If I asked you what the most important alcoholic spirit was in American history, you'd probably say whiskey. You'd be wrong.
Rum was the drink of fashion for George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and the other patriots.
After Independence, rum slid out of fashion and whiskey began its ascent. But then something remarkable happened...rum became fashionable again! And then it wasn't, and then it was, and then it wasn't. And now, I think it’s fashionable-ish. Right?
Personally, I love rum, and I think it's fascinating to chart the rise and fall of rum on the American bar.
This particular dispatch is inspired by Wayne Curtis and his book "And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails." I've scaled down his approach, and don't have as much first-person information, so if you think this is interesting, go read his book!
Each section of this Dispatch is a drink and a time period. You'll get a sense of a boom and bust, a little history, and at the end, there's the recipe for the drink so you can enjoy it at home!
On this week's Discussion podcast, Bridget and I tried each one, so you can get a preview of which ones you may or may not like to try at home!
One myth to knock down before we start. "Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum" was not a real sailor song. Robert Louis Stevenson made it up for Treasure Island in 1883. Every pirate you picture singing it is really quoting a Scottish novelist. (My favorite ride at Disney is Pirates of the Caribbean, so trust me, it pains me a little to say it too.)
Okay. Let's drink our way through 250 years.
What is rum, anyway?
Rum is a sugarcane spirit. That's the whole definition. You ferment something sweet that came off a sugarcane plant, you distill it, and you have rum. In the US, the rules just say it has to be distilled from cane, under 95% ABV, tasting like rum.
There are two main starting points in the rum making process, and from there you'll find lots of variation.
Most rum in the world is made from molasses, the thick dark syrup left over after sugar is refined out of cane juice. There's a simple economic reason: with the same amount of molasses you can make roughly three times more rum than you can from fresh cane juice. Molasses is stable and easy to ferment, and it makes a clean, sweet, approachable spirit.
The other path is fresh-pressed cane juice, which must be fermented within a day or so of cutting before it spoils. Cane juice makes a grassier, funkier, more vegetal spirit. When the French islands do it, they call it rhum agricole, and Martinique protects the style with an AOC, an appellation with strict rules, the same idea as Champagne.
When Brazil does it, from fresh cane juice, they call it cachaça, which by law can only come from Brazil.
Drink 1: Bumbo (1758)
Bumbo is the drink that got George Washington elected. But maybe not for the office you think.
In 1755, Washington ran for Virginia's House of Burgesses and lost badly, 271 to 40, because he refused to buy the voters drinks. He learned his lesson. When he ran again in 1758, his campaign poured roughly 160 gallons for 391 voters, per his own campaign accounts. Mount Vernon itemizes the tab further: about 28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, 34 gallons of wine, 46 gallons of beer, and 2 gallons of cider royal. The practice had a name: "swilling the planters with bumbo." He won.
So what is bumbo? It's rum cut with water, sweetened with sugar, and dusted with nutmeg, sometimes cinnamon. Colonists drank rum like this, watered and spiced, because straight colonial rum was rough, and because rum was everywhere and cheap.
And it really was everywhere. Most sources indicate that in 1770, the American colonists imported four million gallons of rum and distilled another five million gallons from imported molasses. By one historian's estimate, colonists put away the equivalent of nearly nine gallons of 80-proof liquor a year for every person old enough to drink, much of it rum!
This is also where rum gets political and has a real connection to American Independence. Britain's Molasses Act of 1733 and then the Sugar Act of 1764 taxed the molasses colonists needed for rum, and colonists were furious. John Adams said it best in an 1818 letter: "I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence."
RECIPE: Colonial Bumbo
• 2 oz dark or aged rum
• 4 oz water (room temperature for authenticity, or warm it for a toddy)
• 1 to 2 tsp sugar (or to taste)
• Freshly grated nutmeg; a pinch of cinnamon optional
Stir the rum and sugar in a mug or glass until dissolved. Add the water and stir again. Grate nutmeg over the top. Serve at room temperature (no ice in 1758) or over ice if you want it modern.
Drink 2: Grog (1740)
Grog is the drink that gave us the word "groggy." On August 21, 1740, British Vice-Admiral Edward Vernon issued an order that his sailors' rum ration be diluted, "the proportion of a quart of water to every half pint of rum," a 4:1 water-to-rum ratio, split into two servings a day. The goal was to stop sailors from hoarding their ration and getting wasted. Vernon wore a coat made of a coarse fabric called grogram and was nicknamed "Old Grog," so the watered rum became "grog," and a sailor who'd had too much was "groggy."
