Rum and rye from the cocktail crypt

During the Tales of the Cocktail a few of us hopped in a cab one evening to visit Stephen Remsberg, who lives in New Orleans and has arguably the world's best private collection of rums – many of them uniquely historic. (An account of Stephen and his collection leads off chapter ten in And a Bottle of Rum.)

His house in the Broadmoor neighborhood took on several feet of water in the wake of Katrina, and required major reconstruction of the first floor. He and his wife moved back in a couple of months back, yet the rebuilding continues. The kitchen countertops are still made of chipboard, we had to take turns leaning on the dishwasher door for it to function, and there's still a murky water line about chest height on the sliding door to the backyard.

And the rums? Most survived the flooding. The chief problem was that the nearly 700 bottles sat in 90-degree-plus heat for two weeks or more in a house full of water; the humidity caused the labels to slip off quite a few. But otherwise, the collection emerged in tact.

Our crew of topers last Saturday evening consisted of me, Ted "Dr. Cocktail" Haigh, Jeff "Beachbum" Berry, and his wife, Annene (a/k/a Mrs. Bum). And what a treat! Stephen graciously cracked opened several rare bottles of spirits for us to sample – all of which were still sealed with the original government stamps. This included a superb Austin Nichols Boston rum, which had been distilled in 1917 then aged in the barrel through the whole of Prohibition, finally seeing the inside of a bottle in 1934. It was full and rich, with a strong molasses aroma and a subtle maple taste. As Stephen put it, "it's one of the last survivors of an extinct kind of rum."

But the real treat – and I'm stepping off the rum reservation here a bit – was in sampling a few extraordinary ryes Stephen had acquired since late last year. (It's a new interest of his, but he swears he won't abandon rum, his true love.) These included a Sherwood rye made in Maryland around 1916 and bottled in Baltimore (as a prescription medicine) in 1927; a 1920 Pennsylvania rye that was bottled after Prohibition; and a Mount Vernon (Maryland) rye distilled in 1933 and bottled in 1937.

The biggest surprise for me was the Old Overholt Rye, a four-year-old bonded Monongahela rye produced right after Prohibition and aged four years. Even though the aroma tended toward the uninteresting, the flavor turned out to be complex and rich, with scents of licorice and the lingering taste of lemon and tangerine – a far cry from what's sold under the same name today.

This was the very essence of a memorable evening – how often do you get to taste a bit of past so directly?

The blurry video I took captures a few of these memorable moments. Stephen is in the blue shirt, Jeff in green, and Ted in pink.

Let's do launch!

And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails is officially released tomorrow. That simply means the book should be showing up in stores and will get shipped from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Of course, it also means it's time for a party. So if you're in or around southern Maine on the evening of July 25, come on by. The launch party will be held at Restaurant Oolong, home to the best cocktail bar in the state and the turf of Paul Russell and John Myers, both of whom have been a big help in my getting through the book publishing process. John contributed an original rum drink recipe for the appendix -- the Lytton Fizz -- and we'll be serving that up tomorrow night along with other drinks and some snacks. The launch is on from 5 to 7 p.m., and the restaurant address is 100 Commercial Street in Portland. Books, of course, will be available.

Tales of the Tales

I returned home to Maine tonight afer several days of sophisticated sipping in New Orleans at the fourth annnual Tales of the Cocktail, held mostly at the Hotel Monteleone.

This was my second year here, and I could still only marvel at seeing so many cocktail illuminati together. The parties and symposia were ideal venues to catch up on what's going on in the world of cocktails and spirits. At dinner the first night I shared a table with Ted "Dr. Cocktail" Haigh, Audrey Saunders of Pegu Club, Ryan Magarian of Liquid Kitchen, Gwydion Stone of The Wormwood Society, and Paul Clarke, who writes the great drinking blog Cocktail Chronicles. Paul happened to have lauded "And a Bottle of Rum" just the day before, calling it "the finest narrative overview of spirits and cocktails since William Grimes’ Straight Up or On the Rocks: The Story of the American Cocktail." (But I blush!)

I signed a a few dozen of copies of my book at the big cocktail party on Thursday night (where many other cocktail authors also served drinks and signed books) and served as co-host of a sublime dinner held at the Court of the Two Sisters, with wonderful drinks created by Jeff "Beachbum" Berry and Somer Perez of the restaurant Beacon in New York.

Friday morning started off with a talk by Ted Breaux on absinthe, with sniffings of actual wormwood and tastings of actual French and Swiss absinthe. (That's my stepdaughter, Addie, sampling in the photo.) Followed that day by, well, some other cocktail stuff. It's all a bit blurry. Paul Clarke peformed a valuable public service reporting on the event, and I encourage you to head over to Cocktail Chronicles to catch up on it.

