Iceberg! All hands on dreck!

I was on a bootleg run to Canada recently, slipping across the border to New Brunswick to pick up some rums not available in Maine — Havana Club, Lemon Hart, Young’s Old Sam. (The last is an old-fashioned London Dock-style Demerara rum, made in Guyana and bottled in Newfoundland. It’s rich and molassasey and tasty.)

As I was reaching for the Old Sam, I spotted something out of the corner of my eye: Iceberg Rum, packaged in a vaguely iceberg-inspired bottle. Well, what have we here? Of course, I bought a bottle.

I knew a bit about products made of harvested icebergs — I did a story for the Atlantic Monthly five years ago (link here, subscription required) about two Newfoundland companies that chase icebergs and turn them into drinking water, beer and vodka. (One later went bankrupt.) The process was not terrifically complex — it involved unemployed fishermen and chainsaws lubricated with vegetable oil. Still, it’s an expensive way to get water.

The cost was supposedly justified for marketing purposes. (One of the company founders put it this way: "It's great that a large inland city can clean its drinking water and strip out impurities. But ten million people pee in it on a daily basis. And you know what? Nobody peed in mine. Isn't that worth an extra ten cents a bottle?") Vodka sells clean taste and purity, so blending it with 10,000 year-old, pee-free water makes some sense, I guess.

But rum? Not so much. Rum’s flavor has nothing to do with crisp and clean — it’s muddled and complex, and, actually, a little pee would probably improve most cheap rum.

So how is iceberg water supposed to enhance rum? The marketing copy throws a long bomb: "the warmth of the tropics meets the chill of the northern waters." One sort of imagines Godzilla vs. Mothra in taste wars.

Who wins? Fire wins over ice, and, my friend, it's no contest. This is one of the hottest, harshest rums I’ve had the misfortune to sip. The flavor profile was vaguely like a decent light rum (say, a Cruzan two-year), but that was hard to discern because of the flamethrower it applies to your tongue and throat. It’s more like a harsh, cheap vodka with a bit of rum flavoring.

But it’s got icebergs in it. And that’s worth about three minutes of bar chat.

My new best bar: Zig Zag Cafe in Seattle

I was in Seattle last week on an assignment, and my labors included going to the Zig Zag Cafe. This was my first time here, and I have to say this unassuming place tucked off some stairs below Pike Place Market has instantly vaulted to the top of my list of all-time favorite bars.

The Zig Zag was relatively empty when I showed up on a Monday night. Co-owner Ben Dougherty was behind the bar, and I asked for a rum drink — no surprise, there, I guess. I counted 36 different rums on their list, and there wasn’t a one I would be ashamed to have on my own shelf. (Among them: Zaya, Pusser’s Blue, Westerhall.) Ben suggested I pick a rum, and he’d make up a rum old-fashioned for me.

I went with the Angostura 1919, which I knew would be oakey — and a preview sip showed it was, although not nearly as full of wood as the bottle I’ve got at home. I guessed it would make a nice old-fashioned, and I guessed right. The drink was sublime — the exact right balance of sweet and bitter, strong and weak. And it came with a house-made maraschino cherry, puckery and rich with almondy goodness. (And not an alarmingly lipstick-red color.)

Other impressive details: they keep a bowl of citrus on the bar and made twists to order — no stockpiling in little bartop sarcophogi. They have several shelves lined with eight-ounce ginger ales, tonics, and club sodas to ensure customers get the right sparkle and zest — no shooting insipid soda from a gun. The highlight of the evening came when someone down the bar ordered a Spanish coffee. A great blue blaze flamed erupted up thanks to generous dollop of Stroh’s 160 rum, and then with a understated touch of theatricality Ben sprinkled cinnamon from high into the cauldron, and the grains snapped and sparked like Fourth of July fireworks. It made a flaming orange twist seem like a sputtering sparkler.

And then there was the house-made falernum, which was pure ambrosia. Not to mention the Fernet Branca cocktail I ordered up next. Concocting something that can offset the powerfully bitter flavor of Fernet is a real test, and I admire anyone who can pull it off. At Zig Zag they do it with not one but two house cocktails.

Later on in the evening, Ben pointed out the two engraved plates mounted up on the wall above a door — Zig Zag won two Spirit Awards last July at Tales of the Cocktail: for Best Classic Cocktail Bar, and Best Drinks Selection. No argument here. Sadly, I had time to sample only four drinks while I was in town. But my short sampling gave me ample reason to head west again as soon as I can.

