A full-bodied rum

It's a good story. As reported by Reuters earlier this month,

Hungarian builders who drank their way to the bottom of a huge barrel of rum while renovating a house got a nasty surprise when a pickled corpse tumbled out of the empty barrel, a police magazine website reported.

According to online magazine www.zsaru.hu, workers in Szeged in the south of Hungary tried to move the barrel after they had drained it, only to find it was surprisingly heavy and were shocked when the body of a naked man fell out.

The website said that the body of the man had been shipped back from Jamaica 20 years ago by his wife in the barrel of rum in order to avoid the cost and paperwork of an official return.

According to the website, workers said the rum in the 300-liter barrel had a "special taste" so they even decanted a few bottles of the liquor to take home.

The wife has since died and the man was buried in a proper grave.

Sadly, it's wholly false. (See the Museum of Hoaxes website.)

But it's pleasing to see that good folklore never falls out of fashion - this idea has been echoing around since the death of Admiral Horatio Nelson in 1805. It's long been (falsely) said that after the admiral's death abroad, he was packed into a cask of rum (or brandy) to be shipped home in a pleasantly preserved state.

By the time the admiral made port, those who popped the head off the barrel found it half empty, the result of sailors nipping at the admiral's preservative en route. This gave rise to the expression, lamentably underused today, of "tapping the admiral."

On its website, Admiral Nelson Rum depicts an Admiral who looks a bit like Scooby Doo, and urges potential customers to "live the legend." But apparently not that legend. There's no mention of it.

The unimpeachable El Presidente

Earlier this month I wrote up a short piece for an online magazine called Lost, which consists of articles and essays about things that have been, well, lost. I wrote about a rum cocktail that's almost never seen these days, yet should be. It's called El Presidente, and it was once among the noblemen of Prohibition-era drinks.

The drink was born in Havana, Cuba, and that's where I tasted my first, during a trip to Cuba to research my book a couple of years ago. it was a revelation, and should be the first cocktail one serves to any friend who grouses that they don't like rum because it's "too sweet." Vermouth, it turns out, goes fabulously with rum. I'm starting to see more folks mixing vermouth and rum, and that's a trend worth getting behind.

Anyway, you can read more about the history of the drink by clicking on the link to the story below. Along the way, I mention a dreadful mai tai I had at Polynesia, the former Trader Vic's at the former Havana Hilton. So I wanted to post the photo I took of the place – a tiki palace evidently undisturbed since it opened about fifty years ago. Smithsonian curators, take note.

Set 'em up!

Sampling at Mt Gay, Barbados
Originally uploaded by 10cocktails.

It's Memorial Day weekend, the time when rum traditionally begins its migration from the back of the liquor cabinet to the front.

So it seemed a perfectly good time to launch a blog about rum. I'm planning this to be, more or less, a continuation of my book by other means. "And a Bottle of Rum" is now off to the printers – it's due in bookstores and available from online booksellers July 25 – but I don't feel like I'm done writing about rum. Anyway, it's hard to stop.

And I still learn things every day about rum, some of which contradicts what I've already written. So I'd like to use this space to right possible wrongs – why is it that drinking always involves apologies and making amends? – as well as add fresh information and soliciting input from readers. It also seems a good spot to share interesting cocktail recipes, and open to debate some of the finer points of rum history. (For instance, if anyone finds documentation of rum being made on any of the islands before it surfaced on Barbados around 1640, I'd be very interested to hear.)

I'll also hope to report on rum findings from my forthcoming travels – like bars with good rum selections or intriguing cocktail variations – and hope to get suggestions from others about rum-related destinations worthy of a detour.

I'm hoping to post at least two or three times a week. I apologize in advance if you find tedious the preaching about the joys of a good rum and a perfectly balanced rum cocktail.