Despite having heard a bit about it over the last year or so I’d still not made it over to Bourne & Hollingsworth and wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The reviews seem rather polarised, with complaints about it getting packed leading to long waits at the bar (justified – it’s a small room with a small bar, with most of the space taken up by an open area for people to mill around in front of the bar) and that they charge too much for drinks which generally are distinguished by being served in teacups (unjustified – if you are going to a decent cocktail bar in London and are complaining about paying £7.50 for a cocktail no matter what type of receptacle it’s served in then you are probably in the wrong kind of bar. Bourne & Hollingsworth’s drinks quality certainly push it into the £7 a go bracket of London cocktail bars). It’s small and a great place, I suspect, on weekdays, but based on a Saturday night I can see it quickly turning into my idea of packed bar hell. But then again, I do hate people…

The London Cocktail Society’s role was a simple one – find a discerning crowd of cocktail drinkers to come down to the bar on a Saturday night and then taste their way through the candidates for the new house pouring rum – Ron Barcelo, Flor de Caña and El Dorado. To add a bit more competitiveness to the evening we were also joined by brand ambassadors from two of the three rums, with bar boss Dino Koletsas taking on the role of El Dorado’s rep, who couldn’t make it along that night. Along with the three in contention we also had a glass of Mount Gay Eclipse, their current golden pouring rum.

We started the evening with Dino giving us a history of rum. I’ve wittered about this before (and have at least one other post in the pipe with yet another history attached) so I won’t go into it much other than to mention a couple of specific pieces that have somehow not come up in previous tastings I’ve been to. First up is the slave trade. I’m not sure how this hadn’t appeared quite so strongly on my radar before, but it’s been part of every discussion about rum I’ve had since. The Caribbean and its sugar plantations were not only the centre of the rum trade but also of the use of slaves, and rum was connected with it not only through production but also as a key part of trade. Rum was used as currency to buy slaves but was also used to fill the holds of ships before they departed eastwards again, making sure that there was never an empty hold going to waste. More research needed.

Secondly is the effect of prohibition on rum production in North America. I hadn’t realised that there were a good number of rum distilleries in the USA before the Volstead act came into force, but the rise of the Temperance movement and the various other backgrounds reasons for Prohibition hit the US and rum fell by the wayside. This led to a strong trade between the Caribbean and South American countries and the US, now that there was little domestic rum production. However, Prohibition killed that, on the legal end of things at least, and led to a large amount of smuggling of rum into the US. This was easier than with many spirits due to the land border with Mexico meaning that it wasn’t necessary to ship booze in by land and sea.The post-prohibition cocktail boom was led by the poor quality of spirits, with drinks combinations originally designed to hide the flavours of bad booze, but rum quickly returned as a premium spirit and a key element of many cocktails.

Thirdly was a reason behind one of the evolutions in rum styles over time. In earlier rum production the use of pot stills and inconsistent product led to heavy aging in an attempt to produce a drinkable spirit, which gives us the world of dark and golden rums on the market. However, the switch to continuous distillation and modern quality control allowed lighter styles of rum to be produced, leading to the popularity of white rum as a spirit category. That bit of exposition leads into the plan for the evening – try out three quite different white rums and choose which one we thought the bar should be stocking.

We started off with Ron Barcelo Gran Platinum, a relatively new rum to the UK market that I had appear on my desk a couple of weeks back to put up on our website. It’s from the Dominican Republic, where there are currently three main rum producers – Brugal, Ron Bermudas and Ron Barcelo. It’s a family a owned company founded by a pair of Majorcan brothers, Julian and Andreas, who set up a distillery in 1929 in the town of San Domingo. Then in 1930, just as they were getting going, the island was hit by a massive hurricane which destroyed the town and the distillery. Andreas gave up on the place as a bad deal and moved to Puerto Rico but Julian stayed on and started selling rum made by other people. For 16 years he travelled round the island selling from the back of his truck until he’d raised enough money for a new distillery, which was built in 1946 by the Osama river. By 1980 his rum was the most popular in the Dominican Republic, overtaking its older competitors, and in 1982 Julian died leaving the company to his son José. He started growing the business internationally, exporting to the USA and Spain with the success helped along by the 1980s rum boom and Mojitos flying off the backbar. By 1994 they were exporting to 10 countries and by 2009 (with some extra Spanish investment helping them along the way) they’d reached 50 countries.

