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.
This is not a serious rum review, it’s more of a rum chat, just sayin’.
Having rum at 10 in the morning does not make you an alcoholic, it makes you a pirate, or so I like to tell myself. Not that I frequently drink before 10 AM, I think the last time might have been in Belize, and there were circumstances. Set your mind at ease though, the above picture and related activities happened around a much more sedate five o’clock in the afternoon. We are not savages, most of the time.
I mean it.
Let me be brutally blunt, we put up with so much shit as normal joe air travellers, and are often treated (one way or another) so very poorly, that flying with Copa Airlines and Air Panama was a series of little wow moments. Check-in counters? Properly staffed, the net result is that you don’t wait THREE FRICKIN’ HOURS in line among a horde of pissed off people standing around like cattle and nearly miss your flight for Europe. I’m looking at you Air Transat. Yes you, don’t turn away, you want to save on costs, I get it, but sometimes you go too far. Check-in at Montreal with Copa? Maybe ten minutes tops, even faster in Panama City.
Perhaps because the Universe has a sense of humour, I suspect it does, I have something of an empirical streak in me. I’ve always been interested in what I drink. Its history, nature, and thus the quest for the best. Not THE BEST as in experts and pundits and lifestyle magazines for men declare, but my best, my favourite I should say. Okay, enough kidding myself, more likely that tendency is just a fancy excuse for trying a lot of different alcohols. I figure it looks a lot less disreputable to be engaged in a exploration of rums and the search for how provenance affects taste, at ten in the morning, than just swilling back a shot in your underwear and making pirate jokes.
This is much less a proper post and more a cheap excuse to show you a bunch of pictures. Also I did one of those a little while ago and some of you enjoyed it. So here are more reasons why dive, granted most of them only tangentially make any sense, but it’s one of those days.