It's like a cheap knock-off of Out Of Africa. Or is that Salvador?

You, the largely hypothetical reader of this weblog, may recall my recent attempts to procure a bottle of Bacardi-produced Havana Club rum while in the States. Thanks to the wonderful guys at Bramble, I finally got to taste the elusive spirit in the UK.



It's quite nasty. One of the other bartenders present said it smelled of "something someone who's not very good at cooking has burnt". One of our hosts - who has some Cuban heritage - couldn't get beyond gestures to illustrate her distaste.

The Bacardi-produced Havana Club isn't on sale in the UK. Thankfully.

NYC 07: The desperate* search for Havana Club

* Not so much desperate. More half-assed.

The history of Cuban rum is a long, impressive, convulated thing. This being the internet, though, I give you the long story short: Castro nationalizes rum production in Cuba; the Bacardi family leg it to Puerto Rico while Havana Club starts producing rum using the old Bacardi stills and facilities. Of couse, the US trade embargo on Cuba means that Havana Club is not available on American soil, so Bacardi took the opportunity to launch their very own Havana Club.

Following this ok?

The Bacardi Havana Club is not available in the UK, primarily because the Cuban Havana Club is, so I thought I'd make use of the couple of days I had in New York to find a bottle, just to see what it was like. After an exhaustive (again, nearer "when I didn't forget when passing one," than "exhaustive") search of Manhattan's liquor stores I had to admit defeat, safe in the knowledge that I had one last shot - duty free.

Or not. Guess I could pick up a litre bottle of Bacardi Limon, though. Or, in the country that's producing some of the more interesting gins on the global market, a bottle of Tanqueray Rangpur. I guess I'll have to settle for hoping that the Bacardi Havana Club tastes better that rum-flavoured vodka rather than knowing.

Bumbo!

A couple of weeks ago, the stork from Amazon dropped a of Wayne Curtis' And A Bottle Of Rum at Dirty Old HQ (more here) and between that at Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, we got a little carried away. One thing that really jumped out was drink called bumbo (also bombo) , which Curtis describes as "a mix of rum, water, sugar, and a bit of nutmeg".

First of all, a bit of history. Curtis ascribes the name to have come from the British Admiral John Benbow, famed for having his legs blown off during the War of the Spanish Sucession, for reasons that are unknown. Wikipedia suggests that the drink's popularity during the "era of piracy" is down to the fact that it tasted "better than British Navy Grog". Bumbo is one of the original rum cocktails, from the time when a man could say "Arr, me hearties" without being in a movie or wrong in the head.

For our purposes, we decided to combine the basic flavour profile of the old-style bumbo with the slightly more refined technique of a treacle. We've opted for Mount Gay Extra Old for authenticity's sake - Barbados being the cradle of Caribbean rum and all - but any dark, aged rum will suffice.

Bridgetown Bumbo
- 50ml Mount Gay Extra Old
- 2 barspoons Molasses sugar
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 1 nutmeg seed
- 1 dash Angostura bitters

Dissolve the molasses in the base of a mixing glass with the bitters and a touch of water if required. Flake off some of the cinnamon into the glass and add some grated nutmeg. Add a couple of ice cubes and stir. Start adding the rum, little by little, and continue stirring, adding more ice as you go. Don't dissolve the ice completely - the whole process shouldn't take more than a minute or two. Finally, fine-strain the cocktail into an ice-filled Old-Fashioned or Rocks glass and garnish with the remainder of the cinnamon stick.