More so, I encourage you to attend next year: organizers are already talking about a panel on rums, and I'm hoping to help pull that together. I don't know if the exact dates are set yet.... just to make sure, I urge you to leave July and August wholly open next year to ensure no conflicts with a trip to New Orleans.

False memories and rum

ABC Science Online reported yesterday that a Canadian researcher had found he could discourage people from drinking rum by creating "false memories" about earlier episodes involving rum. Some 142 subjects between the ages of 18 and 20 were told that background research had turned up profiles of them that included an unfortunate encounter with rum, and , lo, subjects later evinced a preference for spirits other than rum.

The study was headed up by a professor in British Columbia. "What we find is that if you've increased your confidence that you've got sick drinking rum, you now give rum less preference," he reported.

Um.... OK. I suppose there are serious research reason to look into the powers of this sort of brainwashing. But my question is, how do you control for students who haven't actually had a real-life bad experience with rum?

It was a source of some wonder to me when researching "And a Bottle of Rum" how many folks shared an experience involving the same elements: a high school dance, Bacardi, and shrubberies. This was followed by a solemnly followed vow not to touch rum again.

Some insist that rum makes them sick because it's sweet. That's not the reason. (It's a durable myth that rum is always sweet.) It makes them sick because it's usually the cheapest hard liquor available, and kids first exploring the world of hard liquor tend to buy the cheapest liquor in the biggest bottle. They don't need brainwashing experiments to steer them away.

Question is, can those Bacardi and Coke guys implant false memories of great times with rum?

Live from New York!

Last night I had the great fortune to be able to talk about rum to 150 folks at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I love to talk about rum, I do it often, and I find that I like it better when there's somebody there to listen.

We served up four rum drinks over the course of the 90-minute evening. Everyone began with a mini-mojito, which would have tasted even better if it were 95 degrees out, and this was followed by three drinks, each marking an interesting rum era – bombo (colonial North America), El Presidente (Prohibiton), and a shot of Ron Zacapa Centenario served neat (rum today).

The audience really knew its rum and had a lot of good, focused questions. I wanted to do the Andy Kaufman thing and take everyone out for drinks afterwards. But that would have been pretty expensive.

When I mentiioned some worthy rums to look for today, I offered up a list of some of my favorites, and said I'd post it for reference. So here it is:

Zaya (Guatemala)
Ron Zacapa Centenario (Guatemala)
Pyrat XO (and XO 23) (Anguila)
Barbancourt 5 Star (Haiti)
Rhum Clément VSOP (Martinique)
One Barrel (Belize)
Barrilito 3 Star (Puerto Rico)
Appleton VX (Jamaica)
Mt. Gay Extra Old (Barbados)
El Dorado 15 (Guyana)
Cruzan Single Barrel (Virgin Islands)
Pampero Anniversario (Venezuela)
Santa Teresa 1796 (Venezuela)
Flor de Cana Grand Reserve (Nicaragua)

Not stirred by history

On Sunday "And a Bottle of Rum" was featured in the "Shaken and Stirred" column in the New York Times's Style section, headlined "By the Rum's Early Light." The author, Jonathan Miles, wanted a patriotic drink for the week of July 4, and thought about beer and whiskey, but then came across an advance copy of my book and decided that a rum drink was in order.

With book in hand he went to the Pegu Club downtown and had cocktail expert Audrey Saunders concoct a Bombo based on my recipe. He deeemd it "a disappointment."

No surprise there -- it's not a drink that's tailored to modern tastes, but one I included to give readers a chance to sip a bit of history, to get a passing idea of what colonial tippler might have been drinking.

And, hey, I still don't think it's a bad drink -- molasses and nutmeg seem a good fit for a harsh rum, taking some of the edge off.

Rum = mullet?

The Gothamist ran a piece two days ago on rum's dual public personality, headlined "Rum, The Mullet of Liquors."

There is no question that rum has earned somewhat of a reputation as the party animal of liquors – the bottle behind the bar with the lampshade on its head. But what if we were to tell you there ... is a whole other side to rum that most of us never see. But with just a little shift in perspective, it’s clear that rum can be business up front AND party in the back.

The writer Tamara Lover goes on to post tasting notes for several rums that you generally won't find at spring break, costing from $25 to $30 a bottle: Santa Teresa (Venezuela), Saint James (Martinique), Ron del Barrilito (Puerto Rico), and Rhum Barbancourt (Haiti).