SEASONAL SPICE AND EVERYTHING NICE
New deluxe sipper demonstrates that spiced rum is no longer just for college kids
Ginger. Cinnamon. Nutmeg. Cloves. On wintry days, we crave the warming flavours of sweet spices. And what better way to add them to a cocktail than with a nice spiced rum.
Wait, what? I can hear you asking: Isn’t spiced rum that stickysweet stuff designed for college kids?
Well, yes — and no.
It’s true the original spiced rum, the cloyingly vanilla-flavoured Captain Morgan, was created for an entry-level market. But now Lemon Hart has released Blackpool Spiced Rum, a smooth, complex sipper tailored to the sophisticated brown spirits drinker.
“A lot of people haven’t got a lot of respect for spiced rum, but it’s here to stay,” says Michael Booth, the legendary master blender who created Blackpool. “We can’t reject it, so we have to work within it to make it better.”
It seems they have.
Rum is the most historic of spirits and, arguably, the most diverse. Once known as “rumbullion” or “kill devil,” it originated more than four centuries ago in the Caribbean as a way to make molasses, a byproduct of sugar production, profitable.
Rum quickly became associated with seafaring and island life. It is, as Booth says, “fun and beachy.”
Until the 1960s, almost all rum was brown, aged in oak casks that imbued it with flavours of vanilla, toffee, spice and dried fruit. Then, just as vodka started its world domination, Bacardi released white rum and by the 1990s, two-thirds of the rum market was white. Then came spice.
Back in the 1980s, Viki Hountalas helped create Captain Morgan Original Spiced Rum for Seagram’s in Montreal. It was sweet, heavy on the vanilla and lower in alcohol — 35 per cent — than most spirits. And it was a hit. Today, Captain Morgan is the seventh largest spirits brand in the world and, in terms of rum, second only to Bacardi in global recognition.
It’s not, however, what you would associate with a storied rum brand like Lemon Hart. Lemon Hart is a single-estate rum from the Demerara Valley in Guyana, one of the few controlled appellations in the largely unregulated world of rum. Its provenance dates back to 1804, when it was created by Lehman “Lemon” Hart, a spirits merchant from Cornwall. It was the official rum of both the British Royal Navy and tiki culture. It’s not kids’ stuff.
So why mess with a good thing? “We knew spice was where it’s at for entry-level drinkers and we knew we wanted to participate in that market,” says Hountalas, managing director of the Canadian company Mosaiq Inc., which bought Lemon Hart from PernodRicard in 2009. “But we wanted to be the next generation of spice for spiced-rum consumers. We wanted a more sophisticated rum because we thought the market was ready for it.”
Adds Booth: “A lot of companies say, ‘We want to be different, we don’t want to be Captain Morgan.’ But they lose their nerve and decide they want to be like Captain Morgan. There aren’t a lot of spiced-rum producers who have the nerve to try something different.”
Lemon Hart did.
It took Booth 25 attempts to get it right, but he created an elegant, well-balanced blend of three-yearold premium Demerara rums, then infused it with flavours of ginger, clove, nutmeg, cinnamon, black pepper and vanilla.
What he created was both a sophisticated sipping rum and an easygoing cocktail mixer. Miles Vrahimis, the Miamibased mixologist who is the brand’s ambassador, suggests subbing it for whisky or brandy in classic pre-Prohibition drinks like the Manhattan or Old Fashioned or using it in tiki drinks like the Mai Tai, Navy Grog or Piña Colada.
“What people want now is complexity and flavour,” Vrahimis says. “That’s what’s driving the cocktail movement right now, is flavour.”
Booth agrees and adds: “It’s smooth, it’s round. It’s got a nice clean finish. It’s very versatile. You can drink this like bourbon on the rocks, or you can mix it in tiki drinks. All the spices are there. You don’t even need to garnish it.”