I recently wrote a short trivia quiz on rum for my favorite online trivia league. (It's great! Generally it's six questions every weekday, and you play a different person each day, and there's a defensive element, and you get promoted or relegated, football-league-style, depending on how you do. If you're interested in playing, HMU for an invite.) The regular matches are general-interest trivia, but between seasons users are invited to write topical quizzes on diverse subjects. Last year, a friend and I co-wrote a quiz on gin, and this year I wrote a quiz all about rum. For each quiz, I also put together a longer recap with a lot more information, and – in the spirit of recycling perfectly good content across multiple platforms, which is the Internet Way™ – I thought I'd throw a few questions up here on the blog on successive days, as they might be of some interest to readers interested in matters bibulous.
So here are the first few rum questions, along with my writeup discussion. I've obscured the answers by putting them in white text on a white background; just highlight the area between the brackets to see what's there.
1. What is the name generally given to a particular style of rich, funky, smoky rum distilled in Guyana?
[Demerara]
[Demerara rum] isn’t named for the [demerara] sugar*, but is produced at Guyana’s only distillery, on the banks of the [Demerara] River near Georgetown. [Demerara] Distillers produces the excellent El Dorado line of rums (your smith is especially partial to the 12- and 15-year expressions), as well as Lemon Hart, Skipper, Wood’s, and rums that show up in blends. One unusual approach from [Demerara] Distillers is that they have six continuous stills, one of which is made of wood, and two wooden pot stills, so they can make a very versatile range of rums. I’m not aware of any other wooden stills in use anywhere else in the world.
(* or maybe it is – as it ever seems, more research has revealed conflicting statements.)
2. What ingredient – used instead of molasses – differentiates rhum agricole, made on Francophone islands, from other rums?
[Sugarcane juice/raw cane juice/pressed cane juice]
Rhum agricole that’s made in Martinique is protected by an official French appellation, but it’s also made in Guadeloupe and Haiti. The characteristic flavor notes are vegetal, grassy, earthy, and sometimes fruity. It’s astonishing how much variation there is in rum, and rhum agricole can really bring forth the notion of terroir as it relates to spirits.
3. What animal appears in Bacardí’s logo? They were found in the original distillery by Doña Amalia Bacardí and taken as a good omen.
[(fruit) bat]
Originally, this question read as “Bacardí’s logo depicts not a fighting bull, nor a Lamborghini, but what animal?” I worded it this way as a clue, as the Spanish word for “[bat]” is “murciélago”. Lamborghini has named many of its cars after famous bulls, and Murciélago was supposedly a famous fighting bull from 1879. This wording proved confusing, and I dropped it in favor of a streamlined version.
The [bat] logo has changed over the years but is still in use, adorning not only the bottles of rum but also Bacardí’s current and former buildings.
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