The UK range consists of 4 rums:

* Añejo – aged up to 6 years
* Gran Añejo – aged up to 8 years
* Imperial – aged up to 10 years
* Gran Platinum – aged up to 8 years

All the rums are agricole style, made from sugar cane juice rather than molasses, and the cane growing, rum production and bottling all happens in the Dominican Republic. They distill in a continuous still and take the spirit off at 96.3%, producing about 50k litres per day. The rum is aged in Kentucky bourbon barrels (Heaven Hill?) for at least 18 months, 6 months longer than the Dominican legal minimum of 1 year.

The Gran Platinum is the most recent addition to the range, introduced into the Dominican Republic in 2009 and the UK earlier this year. It is a response the continued rise of rum as a cocktail ingredient, often calling for a lighter flavoured and coloured rum that won’t dominate the palate or alter the look of the drink too much. It is a version of the Gran Añejo filtered through charcoal before bottling to remove the colour as well as some of the heavier flavours picked up from the wood. On the nose it was very light, with pithy lemon and vodka like spiritiness. To taste there was more, with sweet coconut and a buttery, silky mouthfeel – all in all a reminiscent of a lightly sweetened coconut vodka.

The second rum was from Flor de Caña – a Nicaraguan rum, but made in the lighter Cuban style. The distillery is in the north-west of the country in Chichigulpa and was built in the 1890s to produce rums under a number of different names. In the 1950s they started producing Flor de Caña for the local market, moving to export in the 1990s. The company is family owned and the current master distiller has been with them for 39 years, his predecessor ‘only’ having managed 30… As one of the major industries in the area they have put quite a lot back into the local economy, investing in schools and hospitals as well as building industries around the by-products of rum distillation, including paper mills and electricity plants.

The Nicaraguan climate is quite different to the Caribbean, drier and cooler, which gives it more similar yearly evaporation rates of maturing spirit to Scotland – ~3% per year as opposed to ~10% on the islands. This allows Flor de Caña to be matured for longer without getting too woody – while maturation in wooden casks in hot climates is often referred to as ‘maturing’ the spirit faster, it’s only allowing the wood to have an affect faster, which isn’t quite the same: John Hansell made some comments recently about this on his blog. However, the country does also have quite a big variation between day and nighttime temperatures, which causes the porous casks to work more actively than usual, with the spirit being driven in and out of the wood as it expands and contracts as the temperature changes. All of this gives Flor de Caña a good chance to develop interesting flavours during its years in the barrel.

The way that the Flor de Caña rums are named and produced is also slightly different, with each rum being blended in small 20-30 barrel batches from casks of the same age – in other words, if the rum is listed as being a 12 year old, all of the rum in it is 12 years old. In order to keep flavour consistent between batches they use warehouse location to change the way that the rums develop – different heights up the rack in different parts of different warehouses will give different temperatures and humidities leading to enough variation in the finished rums to allow the master blender scope to create the flavour profile they need. In another difference to the maturation of many other rums they top up the barrels each year, replacing the spirit that has evaporated with more similarly aged spirit to keep the headspace in the barrel low to stop an acceleration in evaporation by keeping the surface area in contact with air to a minimum.

The rum is based on molasses and they distill to a lowish 78-80% to retain some of the cane spirit’s flavour. They then use a mixture of 80% bourbon barrels from Heaven Hill and 20% Canadian whiskey barrels to mature the rums for their regular range between 4 and 18 years. They make both a white and gold 4 year old and then 7, 12, 15 and 18 year old rums bottled with no artificial colouring or other additives, and dilute to bottling strength with local water.

