Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 14

S P IR ITS

JAM AI C AN
R UM

Text & Photos by RACHEL DELROCCO TERRAZAS

M
Clockwise from top: molasses (left) and
sugarcane, both at Appleton Estate; the view
of Kingston from the Blue Mountains

14

WINE & SPIRITS

JUNE 2019

y hands are covered in sticky jerk
sauce, pulling apart a whole lobster
at the Truck Stop Grill & Bar in Kingston, Jamaica. Even though I probably could have
devoured one by myself, I was sharing it with
my Jamaican-born friend, Gabe. He stops midbite and says, "This isn't proper without some
rum." Getting up from his seat-a refurbished
rum barrel-he heads to the window counter lit
up by Christmas lights, then returns a few minutes later with a flask, soda bottle and a bucket
of ice. "Wray and Ting by the Q," he says, referring to the flask of J. Wray & Nephew, an overproof white rum, and grapefruit-flavored Ting,
a local soda. He tells me to serve myself and mix
at my own risk. The rum isn't just strong; it's also
got a distinctive scent, what the locals call hogo,
a funky mix that recalls mushrooms, overripe
bananas and fermenting tropical fruit.
J. Wray & Nephew, one of six distillers in
Jamaica, makes one of the most popular rums
on the island, but it's never become mainstream
in the US. Instead, we've become accustomed to
the smooth, sweet wood-driven flavors of rums
like Appleton Estate. But that may change soon:
Now that Jamaica has established a Geographical Indication (GI) for its rums, the country's

distillers have been looking to strengthen their
identity-and, increasingly, that means rums
with a degree of hogo.
The Clarke family at Worthy Park are one
of the new names reviving the traditional style
of Jamaican rum. Owners of a 9,000-acre sugar
plantation that also produced rum from the
1740s until 1962, they built a brand-new distillery in 2005 and began producing rum using
many older techniques. That includes growing all of their own sugarcane for their rums,
as well as fermenting the mash long and slow,
without temperature control, to develop more
flavor. They also favor copper pot stills over the
more efficient column stills, as they produce distillates with higher concentrations of esters-
compounds that add flavor.
The ester concentration is so central to the
identity of Jamaican rum, in fact, that the
industry classifies rum by ester count, the lowest being Common Clean, working up in concentration through Plummer, Wedderburn and
Continental Flavoured. Before the vogue for
cleaner, smoother rums, Jamaicans valued concentrated, funky flavors in their rums so much
that they would push up the ester counts by adding "dunder," or post-distillation runoff, to the



Wine & Spirits - June 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - June 2019

Contents
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - Cover1
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - Cover2
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 1
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 2
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 3
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 4
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - Contents
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 6
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 7
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 8
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 9
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 10
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 11
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 12
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 13
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 14
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 15
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 16
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 17
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 18
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 19
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 20
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 21
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 22
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 23
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 24
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 25
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 26
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 27
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 28
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 29
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 30
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 31
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 32
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 33
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 34
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 35
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 36
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 37
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 38
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 39
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 40
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 41
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 42
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Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 56
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Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 58
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Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 60
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Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - Cover3
Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - Cover4
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