Vernon also allowed men to buy sugar and limes to "make it more palatable," and the Navy later made citrus mandatory to fight scurvy, which is where the British "limey" nickname comes from. That rum-lime-sugar-water formula is basically the ancestor of every sour cocktail, the daiquiri included. The ration survived all the way to July 31, 1970, a day the Navy calls Black Tot Day.
George Washington keeps coming up in this rum research, and I thought this little tidbit was fairly interesting. Mount Vernon, George Washington's estate, is named after this same Admiral Vernon.
Yep, our first President's house is named after a British Admiral!
Washington's older half-brother Lawrence served under Vernon in the Caribbean and named the family estate in his honor. Hilarious, right?
RECIPE: Royal Navy Grog
• 2 oz aged or dark rum (a Demerara or navy-style rum is ideal; Pusser's was the official Royal Navy brand)
• 1 oz fresh lime juice
• 0.75 oz sugar syrup (or 1 to 2 tsp sugar)
• 3 to 4 oz water (hot for a cold night, or cold over ice)
Stir everything together until the sugar dissolves. Serve hot in a mug with a cinnamon stick, or cold over ice.
The First Bust: Whiskey Rises
After Independence, rum experienced its first big bust. The Revolution wrecked the molasses trade, the thing rum depended on. British ships controlled the Atlantic, molasses got scarce and expensive, and Americans needed something else to distill. They had it growing right under them: grain.
The first great American whiskey was not made from corn, it was made from rye. Rye grew easily in the Mid-Atlantic, and Pennsylvania and Maryland became rye country. This grain was the backbone of the first American whiskeys. Corn whiskey and bourbon came into their own a bit later and further south and west, where corn grew better.
George Washington himself is the perfect bridge. After his presidency, his farm manager James Anderson talked him into distilling the rye growing on the estate, and by 1799, the year Washington died, the Mount Vernon distillery was one of the largest in the country, making nearly 11,000 gallons a year. His recipe was 60% rye, 35% corn, 5% malted barley.
By the 1820s whiskey was cheap and rum's long reign was over. From naming his estate after the admiral who watered down the Navy's rum to distilling his own whiskey, George Washington sums up the American rum experience nicely. Thanks, George!
Drink 3: Cuba Libre (~1900)
Rum's comeback starts with a war and a soda. In 1898 the US fought the Spanish-American War, and Cuban rebels had a rallying cry: "por Cuba Libre," for a free Cuba. American troops occupied Cuba, and they brought Coca-Cola with them. Coke first reached Cuba around 1900, and somewhere in Havana in those years, someone poured Bacardi rum over Coke, added lime, and the Cuba Libre was born.
That rallying cry/toast has a fun, if slightly dubious, backstory. A Bacardi ad man named Fausto Rodriguez swore in a 1965 notarized affidavit that he was a 14-year-old messenger in August 1900 when an American officer mixed the first one and a group of soldiers toasted "por Cuba Libre." The wrinkle: Rodriguez worked for Bacardi's ad department at the time he told the story, right when Bacardi had partnered with Coca-Cola. Take it with a lime wedge.
That drink is no longer widely known as a Cuba Libre, but as a rum and Coke. So the question is: why do Americans mostly say "rum and Coke" instead of "Cuba Libre"?
A few threads braid together. The technical difference is that a Cuba Libre has lime and a rum and Coke often doesn't, but the biggest reason is that the name really shifted with politics. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Bacardi fled Cuba for Puerto Rico, and in 1960 the US embargo made Cuban rum and Coca-Cola hard to get on their respective sides. Cuban exiles bitterly called the drink a "mentirita," a little lie, because there was nothing free about Cuba. Calling it "Cuba Libre" got complicated, so "rum and Coke" was the safer, blander order.
RECIPE: Cuba Libre
• 2 oz light or gold rum (Cuban-style if you can; lime-forward)
• Juice of half a lime (about 0.5 oz), plus a spent wedge
• 4 to 5 oz cola (Coca-Cola is traditional)
Fill a highball glass with ice. Squeeze the lime over the ice and drop in the wedge. Add rum, top with cola, stir gently. Without the lime, you've just got a rum and Coke. With it, you've got history.
Drink 4: Daiquiri (1898 / 1920s / 1940s)
If you're interested in making cocktails at home, the daiquiri is the most important drink in this whole piece, because it's not really one drink, it's a template.
