table: they immediately served pure coffee in cups of translucent Chinese porcelain, sparkling champagne, French cognac and Jamaica rum. Then Don Candido Gamboa brought out his large, sweet-scented bag and offered a cigar to all the guests.” (by the way, not bad, not bad at all!)
And yet, we know that from the ’30s onwards Spain became the main importer of Cuban rum. The Spanish domestic market was small and grew slowly, therefore the growth of imports in Spain was due mainly to the fact that Spain re-exported the rum to the free European markets, that is, the Countries that had no sugar producing colonies, like Germany, Austria, Russia, Italy etc. And if those countries chose to buy Cuban rum, it couldn’t have been too bad; anyway, not much worse than that of the other major producing countries, Great Britain and France.
In any case, if the Cuban rum industry was to grow, it had to improve the quality of its rum. So, many set to work to achieve this objective.
First of all, they adopted the new continuous distillation apparatuses. “A continuous still designed in 1808 and patented in 1813 by French engineer Jean-Baptiste Cellier-Blumenthal, afforded planters an opportunity to not only increase rum production volumes but to distill a liquid with a lighter character in a single distillation. … High-volume, fast output stills were standard by the 1850s in most Cuban rum distilleries.” (J. Brown, A. Miller “Spirit of the Cane. The Story of Cuban Rum” 2017)
Some Spanish inventors even tried to improve them. Let’s peruse two documents, the Privilegios 595/1826 and 596/1827, see the images accompanying this article.
A brief explanation is perhaps needed here. Until 1902, Cuba belonged to Spain. It wasn’t exactly a colony, in theory it was a province like any other of the Spanish Crown, but “The captain-general was in May 1825 given ‘facultades omnímodas’ – an authority to do much as he liked; residents of Cuba lost the protection of what law there was. … Forty thousand Spanish troops thronged Cuba and the country swarmed with government spies and informers. The laws preventing Cuban-born persons fron serving in the army or the civil service were rigidily maintained. Cuba was an armed camp. Martial law lasted in effect fifty years. … Cuba remained a political anomaly, increasingly rich but practically under martial law.” (Hugh Thomas “Cuba. A History” 1970) As for any Spanish province, Cuban official documents were kept in Spain and they are still there. Thanks to the competence and helpfulness of the staff of the Archivo Histórico Nacional and of the Oficina Española de Patentes y Marcas in Madrid as well as the Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla, I managed to get a copy of some interesting documents, among which two Privilegio requests (that is, Patent Application) dated respectively 1826 and 1827, for the invention of new, better methods to produce aguardiente, by using continuous distillation apparatuses.
It has not been easy for me to read these documents. They were written by hand, and often I find it difficult to decipher the handwriting. Moreover, in places the ink has faded. I have managed to read them only in part, but I hope quite enough for my current needs. The signatories of the applications declare that the Column still for whose patent they are applying is their own invention, and that it can produce a better rum than the existent Column stills made in France. As evidence they provide details and drawings. I am not a technician nor a historian of technology so I can’t understand whether what they declare is true. Therefore, I am not able to judge whether the Column stills described were really able to produce better rum, nor if, where and when they were actually installed. What interests me now is to emphasis how the objective to improve the quality of rum was pursued at least since the 1820s.
Rum Historian April 2023
To be more clear, the Handbook for Distillers itself, to which we have dedicated two articles – see the January and February issues – and the prize awarded by the Royal Society which inspired it were not an isolated fact, the initiative of a single intellectual or enlightened ruler. On the contrary, they were fully immersed in the context of a dizzying economic and technological growth which changed Cuban rum making in a matter of years.
The drive to improve quality also involved adopting the new filtration techniques in sugar and rum making. “Technology was not the only factor that played a role in the development of Cuban rum. German chemist Johann Tobias Lowitz (1757-1804) discovered and recorded, in 1785, that charcoal adsorbed noxious odours from sick people, putrid meats and rotten vegetables. He also found that the substance was excellent for removing the colour from liquids, particularly crystalline acetic acid. … Merely shaking corn-based spirit with powdered charcoal removed fusel oils and unpleasant esters, improving the liquor’s aroma and taste. Undesiderable colour was quickly whisked away, producing a cleaner form of ethanol.” In 1836 Charles Derosne and Jean-Francois Cail built in France a factory to produce Derosne’s filtration system. “Cuba was an early adopter of Derosne’s filtration system. Cuban sugar planters Joaquín de Arrieta, Wenceslao de Villaurrutia, and Pedro Lefranc Arrieta acted as Derosne’s agents, setting up the first filtration system, in 1841 … the new filtration system needed to be operated by a skilled sugar master. Derosne himself travelled to Cuba” to train machinists and supervise installations. (J. Brown, A. Miller)
Cuban planters gave their contribution too. According to Manuel Moreno Fraginals, “EL INGENIO Complejo económico-social Cuban del azúcar” 1978, and Fernando Campoamor, “El Hijo alegre de la caña” 1981, as early as 1820 Cuban planter Fernando de Arritola changed the design of his own still. Trying to improve its functioning, he added a coil to the swan-neck conical head, producing a rum far better than its crude Caribbean competitors. And regarding ageing, so important in the subsequent development and success of Cuban rum, many sources report that the first attempt to age rum intentionally in Cuba was undertaken by planter Pedro Diago, who buried some ‘mud-glazed pots’ full of rum. Even if it is was a failure due to bacterial infection, it was a beginning. By the way, he was the same Pedro Diago who some years before had introduced the first wind-mill to grind the cane in Cuba, resulting in another failure.