We were trying the filtered 4 year old, the white rum in their line-up – similar to the golden 4 year old that it’s based on, but with less of the woodiness as well as none of the colour. On the nose there was coconut again like with the Ron Barcelo, but it was joined with butter and limey citrus. To taste it was lightly sweet with banana cream, coconut and a touch of sweet liquorice.

Third on the list was El Dorado, from Guyana. There’s quite a lot of rum heritage in Guyana, starting with the British settlement of areas near the Demerera river in the mid-1700s and continuing to the present day. Sugar cane and rum production both need water and trade routes, making the river regions perfect and distilleries sprung up all over the place. The British left in 1966 and over time the distilleries and sugar plantations combined until the 1980s, when the remaining distilleries consolidated under the banner of the state owned Demerera Distillers Ltd. This consolidation did lead to the closing of many distilleries, but their distilling equipment was packed up and moved to one location, allowing them to produce rums of all the various styles that were once produced across all the distilleries.

El Dorado is molasses based, using local sugar cane, and has a 22-26 hour fermentation using an introduced cultured yeast rather than the spontaneous fermentation that some distillers use. Their blends are made up of rums from a couple of the many stills at the Demerera distillery, maybe even including spirit from their wooden still, the last one still in use in the Caribbean today.

We were trying the 3 year old, which is matured for at least 3 years in Kentucky whiskey barrels and is then double charcoal filtered, to remove colour and some of the heavier flavours, and then bottled. On the nose it had banana, sweet fruit and caramel. To taste it had milk, sour cream, sugar and coconut – a similar but much bigger flavour than the last three.

To round out the tasting we also tried the Mount Gay Eclipse, Bourne and Hollingsworth’s current house pour golden rum. I have a bit of a history with Mount Gay, as in my rum drinking days (before I got so heavily into whisky) it was my standard tipple and the first years of my working life were fuelled by late night Paramount comedy channel programmes and Mount Gay Old Fashioneds – still one of my favourite drinks of all time.

Mount Gay is from Barbados and claims to be the oldest rum brand in the world, tracing its heritage back to 1703 (even though it may have been renamed to Mount Gay in the late 1700s). It’s named after Sir John Gay Alleyne, owner of the distillery in the mid-1700s, who later became an MP in the Bajan government and Speaker of the House. It is the biggest rum in Barbados and one of the only ones exported from the island, although there are a bunch of locally distributed spirits as well. They produce a variety of rums, but we stuck with the standard golden expression – Eclipse. On the nose it had vanilla, honey, fruit stones and demerera sugar, with a palate of cream, caramel, pepper, ginger and a bitter end. Still one of my favourite rums, although as I try more brands I am being tempted away.

Having tasted the rums we were invited to cross the barstaffs’ palms with silver and order one of a number of drinks that they’d put on for the night, each with a user-selectable rum component to allow us to compare the different spirits in a cocktail as well as neat – as Bourne & Hollingsworth are a cocktail bar mixability is rather important. Before trying the cocktails we discussed how thought the rums would perform and came up with our predictions:

* The Barcelo was lightly flavoured, so would be easier to make cocktails with, as the flavour would not overpower the other ingredients.
* The Flor de Cana was tastier on its own but might not work so well in all rum cocktails.
* The El Dorado was a great sipping rum, but its strong flavours would clash in a mixed drink.