But before we get to the template, let's talk about the origin. Around 1898, an American mining engineer named Jennings Cox was working near the village of Daiquirí in Cuba, and, the story goes, mixed Bacardi with lime and sugar over ice, thus inventing the daiquiri. There are competing versions, of course, because there always are: some say it was named at a nearby bar, some credit a Bacardi figure as a guest. By 1909 two Navy officers had carried it back to the Army & Navy Club in Washington, DC, and the drink was on its way to stardom.
Then two things supercharged it. Prohibition (1920 to 1933) sent thirsty Americans to Havana, where the daiquiri was king at El Floridita and a regular named Ernest Hemingway made it famous. And in the 1940s, wartime whiskey rationing plus FDR's Good Neighbor policy toward Latin America made rum suddenly cheap, abundant, and fashionable. Rum was back, and the daiquiri rode the wave.
I love daiquiris because the formula is so simple: spirit + citrus + sweet. Get that ratio right and you can build a thousand drinks. Swap the sweetener, simple syrup, honey, maple, falernum, and you get a new drink. Swap the rum and you change the whole personality. It's a fascinatingly simple, yet complex drink.
The most famous riff is Hemingway's. He tried a daiquiri at El Floridita, said something like he'd prefer it with no sugar and double the rum, and bartender Constantino "Constante" Ribalaigua Vert built him a version with grapefruit juice and maraschino liqueur instead of sugar. It got called the Papa Doble, or the Hemingway Special. Papa supposedly drank them by the dozen. And the frozen daiquiri, blended with crushed ice, is a Floridita signature too.
RECIPE: Classic Daiquiri
• 2 oz white rum
• 0.75 oz fresh lime juice
• 0.75 oz simple syrup
Combine all ingredients, shake hard with ice, fine-strain into a chilled coupe. No garnish needed, or a lime wheel. Once you can make this, you can make a hundred drinks. Swap the syrup for honey or falernum, swap the rum, riff away.
RECIPE: Hemingway Daiquiri (Papa Doble)
• 2 oz white rum
• 0.75 oz fresh lime juice
• 0.5 oz fresh grapefruit juice
• 0.5 oz maraschino liqueur
• (optional 0.25 oz simple syrup if you're not as big of an alcoholic as Hemingway)
Shake or blend with crushed ice, serve in a coupe or over crushed ice.
Drink 5: Mai Tai (1944)
The Mai Tai is the peak of rum's second boom, and it comes with the best origin fight in cocktail history. Victor Bergeron, "Trader Vic," said he invented it in 1944 at his restaurant in Oakland, California, for two friends visiting from Tahiti. One of them sipped it and said "Maita'i roa ae," Tahitian for roughly "out of this world, the best," and the name stuck. Vic built it around a bottle of 17-year J. Wray & Nephew Jamaican rum, and he wanted the rum to shine, so he kept it simple.
The rival claim comes from Don the Beachcomber, who opened his Hollywood tiki spot in 1933-34 and said he'd made a Mai Tai precursor first. The two sides feuded, and there was legal wrangling in the 1970s, but Vic's version is the one that's well-documented and the one the world drinks.
RECIPE: Trader Vic's 1944 Mai Tai
• 2 oz aged Jamaican rum (the original 17-year Wray & Nephew is long gone; most bartenders now use a blend of aged Jamaican and Martinique rhum)
• 0.75 to 1 oz fresh lime juice (juice of 1 lime)
• 0.5 oz orange curaçao
• 0.25 to 0.5 oz orgeat (almond syrup)
• 0.25 oz rock candy or simple syrup (2:1 rich syrup)
Shake with crushed ice, pour unstrained into a double old-fashioned glass or tiki mug. Sink the spent lime shell, garnish with a mint sprig. No pineapple juice, no grenadine, no dark rum float, that all came later.
Tiki: America's Fantasy of Paradise
The Mai Tai didn't boom in a vacuum. It rode a full-blown cultural wave. World War II sent millions of American GIs to the Pacific, and they came home with stories of island paradise, and a hunger for escape. James Michener's "Tales of the South Pacific" won the Pulitzer in 1948, became the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "South Pacific" in 1949, and then a hit movie. Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959. Elvis put out "Blue Hawaii" in 1961. The whole country wanted a luau.