Apparently, the main obstacle to overcome in order to improve Cuban rum was that it often smelled and tasted unpleasantly of mosto, that is, the residue of previous distillations (I think, what in Jamaica is called dunder). Among the many who tried to solve this problem, it is worth mentioning at least José Luis Casaseca, Dean of the Spanish chemists, who “in 1841 submitted to the Royal Board of Trade a procedure to eliminate the smell and taste of mosto from Cuban rums, thanks to which he hoped to win the rich prize offered. It consisted in putting quicklime into the barrels, an old procedure advocated in 1817 by Lenormand in his Traité de l’art du distillateur des eaux-de-vie et esprits, already tried out by Cuban distillers and abandoned because harmful to health.” (Campoamor)
The problem was serious and it was solved only slowly, so much so that as late as 1855, Leopoldo García Ruíz tackled it vigorously in his “Manual de la fabricación del aguardiente de caña”. Sure enough, García Ruíz laments that “if our rum is not as delicious as the Jamaican one and if its reputation is not well established in Europe, this is due to the negligence with which the mosto is used, its excessive use and its poor condition.” He concludes by reminding the distillers of the necessity to take good care of the still and keep it scrupulously clean, to use the mosto in limited quantity and throw it away when its smell is too strong and unpleasant.
Thanks to the improvement in its quality, the export of Cuban rum increased greatly, exceeding 15 million liters in 1860. Undoubtedly, the crisis of viticulture in Europe, caused by a serious disease, the Oidium (and also ravaged by the Philoxera later) and the opening up of new markets made a great contribution. In those same years, domestic consumption grew significantly too; we will get back to that later.
To conclude, around 1850 numerous, new, modern rum distilleries had been operating in Cuba for years. These new distilleries were to be found not only within the sugar plantations, as a sideline, but they were often built in the towns, real industries, independent of the plantations. They dedicated great attention to the production process, they had long adopted continuous distillation and filtration systems and had also started to experiment with ageing. These new distilleries produced better rum, which was actually a new style of rum, more in tune with a world whose taste in spirits was rapidly changing. Cuban Ron Lïgero (Light Rum) was about to be born.
But precisely during those years when Cuban rum started to become great, its parent industry, sugar making, stopped developing; more than that, it lagged behind. Justo G. Cantero in his “LOS INGENIOS Colleccion de Vistas de los Principales Ingenios de Azucar de la isla de Cuba” 1857, writes that the number of sugar plantations on the island reaches about 1.570 with around 200.000 workers. Big numbers, but “The plantations were first established in order to make white sugar, and most of them continue produce it; however, for some years now a change has occurred which has led many plantations to produce only muscovado or concentrated molasses, owing to a shortage of labor, the fact that it is easier to sell these lower types of product to foreign sugar factories and above all owing to the difficulty of obtaining, with our equipment, white sugar that can compete with the sugar obtained in European sugar factories.”
-Marco Pierini-
POST SCRIPTUM
In my research I always pay special attention to the sources, their reliability, their consistency with the historical context etc. All too often it happens that a piece of information is provided without the appropriate sources, then it bounces from an article to a website, from the latter to a book until everybody believes it is true. In order to avoid all this, I have always tried to verify the information by using primary sources (old books, archives, documents, etc.) and by and large I think I have succeeded. In this article, unfortunately, it is not so. Some information here is based on second hand sources, taken from modern books that don’t always indicate their sources in a satisfactory way and that I was unable to check directly. The sources I used are works written by prestigious authors, who are supposed to be trustworthy; still, they are second hand sources. I apologise to our readers, but I couldn’t do otherwise; a reflection on the quest for quality in Cuban rum making was necessary and I tried to do my best with the material at my disposal.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