We decided to stick with the Flor de Cana and El Dorado as we thought the Barcelo would get a bit lost. First up we tried The Airmail – rum shaken with lemon juice and acacia honey, topped up with champagne. This was a bit of a washout on the rum front, with the champagne and lemon killing all of the others flavours and giving us a sweet and citrusy fizzy drink in a flute. We followed it with a Rum Cobbler – rum and port stirred with lemon juice, liqueurs and fruit, served in a tin cup over crushed ice. This was much more successful and despite my initial guess that the Flor de Cana would win here the El Dorado sang, with its creamy taste and texture adding rather a lot to the cocktail. After a bit of discussion it looked like it wasn’t only the Cobbler that suited the El Dorado and I duly cast my vote for it. We’re still waiting for the results but scuttlebutt suggests that the El Dorado was the overwhelming winner – a noble victory.

Many thanks to Kate from the LCS for organising, Dino from Bourne & Hollingsworth for making it happen, and Joel from Lovedrinks and the lady from Amathus whose name I’ve forgotten (Auror? My notes are rubbish) for the talks about their drinks.

I didn’t know much about rum, other than the fact that I like sticking it down my neck in various forms, and Meimi started off the evening with a presentation of a bit of the history of rum in Cuba. Things start back in 1550, when the first sugar cane mill was built in Cuba. Sugar growing itself had been brought to the Carribbean by the European powers due to the climate being right to grow it and along with being one of the initial test beds, Spanish Cuba became one of the biggest sugar cane producers.

Sugar processing was quite simple – the cane was crushed to release the ‘guarapo’, sugar cane juice, which was then boiled down to become molasses. As the molasses cooked sugar would crystallise and be skimmed off. At the end of this you were left with molasses with a sugar content such that no more crystallised sugar could be easily extracted and this was dumped in pits. These pits attracted wild yeasts and over the space of 8-10 months they fermented, producing a low alcohol molasses ‘beer’. As people realised that they could brew with the sugar waste they started getting it to ferment deliberately, including dumping in rotting materials (including animals…) to give it a kick start.

As often happens with fermented liquids when there is a of knowledge stills around, people started distilling the fermented molasses to produce a drink originally called tafia. This was a rough poor quality rum due to the impurities in the molasses and general lack of expertise in the distilling. As rum production became more official, with molasses being fermented in a more controlled fashion, higher quality spirits started to appear and it’s this stuff that should probably be called rum. Eventually as production moved on through the 1800s rum started being aged in wood, giving rise to the range of rums that we are more familiar with today – as with whisky, rum is clear when it leaves the still and older rums pick up there colour from the wood they are aged in (and maybe a bit of spirit caramel colouring to even out the hue between batches)

It’s about this point that Cuban rum breaks away a bit from the rest of the Caribbean. Most of the distillation was done in pot stills, which produced spirit with quite a heavy character. However in the late 1800s they developed a lighter style of rum, using column stills, due to the Spanish court preferring that style. This change has continued to the present day, even though many other companies also now use continuous stills, and is one of the characteristics of Havana Club.

The company was founded by José Arechabala who moved to Cuba at the age of 15 and started producing rum in 1860. In 1878 he started his own company and produced rums under many different brand names, including Havana Club, which eventually stuck. In 1924 he was shot dead by a worker after not handing over some cash when threatened and the brand went to his daughter Camila. The US Mafia turned up at around this point and started extorting money from Camila, who then fled to Spain leaving the brand to her son José. He was a businessman by trade and expanded the operation, using leftover sugar cane to make paper and furniture, and starting a candy factory which produced rations for the US army. On top of this he set his mother up with a department store in Spain. Unfortunately at this point everything went a bit wrong: the store went bankrupt, the US-Cuba relationship started to fail and the furniture market collapsed. Seeing the Cuban Revolution moving to a communist anti-US stance he packed up his family and left the country, leaving Havana Club to be nationalised in the early 1960s. These days the rum is produced in a joint venture between Pernod-Ricard and the Cuban government. As such you can’t buy ‘real’ Havana Club in the USA, due to their trade embargo, but Pernod-Ricard market a different, non-Cuban rum under the same name over there.