Tiki bars gave it to them: thatched roofs, torches, carved idols, ceramic mugs, and rum drinks with paper umbrellas. It was pure escapism, a manufactured paradise you could drive to. Honestly, think of it as the Instagram aesthetic of the 1950s, an entire look engineered to transport you somewhere you weren't.
A few more tiki drinks worth knowing by name:
The Zombie: Don the Beachcomber, 1934. Three kinds of rum, plus falernum, bitters, and secret spices. So strong that Don's bars limited customers to two, and he kept the recipe in code for decades until tiki historian Jeff "Beachbum" Berry cracked it in the 2000s.
The Painkiller: from the Soggy Dollar Bar in the British Virgin Islands in the 1970s, now trademarked by Pusser's Rum. Rum, pineapple, orange, cream of coconut.
The Navy Grog: a Don the Beachcomber creation, a tiki descendant of that old navy ration.
The Scorpion Bowl: a communal, shareable bowl with long straws, a Trader Vic and tiki-bar staple.
The Blue Hawaii: invented in 1957 by bartender Harry Yee at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, when a Bols rep asked him to feature blue curaçao. Yee also gave tiki the paper parasol.
But alas, rum would bust again as America changed, Elvis left the building, and Gordon Gekko entered. The 1980s calorie-driven health culture would usher in the clean, flavorless vodka martini craze, and rum would once again bust.
So long tiki escapism, hello greed is good.
Bringing It Full Circle: Clarified Milk Punch
I saved my favorite for last, because it closes the whole loop. Clarified milk punch is the drink that proves what's new is old.
A clarified milk punch is a fun little trick that goes like this. You make a punch (spirit, citrus, sugar, spices) and then you slowly pour it into warm milk. The acid curdles the milk. It looks revolting, a broken mess of curds. Then you strain it. The milk's casein proteins clump into curds, and as the liquid drips through, those curds act like a natural filter, binding the harsh tannins and rough compounds and stripping out the color. What comes out the other side is crystal clear, silky, and, crucially for 1750, shelf-stable. It keeps for months without refrigeration.
The history goes way back. The English playwright and spy Aphra Behn is sometimes credited with popularizing it in the 1600s. The oldest surviving written recipe belongs to a housewife named Mary Rockett, dated 1711. And Benjamin Franklin wrote out a milk punch recipe in a letter to James Bowdoin on October 11, 1763, and you can read it today at Founders Online. Colonists drank this stuff. Legend even has it that months-old bottles of milk punch were found still good in Charles Dickens's cellar after he died.
Then milk punch basically vanished. Once commercial refrigeration arrived in the mid-1800s, you didn't need a clever trick to keep a drink stable, and clarified milk punch faded out so completely that by the 1900s it was barely in the books. Until it came roaring back around 2008 to 2013, when craft bartenders rediscovered it, at places like Eleven Madison Park and the Punch Room in London.
Modern bartenders geek out over the science, the casein, the pH, and Instagram loves the crystal-clear result. While drinkers in 1763 didn’t know the chemistry, they knew it took the harsh edge off rough alcohol and it didn't spoil. Today we love the aesthetic and appreciate the science. In 1763, they just loved that “this one simple trick” made the rum taste good for a long time!
We can all agree it’s an awesome drink.
RECIPE: Clarified Milk Punch
• 8 oz aged rum
• 3 oz fresh lemon or lime juice
• 3 oz simple syrup
• 4 oz brewed black tea, cooled (optional, for tannin and body)
• 3 oz whole milk
• Grated nutmeg
Combine everything except the milk. Warm the milk gently in a bowl. Slowly pour the punch INTO the milk (never the other way, order matters). Let it sit undisturbed 30 to 60 minutes as it curdles. Strain slowly through a coffee filter or several layers of cheesecloth, then strain again through the same curd bed until it runs clear. Bottle and refrigerate; it'll keep for weeks. Serve over a big cube.
PS: expect to strain it a few times before it runs clear. Modern milk can be stubborn.
Summing It Up
Rum is a connection between us today and the sailors who maintained trade in Colonial America. An admiral's coarse coat gave a watered-down rum ration its name, and gave us the word "groggy." A campaign bar tab put Washington in his first office and started him towards the Presidency. And a curdled-milk trick from 1763 is molecular gastronomy in cocktail bars right now.
Rum boomed and busted and boomed and busted, and every rise and fall left a drink behind that tells you what America wanted at that moment. It's a fun story full of delicious drinks.
Enjoy one or two (responsibly, of course) and toast the Americans before you who enjoyed them as well.
Cheers!
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