The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (18 page)

China had its own kind of sugarcane,
Saccharum sinense.
Although it was smaller than the New Guinea species, it was also tougher and able to withstand colder temperatures, poorer soils, and drought. India had its species,
S. barberi.
Some amount of cross-breeding took place between these and a few earlier, wilder species, although botanists disagree on exactly how this happened. What we do know is that the hybrids traveled well and thrived throughout warmer climates in Asia and Europe. By the fifteenth century, Europeans had a sturdy, robust, and powerfully sweet form of sugarcane to take with them on spice trading routes. The Portuguese took it to the Canary Islands and West Africa, and Columbus brought it to the Caribbean.

Once it arrived in the New World, sugarcane gave us rum, but it gave us something else, too: slavery. Starting in the early 1500s, European trading ships sailed to West Africa and went from there to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, introducing human cargo to their trading partners and opening one of the most monstrous chapters in our history. There was nothing pleasant about work in sugarcane fields. In blistering heat, the canes had to be cut by hand using enormous knives, pressed in powerful mills, and boiled in ferociously hot kettles. There were snakes and rodents and vermin of all sorts living in the fields. It was dangerous, exhausting, back-breaking work. The only way to get people to do it was to kidnap them and force them to, under penalty of death—which is exactly what happened. Slavery was abhorrent to some Europeans and early Americans: British abolitionists, for instance, refused to take sugar in their tea to protest the way in which it was manufactured. But hardly anyone refused to drink rum.

Sugarcane seems, at first, like a simple plant. It's just a tall, sweet grass. But look closely and it's easy to see that quite a lot goes on inside a single stalk. The cane that emerges from the ground is segmented into joints separated by nodes. Each node holds “root primordia”—tissue that could turn into roots under the right circumstances—and a single bud, ready to grow into a stem and leaves. These highly charged little bands of tissue explain why it's so easy to propagate sugarcane. Just place a single joint with an intact node (a cutting like this is called a sett) underground, and it will unfurl “sett roots,” which provide temporary nutrition, and then more permanent “shoot roots” that will anchor the plant in place and keep it alive. The bud will unfurl and become a new cane.

The stalk is made up of concentric layers, similar to a tree trunk. The outer layer, a hard, waxy rind, protects the plant from water loss. It might be yellow, in the case of a young, growing plant, or green as the chlorophyll starts to show. Red and blue anthocyanins—plant pigments that, in the case of sugarcane, protect the plant from sun damage—might turn the stalks a bright purple or burgundy red. Some varieties are even striped like candy canes.
In the center of the stalk are soft, spongy plant tissues that transport water up from the roots and carry sugar down from the leaves. This is where the magic happens. Each joint ripens separately, which is to say that the joint closest to the ground matures until it holds the most sucrose it possibly can. The joint above it holds slightly less, and the one above that holds even less, and so on. Under ideal conditions—a long, warm season with lots of sunshine and high humidity—sugarcane elongates quickly and fills with sugar. Growers call this the grand growth period. At the end of that period, the cane is cut as close to the ground as possible, to get the joints with the highest concentrations of sugar.

If the stalk doesn't get cut, sugarcane will bloom. It produces a loose, feathery plume, sometimes called an arrow, which sits high above the leaves to catch a breeze. This is how the pollen is spread. Each plume holds thousands of tiny flowers that could each produce a single tiny seed—but on sugarcane plantations, the cane is harvested before it can reproduce, and setts are buried in the fields to start the next generation.

Hacking into a dense field of cane was difficult enough without the leaves, sharp as blades, cutting into the skin of the workers. The creatures living the fields—snakes, rats, fat fleshy centipedes and stinging hornets—delivered another round of unwelcome surprises. One solution was to set fire to the fields before the harvest, driving the vermin out and clearing most of the vegetation away. This is still done in some cane fields today, even on modern farms that use heavy equipment to do the harvesting.