Today’s production process hasn’t changed all that much. The sugar cane harvest (la zafra) occurs between December and March, and the canes are processed to extract the guarapo. It is boiled to molasses (also known as miele, ‘honey’), cooled and skimmed of crystallised sugar until it is about 55% of its original volume. The molasses are then mixed with water and a cuban yeast, and then left for about 24 hours to ferment into a 5-6% sugar cane wine. Havana Club have 3 copper column stills and distill to produce two different spirits: the 76% ‘aguardiente’ and the unromantically named ‘extra fine distillate’ at 96%. The aguardiente is aged in steel vats for at least 2 years at which point it is referred to as La Madre – the mother. La Madre is then further mixed with water and some extra fine distillate before being aged in ex-bourbon/whisky barrels. Getting the barrels is not as simple a process as for many companies due to the US embargo, which gets in the way of importing bourbon casks. Luckily Pernod-Ricard use their international connections and the barrels are funneled from Wild Turkey through Jameson and Chivas whisky companies, often leading to them being used for Scotch and Irish whisk(e)y maturation in addition to bourbon. When the barrels arrive in Cuba they are washed and sun dried, and not recharred. The aguardiente is left in the barrels for various lengths of time and on reaching the end of its maturation it is rested in vats for 24 hours before being charcoal filtered and bottled.

The first of the rums we tasted was Havana Club Añejo Blanco, a 3 year old white rum. I’m not certain how this rum is quite so light after 3 years of maturation, I suspect a combination of tired casks and charcoal filtering as well as the 2 years of initial maturation in steel counting towards the total, but Havana Club use the whisky style ‘years in the barrel of the youngest spirit in the mix’ approach to labeling their rums’ ages (which seems to be a Cuban regulation). On the nose it had cut grass, grape spirit, a hint of pepper, sweet vanilla and maybe a touch of agave syrup. Its taste started with a burst of rich sweetness, leading to a vegetal middle and a lightly green woody finish with a hint of sourness. We were also served up the blanco in a cocktail with an accompanying canapé – A beetroot daiquiri with chicory, blue cheese and walnut. The daiquiri was earthy and sweet with a hint of citrus and when tasted after a nibble on the chicory/cheese/nut combo picked up more of a citrus bite.

Next up was Havana Club Especial, a golden blend of 5-7 year old rums and specially created as an accompaniment to Coke, all the better to mix a good Cuba Libre – rum and Coke with a fancy name. From what I can gather from in between the lines of marketing bullshit (especially from Bacardi) the Cuba Libre seems to have originated in Cuba around 1900, the year that Coke arrived in the country. I’ve been drinking rum and Coke for many years and only recently realised that like The Screwdriver it was a cocktail simply by virtue of having a name. That said, the important addition, in my opinion, to turn a rumandcoke into a Cuba Libre is lime – a good chunk squeezed into the drink and a nice wedge jammed in amongst the ice. It’s not much, but Coke, rum and lime is three ingredients so it’s sort of a cocktail. Anyways, back to the Especial – on the nose it was spicy and buttery and my notes simply read, “like cinnamon toast”. To taste it was sweet and tannic, with caramel, sweet grapes and a light new spirit taste. It didn’t have much of a finish, which is part of the intent as that might get tangled up with the Coke and lime in the glass. Rather than stick with a Cuba Libre, Meimi made a punch using the Especial, mixing in mango, orange and lime juices with some sugar and ginger beer. She matched it with some chorizo, goat’s cheese and membrillo (spanish quince jelly). The cocktail was spicy and sweet, with the ginger adding a nice zing, and brought out the goatiness of the cheese, which in turn turned the dial down on the ginger.