The Zig Zag Cafe, 1501 Western Avenue, Seattle WA 98101. (206) 625-1146.

Angostura Bitters: Breaking Away

It’s taken nearly two centuries, but Angostura bitters has finally secured a beachhead in the United States.

Actually, two of them.

This week Trinidad-based CL Financial —- which acquired Angostura from spirits giant Pernod Ricard earlier this year — bought Lawrenceburg Distillers in Indiana and the Charles W. Medley distillery in Owensboro, Kentucky, in two independent transactions. That’s a lot of acquisition for a company whose flagship product is a four-ounce bottle containing a product that’s rarely served more than three drops at a time.

Angostura began in 1824 as an elixir to quell grumbling guts. It was made of various herbs, barks, and roots steeped in rum, and was invented by the German adventurer Dr. Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, who served as the surgeon general to Simon Bolivar at a town called Angostura on Venezuela’s Orinoco River. (It’s now Ciudad Bolivar.)

Siegert made lots of infusions, but the one that caught on was called "amargo aromatico," or aromatic bitters. After the Bolivarian wars, Siegert remained in Angostura and continued to sell his bitters. Customers appreciated them not only for their relief of gastric distress, but because they made alcoholic drinks taste much better.

Siegert’s bitters operation relocated to Trinidad some years later, and has since been bought and sold several times. (Bacardi owned it for a while.) The Angostura plant in Trinidad now produces not just bitters but lots of rum — they make their own 1919 brand rum, produce 10 Cane for Moet-Hennessey, and distill many other rums sold regionally — but under the new owners, have aspirations globally. And a good place to start seemed Kentucky bourbon, which is in great demand now in Europe and Asia.

The Lawrenceburg distillery is the largest in the country, producing nearly one out of ten bottles of spirits consumed domestically (much of it for Seagram). The plant will also serve as the U.S. headquarters for Angostura. It’s unknown if they’ll start producing their own rum here. But they do plan to shift some bottling of their bitters to Indiana.

Will Angostura bitters be made in the U.S.? I hope not. The ingredients in this fine and complex bitters are guarded as closely as Coca-Cola’s formula, and the plant in Trinidad has top-secret locked rooms, mysterious chutes to convey ingredients from place to another unwitnessed, and a convoluted supply chain to ensure no one can track what herbs and barks enter the plant.

All this mystery sure makes it taste better. I’m pretty sure Indiana Aromatic Bitters just wouldn’t taste the same.

Blogrolling in our time

If you’ve bought Jeff “Beachbum” Berry’s new book, Sippin’ Safari — and if you haven’t you should — you may have noticed on the back cover the flattering comment I made about the author. And if you bought the paperback edition of And a Bottle of Rum, you may have noted Jeff’s flattering comment about my book on its front cover. Spy magazine used to call this practice of mutual endorsements “logrolling in our time” — which was visually much more appealing than “backscratching in our time.”

Most readers probably believe that such “coincidences” come about through some sort of country club conspiracy, where old friends genially agree to prop one another up — a sort of poor man’s version of the Bush Administration and the Haliburton Corporation.

In fact, arriving at such mutual endorsements involves protracted and often heated negotiations, often fraught with unspoken recriminations about the quality of the other’s work and dark allusions to one another's personal hygiene. I have to give Jeff’s negotiators this: they are very persuasive, and in exchange for that envelope of photographs they mentioned, I am pleased to offer the following expanded endorsement:

If you’ve browsed through and sampled recipes from Jeff’s first three books, which served up authentic recipes of the ancient tiki bars, you’ve probably been intrigued enough to wonder about the stories behind them. Wonder no more! Sippin’ Safari provides the captivating backstory behind these drinks — and the story is largely that of Filipino immigrants, many of whom started at Don the Beachcomber’s in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s, and then scattered into a diaspora of tiki drink experts who traveled with their own passports.

Those passports happened to be the little black books with the recipes written in code. The restaurant owners often didn’t know the drink recipes, but simply hired those who did. By treating the recipes like a state secret, the keepers of the secrets ensured they would always be employable. Jeff tracked many of these books down, and with the patience of a Cold War spy cracked the codes. This is, truly, a remarkable story, and the book's price is worth it for the recipes alone.

