Rum

Rum is distilled from sugarcane - either from molasses, the thick residue left after sugar is crystallised out, or from fresh-pressed cane juice. Molasses is the usual route and gives the deep, slightly funky character most people mean by rum. The cane-juice spirits are a different thing, and they are at the end of this chapter.

Rum is usually sorted into three colours. The framing is worth knowing, but it doesn't tell you much.

• Light or white - filtered after distillation to take the colour back out, and in Cuba and Puerto Rico it has to be aged first, so a white rum is not necessarily an unaged one. Light aroma, clean taste. The one for mixing: Daiquiri, Mojito.
• Gold or amber - some time in wood, or caramel, or both. Medium-bodied and smoother.
• Dark - long in charred casks, often heavily caramel-coloured. Meant for drinking neat, or for a tiki drink like a Mai Tai, where it has to hold its own against a lot of juice and syrup.

Plenty of rum is sweetened after distillation, and nothing obliges a producer to say so. The EU allows up to 20 grams a litre, which is enough to change the texture of a drink and most of its finish. Jamaica's geographical indication forbids it outright, Barbados works to the CARICOM standard, and much of the rest of the world permits it quietly. The Swedish and Finnish state monopolies lab-test what they stock and publish the sugar figures, which is the most reliable way to find out what is in a bottle.

Where a rum comes from and what it was distilled in tell you far more than its colour, and the traditions split along old colonial lines.

• Jamaican - pot still, long fermentations and deliberately high ester levels. That is the funk: overripe banana and something close to glue, in the best sense. Hampden and Worthy Park sit at the far end of it.
• Spanish-style *ron* - column still, lighter, aged in the heat and often sweetened. Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Guatemala.
• English-style - Demerara from Guyana, and the Barbados blends. Pot and column together: richer than the Spanish style, drier than the sweetened ones.
• French *rhum agricole* - distilled from fresh cane juice instead of molasses, so it starts from a different raw material rather than a different method. Grassy and vegetal, and Martinique has an AOC for it.

Brazilian, made from fresh cane juice rather than molasses, and one of the oldest spirits in the New World. The law calls it its own category and it earns that three times over.

• It ferments on airborne yeast. No pitched strain - whatever is in the air at the mill does the work, which is why one distillery does not taste like the next.
• The cane fires the still. The crushed solids left after pressing are burned to heat the kiln, so the plant runs on its own waste.
• It is not aged in oak. Unaged cachaça rests in steel. Aged cachaça goes into Brazilian hardwoods - amburana most famously, which gives cinnamon and vanilla, and thirty-odd others that oak has no equivalent for.

Rhum agricole, from Martinique, is the other cane-juice spirit and the same idea from a French colonial direction: grassy and vegetal where a molasses rum is rich. If a recipe calls for cachaça, an agricole is the nearest thing on most shelves.