Moving on we had the first of the properly dark rums, Havana Club 7 Años, aged, as the named suggests, for a minimum of 7 years. On the nose it had sweet dark chocolate, coffee cherries, dried sweet cherries and fruity tobacco – a lot of dried fruit and planty flavours. To taste it was much lighter than the nose suggested, with butter, cream and a little bit of light spice. This was matched up with a Mulata cocktail. This drink appeared during the 1920-1950 era when Cuba was a cocktail mecca and traditionally consists of rum, lime and chocolate liqueur. One story of its invention is that Constantino Ribalaigua came up with it in 1924 at El Floridita in Havana, a bar frequented by Hemingway and the birthplace of the frozen margarita, and named it in reference to the skin colour of a girl he liked who came in to his bar to drink chocolate daiquiris. The version we tried used Mozart Dry Chocolate Spirit, a clear sugar free ‘liqueur’ made by redistilling neutral spirit that has had cocoa beans steeped in it. It’s high proof and unlike any chocolate liqueur I’ve tried, tasting much more like the cocoa nib gin I tasted at the Sipsmith distillery (made in the same fashion but with a base of gin rather than neutral spirit) and my own version of that (which wasn’t redistilled as I don’t have a still – just steep cocoa nibs in gin for a couple of days. Tasty). With the flavours of the drink all mixed together it tasted just like chocolate limes – lime candy filled with cocoa powder heavy chocolate. It was matched with a piece of high cocoa content chocolate, which rolled on more chocolatey goodness but also made the booze of the rum more noticeable.

Next we tried the Havana Club Seleccion de Maestros, the masters’ selection. This is a rebranding of the previously available Barrel Proof which was launched as a trial in 1989. It was very successful and as such 12 years later has finally been ‘properly’ released. This rum came out of a trip by the Maestros Roneros (the master rum blenders) to Scotland, where they toured a number of whisky distilleries. Intrigued by the concept of cask strength single cask whisky they decided to take the idea and do some rum based twiddling with it, eventually coming out with the Barrel Proof, a 10 year old rum ‘in the style’ of a cask strength whisky. They choose specific empty casks, fill them with undiluted aguardiente and then store them upright in clusters, in an attempt to minimise evaporation (the angels’ share – about 5-7% in Cuba). After 10 years they then prepare to taste the casks – this takes 2 weeks of preparation where they refrain from fatty foods, smoking (difficult for a bunch of cigar chomping roneros) and other things that might affect their taste buds. They then select the casks they want, based on colour, flavour and ABV, with the rest going into general blending stock, and then vat them ready to be bottled at barrel strength of 45% (after the traditional 24 hour rest and charcoal filtering). On the nose there was sour fruit, spice, salted caramel, liquorice and dark chocolate. In the mouth it was much oilier than the previous rums and had flavours of sweet and sour grapes, and chocolate limes.

The penultimate rum of the night was the Havana Club 15 year old. This one is a bit simpler in its making, being a blend of rums at least 15 years old, but it’s quite difficult to find as most of the rum at Havana Club is bottled before hitting 15, leaving only a small amount of stock to create the 15 from. As such it is made in batches depending on market demand and is put together to have more of a feel of a cognac. On the nose it had sweet pipe tobacco, dried cherry and sweet liquorice – similar to the 7 años. To taste it was oily, with light bubblegum, foam strawberry shrimps and runny toffee with lightly rubbery edges, leading to a long sour wood finish with icing sugar sweetness.

The last rum that we tried was something rather special -  Havana Club Maximo. A batched rum produced at the rate of 1 batch every 10 years, with only 1000 bottles per batch. The UK ration is small (10-40 bottles per year) and TWE seem to have grabbed most, if not all, of it. It’s made from a range of casks of varying ages as part of a grand plan. Each of the maestros will occasionally select exceptional casks and hide them in an underground cellar, marked for the Maximo, and once every 10 years a few of these are selected and vatted to produce the rum. There’s no age statement on it to describe how old the youngest rums are, but Meimi reckoned the oldest could well hit over 100 years. On the nose it had white chocolate mice, soaked dried fruit, sweet grape and Pedro Ximinez richness. To taste it was very Cognac-like, with an oily mouth feel, dried fruit, milk chocolate and cigar box cedar all leading to a long lightly tannic finish with sugary fruit syrup. An impressive rum to finish the night.