If you want to know more, you’ll need to buy the book.

Logrolling doesn’t seem to be much in fashion these days — perhaps because, like so much else, it’s migrated to the internet. Logrolling has been replaced by blogrolling. Now, blogs endlessly report on what other blogs are reporting, and links fly back and forth through Siberiaspace, via what the senior Senator from Alaska envisions as something like “blog inter-tubes.” I believe these look like those large sawmill sluices, although carrying chunks of information rather than lumber. Someday I hope to travel to Alaska and see them.

Until then, I will occupy myself by sending readers down the sluice to Jeff Berry’s blog, where one can read his (mostly fictional) account of how we came to recommend one another’s book.

I look forward to the return of those photographs.

Amazon: Sippin' Safari

Tasting: Lucia Duque Rum

Take a moment to scan the store shelves today for a new and much-hyped rum being launched amid one of the most expensive marketing campaigns I've ever seen. Lucia Duque Rum formally rolls out today — available in white, gold, and anejo.

But don't look on the liquor shelves. It's stocked only in the magazine racks. In the current Rolling Stone (on shelves September 7), there’s a splashy ad for Duque rum with a sealed pouch that allows you to taste a nonalcoholic “rum mojito” made with Duque.

Duque Rum is part of a clever campaign to advertise Cane, a new CBS series revolving around the complicated doings of a family of Cuban exiles growing sugar and making rum in Florida. (I’m thinking: Dallas, with sugar replacing oil.) As far as I know, it’s the second fictional rum coming out of Florida in recent months. Bacardi’s Havana Club, which premiered earlier this year as a spin-off of a complicated court case, was, of course, the first.

I was hoping to taste the Duque rum mojito today via the proprietary “multi-sensory marketing” technology (an upgrade of the old scratch ‘n sniff), and see if any rum taste comes through. But I read that the “Peel ‘n Taste” flavor pack is being included only in Rolling Stone editions sold in New York and Los Angeles. Ah, well, and here I am in Maine.

I did explore the very impressive site at www.luciaduquerum.com — and, seriously, this could be any upscale rum website, complete with the requirement that you enter your birthdate to proceed, and full of shots of improbably beautiful but vapid young people enjoying rum at those parties you and I are never invited to. The site features a very professional ad (grizzled men hacking at sugar cane with machetes; labeled bottles rolling off a production line), a serviceable mojito recipe, and a (real) call for a Duque spokesmodel — apparently this is an actual contest and the winner gets to appear on a future episode.

This all raises a couple of questions. Can an actual Duque rum far behind? With all the millions of dollars spent on building brand awareness, it seems a little silly to let it go to waste. I haven’t seen any reference to a licensing agreement anywhere (yet). But who knows?

And what’s up with the “rum mojito”? Is this to distinguish it from the “vodka mojito”? Perhaps Absolut is behind the whole campaign, clearing brandspace to invade the popular mojito market.

It’s just so hard to tell what’s real these days.

Lucia Duque Rum

The secret of Jasper’s special mix

At the rum seminar at Tales of the Cocktail last July, we served three rum-punch-based cocktails to illustrate just how versatile rum punch is as a base for great rum drinks. One of the three was Jasper’s Jamaican Punch, expertly demonstrated and prepared by Stephen Remsberg (photo, at left), the country’s preeminent collector of rum and one of its great repositories of rum lore. (See chapter 10 of And a Bottle of Rum.)

The recipe for this punch he got firsthand from Jasper LaFranc, a noted bartender at the Bay Roc Hotel in Montego Bay, which Remsberg visited in the early 1970s. It's simple but very tasty.

The official recipe cards distributed at Tales included only the ingredient “special mix.” Some attendees found this uniquely unsatisfying in the useful information department. We didn’t mean to be obtuse or secretive - it was mostly a communication lapse with the Tales staff. But a few folks have asked, so here’s the full recipe:

Jasper’s Jamaican Planter’s Punch
1-1/2 oz dark Jamaican rum
1-1/2 oz special mix*
1-1/2 cups crushed ice

Flash blend for ten seconds, pour in a 10-oz highball, and add ice to fill. Garnish with orange slice and cherry.

*Jasper’s special mix
1 part fresh lime juice
1 part sugar
To taste:
Angostura bitters
fresh-grated nutmeg

Stir until dissolved. Let steep in refrigerator at least two hours.