gillmang wrote:As for the stink of new rum, I think he is referring to the odour of high proof unaged rum distilled from molasses or sugar cane, which can be pretty pungent and is an acquired taste.
I think you're referring to such as Wray & Nephew's White Overproof in Jamaica, and you're dead-on accurate with that. It's also (along with other brands produced locally on Jamaica and other islands) what the people who MAKE rum, as well as 90% of the local population, call "whites", by which they mean "real rum" (the other kind being something like "rum for dummies"). Which (for AFisher) is pretty much the same way any Georgia 'shiner would look at 80-proof Georgia Moon.
That's also the way it was shipped to England and the northern American colonies. In fact, the purpose of barreling it at that strength (about 120 proof) was to increase efficiency. It was expected that the wholesale customer (tavernkeeper, shop owner, grocer) would dilute it appropriately for retail sale (and the odds are they exceeded that as far as the end customer would accept). But the island natives drank it "as is", as they still do. I would suspect, considering the reputation the North American colonists had for hard liquor, that that's the way it was often drunk in Canada and New England.
New England and Canadian rum was made exactly the same way as it was in the West Indies, and had exactly the same spunky flavors. Except that, since the molasses they used was nowhere near "fresh", there might have been a few additional delights as well.
gillmang wrote:Some rum is still made in Canada but it is blended with imported rum and I think it is fair to say this rum is part too of the tradition of making rum in North America from imported molasses.
That would be Screech? Actually, I believe the product available today is all Jamaican, and just bottled in Newfoundland. The marketing trades heavily on the close relationship between the cod fishers of Canada and the sugar plantations of the West Indies, which wouldn't have been able to exist without them. Employing the same forethought and leadership with which the British established North American colonies that had no provision for growing food, the sugar-producing islands were planted entirely with sugarcane and had no food crops at all. The population was kept alive almost exclusively by shipments of salt cod from the Canadian Atlantic colonies/provinces, in return for the same molasses as New England. I'm pretty sure the same processes were used and the same rum was produced as well.
The product that's sold under the name Screech today is actually a pretty good aged rum, darker than many, and similar to (maybe even better than) Jamaica's Coruba or Myers brands. I doubt that the original was like it in any way.
The same is probably true of Medford rum, the New England brand from that city (in Massachusetts) that made its fame in the 19th and early 20th cernturies by glorifying the legendary New England rums (several of which were distilled in Medford) and then marketing itself as a direct descendent. The mystique of that brand was only enhanced by the fact that it didn't survive prohibition, making it appear to be lumped in with the other New England distilleries of a long ago era. But Medford wasn't from that long ago. The company dates "only" from 1860. By that time the techniques of using the Coffey still and barrel aging to produce fine spirits were being discovered and used everywhere from Scotland to France to Jamaica and even to Pittsburgh, Lynchburg, and Louisville. With no bottled examples to preserve them, whatever the "real" New England rum was, as well as the real Monongahela and the real Bourbon -- and the real Screech, too -- had long passed into memory by then.