An excellent introduction to rum followed by some interesting drams (or whatever the Cuban equivalent is). I’ve got a bunch more rum stuff on the horizon at work and this was a nice way of starting the ball rolling. All I need to do now is wait for my rum history books to arrive…

Havana Club Añejo Blanco
Cuban rum, 40%. ~£20

Havana Club Añejo Especial
Cuban rum, 40%. ~£18

Havana Club 7 year old rum
Cuban rum, 40%. ~£20

Havana Club Seleccion de Maestros
Cuban rum, 45%. ~£40

Havana Club 15 year old
Cuban rum, 40%. ~£130

Havana Club Maximo
Cuban rum, 40%. ~£1200

As I work for The Whisky Exchange and was meant to be trying to take some photos I didn’t have to pay for my ticket. I also don’t have any pictures above as all the decent ones went to our work blog post, which is over here.

Other than hearing it mentioned in adaptations of Dickens and other period pieces on the TV, I first encountered real life hot buttered rum at a Christmas party about 10 years ago. Every year I’d turn up on a Friday night and help my friend Neil prepare the increasingly impressive feast that became his yearly Christmas dinner. Served on the Saturday we’d start on the previous night, constructing a pile of desserts, several turkeys, stacks of veg and a yearly escalating number of sausages wrapped in bacon. We were joined by a number of other assistants that night, including booze buddy Adam who was in charge of drinks making to keep us lubricated as we prepared. He had decided that buttered rum was the way to go and without the safety net of a recipe combined butter, sugar and rum in cups which he and I promptly drank. Unfortunately the proportions were not quite as they might have been and I ended up sleeping on the floor of the kitchen (I think, the memories are predictably hazy) and cooking the next day was not as pleasant as it otherwise might have been.

Hot drinks containing booze have never really fallen out of fashion, popping up every year around Christmas without fail. The smell of mulled wine is ingrained into public consciousness as part of the season and the image of people standing in the snow with steaming cups of something to warm the cockles appears in the standard imagery. It makes sense to combine the warming effect of alcohol with actual warm drinks when the weather turns and the traditions of ‘hot toddies’ go back years, although their use as a cure-all for winter illnesses isn’t all that recommended these days. In medieval times, when the drinking of brewed drinks was preferred due to the potential of water contamination, hot spiced beers, ciders and wines (the foundations of mulling) were regularly served, with heating by the plunging a red hot poker into the drink living on until the times that fireplaces fell out of fashion in drinking houses.

As ever with older drinks there isn’t any particular set recipe and a quick search on the web led to me 5 or 6 different variations, but the core ingredients are the same – butter, brown sugar, rum and spices. Some involve cooking a mix of all the ingredients with water for hours to create a caramelised base to add rum to, some applaud the red hot poker method of heating and one intriguing looking one uses ice cream, but mine is rather simple and easy to make.

Per cup:

• 50ml dark rum (25 ml will work fine if you don’t want quite the hit of booze)
• 2 tsp butter (I used unsalted, but lightly salted should be fine)
• 1 tsp brown sugar (I used some quite sticky demerara – the darker the better)
• pinch of allspice (and whatever other ‘Christmassy’ spices you like)
• grated nutmeg and a cinnamon stick to garnish

Mix together the butter, sugar and allspice (as well as any other spices you want – cloves, extra cinnamon or whatever) into a paste – you can keep this in the fridge until someone wants a drink. Put the mix into a mug with the rum (I used some rather tasty Gosling’s Black Seal Rum, found at the back of the cupboard where it was left by my lovely landlord) and top up with boiling water. Stir until the sugar is dissolved and garnish with a grate of nutmeg. Instead of sprinkling some cinnamon either on top or into the mix I served it with a cinnamon stick as a stirrer, which seems to work nicely, imparting a hint of cinnamon and giving you something to mix the drink around with.

