That bottle of rum in your hands at the liquor store, the one you are considering paying almost 80$ for, is not what you think. You might assume you are holding alcohol distilled from a sugar cane by-product with nothing added, except maybe some time in a cask, but you would be wrong. In perhaps 90% of the cases you would be wrong.

You might not care about any of this but there is trouble afoot in the rum world. There is a war coming and the battle lines will be drawn  along philosophical and business lines. On one side you will find producers that want to elevate rum to the level of noble spirit, on par with scotch or cognac, and on the other, producers that, either from “tradition” or simple bottom line concerns, just want to sell you a product mislabeled as rum. As to what that product might be, well, meh, apparently almost anything goes. There you go, I said it.

In fact it appears there is, in places, severe fuckery in the rum industry. The kind of shenanigans that make you choose how you spend your money with the utmost care, the type of fuckery that makes you turn your back on once prestigious and preferred brands.

In short, since there are no regulations, almost anything distilled from sugar cane can be labelled rum, additives not withstanding. What can be found added to rum? Sugar, glycerol and flavouring agents.  Sometimes all three, and it is a dirty secret, either denied or pussyfooted around. It is quite enlightening to see which rum bloggers/insiders talk about this and which will not. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you eh? So much for that authentic experience.

According to tests which for example you can check out here, and here, sugar is frequently added to rum, at times in surprising amounts, roughly up to nine sugar cubes per liter. The consumer might well ask, but at what point am I buying rum liqueur rather than actual spirit? Or the consumer would if there was a mention of added sugar on the label, which there isn’t, ever. To me this is the larger fuckery. Some of my favourite brands are among the big culprits, do you think I’ll purchase them again? No.

Whether it’s legal to add sugar or not to rum is an open question, but informing customers about it should be mandatory. As far as I know, the only rum blender/bottler/seller that acknowledges adding sugar is Plantation, they liken it to dosage, (adding sugar) as is done with champagnes and cognacs. Which is fine, but just tell us, on the label please, then as consumers we can decide what we want to drink and know what we are drinking.

Make no mistake about it, if your rum taste sweet there’s probably sugar added to it, sweetness should not, or marginally so, survive distillation, and cask influence might contribute some sugars, but not that much. It’s interesting because my dad used to add half a cube of sugar to his cognac, why couldn’t we do the same with our rum? Except we’d get to choose how much, if any, we want. Plus considering how much some premium rums cost and how much sugar some of them contain, we might save a bundle by adding the sugar ourselves to less pricey rums. Hey, wait a minute…

Adding sugar is just the tip of the iceberg though. If you had a laboratory at your disposal you might find glycerol, because it improves mouth feel, but also a host of unreported flavouring agents, like vanillin, perhaps guarana, and of course colourant. Even though there is an ancient tradition of “improving” on rum by steeping all sorts of things in it, doing it on the sly feels underhanded and it sabotages brand image once people find out, and eventually they do.

I have a special bee in my bonnet over colourants in spirits (including single malts of course). Adding caramel to change the colour of liquor feels futile. I get it, it’s playing on the public’s perception of what good spirits should look like, and hence what they will reach for on the shelves, but it’s just one more marketing ploy. Then booze reviewers go on about the colours… Sigh.

The worst culprits however, in my opinion, is what I call “frankenrums”. It goes something like this, you make nearly pure alcohol from sugar cane, something like 99% ABV, basically barely flavoured gasoline, why? Because it’s fast and efficient and can be done on an industrial scale in large column stills. Then you water it down to 40%, since there were almost no esters left in your original distillate, this doesn’t taste like much, it could be called vodka made from sugar cane. At this point you start dumping in the sugar, the flavouring agents and the glycerol, and voilà, “rum”. Fancy bottle, lots of sugar and no age statement? Could be a premium priced rum.

There are other deceitful practices as well, but they are easier to detect and are a matter of reading the label with attention. In general, the label can still be regarded as a contract between the bottler and the buyer. That’s probably why many labels are short on facts and long on legends and sunsets. Some distillers will sell bulk product which can then be blended, packaged and sold by third parties and marketed with a provenance that is only marginally true. Similarly, age statements can be misleading, a large number not followed by the word “years” is essentially meaningless. A date of distillation does not equate with the same amount of years of maturation, and 20 years of solera aging does not mean your rum is 20 years old, only some of it is. Read the labels carefully boys and girls, the good products will jump out at you because of the actual information they provide.

What these things amount to is either laziness or a concerted effort to deceive, to give an impression that is not representative of the facts. Either way that’s a very short-sighted way of doing business, because once you get busted, you get busted for good.

So what to do?

As always let’s educate ourselves and then make wiser decisions. The internet is apparently for more than porn and kittens and there is a lot of info out there. Looking through some test results will allow you to spot distilleries that go easy, or completely abstain, from adding sugar, it’s a decent bet they might refrain from adding  the other stuff as well, but that’s just my guess. Also A.O.C. rums from Martinique are subjected to more stringent rules, but there are some sugar cheaters there too. As always, get informed!

I certainly look forward to a rum producer that will rock the casbah by printing on her or his labels “no additives of any kind, natural colour”. I can imagine the ripples this would send through the industry. I doubt it will happen any time soon, so it’s up to us, we need to be discerning.