Once the cane is harvested, it is highly perishable and must get to the mill quickly before bacteria start eating the sucrose and robbing the sugar factory of its product. So as soon as it is cut, the cane is chopped, crushed, and milled to extract the juice. On the French Caribbean island of Martinique this fresh juice is fermented and distilled directly to make rhum agricole; in Brazil the fresh cane juice becomes
cachaça
(pronounced “cachasa.”) But most of what we know as rum comes from molasses, not cane juice.

When sugar is processed, the juice is filtered, purified, and heated to crystalize the sugar. Left behind is a dark, rich syrup: molasses. If it's going to be made into rum, the molasses is then fermented with water and yeast to make a wash of 5 to 9 percent alcohol. That is then distilled, originally in simple pot stills, and now in more sophisticated column stills.

 

On plantations, rum was a cheap drink for the workers, not a fine export. The owners of those farms probably drank port or brandy, not rum. The first colonists arriving in New England, lacking a quick and easy way to make alcohol, imported molasses from the Caribbean to turn into rum. But that was an act of desperation and, later, an act of defiance. The Molasses Act of 1733 was an attempt by the British to force the colonies to buy British, not French, molasses, by imposing heavy import taxes on French products. Such laws only fueled the colonists' outrage and kindled the American Revolution. John Adams, writing to his friend William Tudor in 1818, said, “I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes.”

Sugarcane cultivation became an American enterprise as well. It grows on nine hundred thousand acres in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Hawaii. But most rum still comes from the Caribbean. The reason for this is, in part, an accident of history—the oldest and best-known distilleries are by necessity located where the sugarcane grew first. It is also an accident of climate. When rum goes into a barrel, the same wonderful interplay of alcohol and wood that makes whiskey so mellow and smooth also happens with rum. But in the tropics, it happens much, much faster. A barrel of rum (often a used bourbon barrel) loses a whopping 7 to 8 percent of its alcohol per year as the wood expands and softens in the steamy heat. What might take twelve years to accomplish in Scotland happens in just a few years in Cuba. For this reason, dark, well-aged Caribbean rums are astonishingly rich and complex after just a short repose in wood.

Bagasse
: The sugarcane residue left over after the juice is pressed from the stalk. Used for fuel, livestock feed, building materials, and compostable packaging.

Although rum is a drink of the Americas, its history is inextricably tied with that of the British navy, and a surprising number of recipes, colloquialisms, and strange bits of technology came out of the navy's long relationship with its favorite spirit.

In the 1500s, sailors were given beer to drink, in part to keep them happy and in part because water, without any alcohol to kill bacteria, spoiled quickly at sea. But even beer went bad on long voyages, so rum became the ration of choice. Giving sailors an entire pint of rum turned out to be a bad idea—they'd drink the whole thing and ignore their duties—so the solution was to mix it with water, lime juice, and sugar, which improved the taste and combated scurvy. This grog (it was not strong enough to call a daiquiri, even though the ingredients were more or less the same) could be doled out twice a day without imperiling the ship.

It's easy to see how disgruntled sailors might start to wonder if their rum had been diluted a little too much. They demanded proof that they were getting the rum they were entitled to. There were no hydrometers in those days (a hydrometer is an instrument that measures the density of a liquid as compared to water, thereby measuring alcohol content), so a method was developed using a material ships always had on board: gunpowder. A quantity of gunpowder, mixed with rum, would not ignite if the rum was watered down. It would have to contain about 57 percent alcohol to catch on fire. In the presence of the crew, the ship's purser would mix the rum and gunpowder and light it on fire, offering “proof” of its potency.

British proof is still based on this standard: a bottle is 100 proof if it contains 57 percent alcohol. In the United States, the math is easier: 100 proof is the equivalent of 50 percent alcohol.

In 1970, the British navy discontinued its rum rations. Sailors protested, wearing black armbands and appealing to Prince Philip, a retired navy man himself, to “save our tot.” But it was no use. Eliminating the rations saved money and helped make sure that the sailors steering submarines were at least as sober as civilians driving cars. The tradition has been gone for over forty years, but some rum distillers continue to offer a “navy strength” version bottled at 57 percent alcohol.