It’s really quite tasty – the spices and rich rummy sweetness rolling off the top with the steam of the hot water are, to me, the distilled scent of Christmas. To taste it is rich, with the fruitiness working with the butter to make something that’s akin to liquid Christmas cake and when you hit the bottom of the cup you can suck on the cocktail soaked cinnamon stick for a spicy reminder of what you’ve just finished. As the drink sits it will settle out into a buttery head (which isn’t particularly oily, having more the consistency of coffee foam) and rich sugary rummy liquid, and I rather like drinking it like this. However having a swizzly stick allows some mixing to make a more emulsified tipple with a consistency a bit like tea with creamy milk.

I suspect I’ll do some more experimentation with this over the season. Getting the texture of the drink right by making sure that the butter and liquids emulsify nicely is my first goal and getting some more caramel flavours in by cooking the butter and sugar mix before use sounds like a good plan. But mostly the red hot poker approach is something that I will have a go at as soon as I’m somewhere where the closest I have to an open fire is better than an out of fuel cigarette lighter…

Gosling’s Black Seal Rum
Dark Bermudan rum. 40%. ~£20 from Master of Malt

Here’s a video of my chubby hands making one:

This is just the most simple version of the drink that I’ve heard of – bitters, sugar syrup, booze, stir with ice. The ice dilutes the booze and the sugar and angostura provide a spicy sweetness to fill in the gap that the watering down process makes. I’ve tried it with various different spirits over the years, but generally stick with whiskey and golden rum – my standard version of this is with Mount Gay rum, although I’m using Buffalo Trace whiskey here (as I had some in the house). After years of having this as the only cocktail that I would drink, and only at home, I ended up in Sosho Match for a friend’s birthday and started chatting with the barman about them – 2 hours later my mate was trashed on Hong Kong Phooey Reloadeds and I was a convert to the way of the cocktail – I had a Manhattan and a Martini in front of me and I wanted to know more.

I’m still quite conservative with my cocktail drinking, sticking to predominantly booze based drinks (such as the aforementioned Manhattans and Martinis, which are really just variations on a theme), but am keen to learn more. My occasional accidental interaction with the staff at cocktail bars (I’m looking at you Match Bar West End – who knew that telling me about Sazeracs could lead to me getting a night bus home on a Sunday..?) continues to aid in this pursuit.

Unfortunately, despite being such a simple drink, and probably in part due to it being so, there are occasional bar tenders who feel the need to spice it up a bit. The addition of an orange peel garnish flamed over the glass is one thing, smashing up some fruit in the glass before mixing is another, but when my drink turns up with a distinctly pinky tone and a shifty looking waiter then finding out that the ‘House Old Fashioned’ includes ‘sweet pomegranate’ make me hang my head. We call that ruining whiskey with grenadine in my house…

Anyways: simple base drink, easy to add things to (orange and cherry seem to the be popular choices, along with tweaking the type of bitters) and good for most sweet-ish booze you have hanging around. My favourite and the start of my cocktail conversion.

Buffalo Trace Straight Kentucky Bourbon
Bottled at 45%. Chill filtered…
Wide availability (I got mine from lovely Mr Waitrose)

I rather like Buffalo Trace. Mainly because it has a buffalo on the bottle, and because they make the finest whiskey in the world (George T Stagg) but also because I quite like the straight bourbon. It takes ice well, which is how I drink my bourbon, unlike JD (which has a rather hollow taste once the boozey hit has been taken away) and Jim Beam (the boozey hit hides the pain of the actual whiskey flavour), and it’s also about the same price as those two supermarket standards. It’s a bit rough for making Manhattans, in my opinion, and probably a bit too rough for making Old Fashioneds, but it’s a good sipping whiskey and I normally have a bottle in my cupboard.