Ron, Rum, or Rhum
How you spell it really matters!
Another holiday, another excuse for a deep dive into a spirit! I’m a sucker for speakeasy style bars. The harder they are to find the better because it means the bar has to make it worth your while or the clients will stop bothering to look.
So tonight’s bar is Sneaky Tony’s in Perth and fortunately tonight I only have to find it unlike on a some nights when you also need to track down the password.
Sneaky Tony’s specialises in rum with over 300 different types so we have the choice of sipping something old on the rocks or mixing it up with their cocktail menu and I hope by now it’s obvious which of those two options I’m going to choose!
Before we go there, however, and back to the title, I have often wondered, and certainly recently with different cocktails asking for different types of rum, what the difference is between white rum, dark rum, and whether it matters whether you call it rum, ron, or rhum.
So here is a whistle stop tour of the answers to those questions.
To deal with the white rum or dark question we need to go back to basics. Spirits are produced by brewing something with starch (sugar) in it whether it’s cactus (tequila), grapes (brandy), barley (whiskey), potatoes (vodka) or sugar cane/beet (rum). This creates your alcoholic brew; think beer. The brew is then distilled, if you think back to high school science, you heat the brew and the alcohol evaporates first which you capture through condensing it. What you get is basically 100% alcohol and it will be clear. For rum, this clear liquid then takes 2 routes. Route 1 - diluted to 40% and straight to bottle, this is white rum, think Bacardi. Route 2 - put in a barrel to age where it absorbs some Flavour and colour from the wood. Once aged, the resulting liquid is again diluted to whatever strength is needed and bottled.
So there is your white and dark difference. There are no doubt additives to change the taste, sweetness and colour but basically that’s it.
Now when I said that rum was sugar cane that wasn’t quite right, actually rhum is made from sugarcane/beet juice, you mostly find this in France and is usually produced in former French colonies in the Caribbean. You will find it labeled rhum agricole and it is described as having a more floral fruity taste.
So where does rum come from, well the answer to that is linked to its history tied to slavery. Sugar making produces molasses as a throw away byproduct; distilling this molasses produced rum without “stealing” anything of value from the plantation owners. By convergent evolution, in the Central and South America they also discovered this trick but Cuban Ron is a lighter fruitier spirit and so some cocktails will specify Ron rather than a generic white or dark rum.
So there you have it, everything you need to know to break the crystal clear cocktail ice at a party when somebody asks for a rum and coke!
Introducing to Special Thriller cocktail, thanks Tony!