Merci, Napoleon: We have Rhum Agricole!

Today we are looking at a comparatively little-known tropical spirit in the English-speaking world, called Rhum Agricole, which traces its history to the distillers of Armagnac in France, and a miscalculation by one of Europe's most notorious emperors.

Most of you will know that rum as we generally know it is made from either sugarcane molasses or sugarcane juice. Yes, there are other products sold as “rum” in some markets, like flavoured ethanol in some low-income countries; one can find sugar beet molasses based “rums” popular with some eastern European confectionary manufacturers; and some people also wonder if some of the cheaper rums bottled in the largest rum-producing nation in the world (The Philippines) are not made from grain neutral spirit after all. But taking these more and sometimes less obvious imposters aside, the raw material for rum has to be found in one way or another in the sugarcane plant.

The word “rum”, by the way, is commonly accepted these days to have originated in the mid-17th century in the Caribbean, as an abbreviation of the word “rumbullion”, which was at the time used to describe a great tumult or uproar, and was rum-oured (This is, without doubt, the worst pun you have ever heard of! But you have heard of it!) to have been caused by the enthusiastic consumption of the fermented and distilled cane spirit popular in those latitudes.

So how do we get to Rhum Agricole from that? Initially, virtually all rum was made from sugarcane molasses in the overseas colonies of the major European empires: Britain, France and Spain. The sugar from those islands and coastal tropical areas was a major if not the most important agricultural export product from the colonies to Europe. That sugar was ordinarily refined at origin, and a by-product of the sugar-refining process is...

Molasses!

From those sugarcane molasses, rum was distilled, and it became very popular indeed in the colonies, as well as with countless sometimes more and often less respectable seafarers of the time.

I thought you were going to tell us about Rhum Agricole?

© Alexander Altenhof

We will come to that now: In the early years of the 19th century, the imposition of Napoleon’s Continental System had had the unintended consequence of cutting off the Caribbean sugar supply to most of Continental Europe. Ironically, France was one of the hardest-hit nations of this policy, as while the intention had been to prevent British merchant ships from calling at French controlled ports, the British Navy who controlled the Caribbean seas in turn intercepted most French vessels trying to cross the Atlantic from the French Antilles, and therefore hardly any sugar arrived at the French ports anymore. Napoleon instructed the Continents' scientists to look for an alternative solution, which was eventually found in sugar beet. After a few early decades of fairly disappointing yields, output experienced a breakthrough in the 1840s, and sugar beet production in France went off the charts.

In turn, demand and therefore the price for sugar from the French colonies collapsed (Supply and demand, my dear fellows!), and while it did not mean the death of sugar refining in the affected colonies, it put an enormous dent into production over there, which also meant that all of a sudden there was a lot less molasses around to make rum from.

Their people were still thirsty and yearning for a drink, so the French overseas rum producers decided to take a different approach to rum-making. Squeezing a stalk of sugarcane and pressing the juice out of it is a lot easier and quicker than having to work with molasses, so yet again necessity was the mother of invention. The stills that were commonly in use at the time had been modelled after alembic stills from the Armagnac and Cognac regions in France, and over the years they evolved into the so-called creole column stills to work perfectly harmoniously with the newly found feedstock, the sugarcane juice.

© Rhum J.M.

This Colonne Créole is essentially a simpler, shorter version of an Armagnac still that can be operated continuously, and it shares a lot of the characteristics of its older brother: low reflux, low rectification and maximum aroma retention. The distillation of the sugarcane juice has to happen fast after fermentation to avoid oxidation, and the resulting spirit with a typical ABV of 65-75% veritably bursts with grassy and vegetal flavours carried through from the sugarcane.

The spiritual relationship between Armagnac and Rhum Agricole runs deep for many distilleries. Many well-known master distillers of Rhum Agricole have trained in Armagnac or Cognac; both spirits are seasonal and continue to be made on a relatively small-scale, in an artisanal and traditional fashion; like Armagnac, some Rhum Agricoles follow the ageing terminology of Blanc, VO, VSOP and XO; most importantly, they are both heavily terroir-driven in their production and their storytelling.

One could say that:

Commercially speaking, it should come as no surprise that Rhum Agricole only comprises of around 3% of total global rum production. The best-known and largest producing countries are Martinique, Guadeloupe and La Réunion, though of course it can also be found in other, more surprising origins like Madeira, Australia or even Japan. We personally know an island distillery in the Land of the Rising Sun that we can supply a superbly aromatic Rhum Agricole from in bulk, and we can also source from the more traditional origins.

© An Overview of Spirits Made from Sugarcane Juice, by Claudine Corbion, Juliette Smith-Ravin, Odile Marcelin and Jalloul Bouajila

If you ever want to try it in a cocktail, have a go with it in Daiquiri for a very fresh-cut grassy style; mix it 50/50 with a funky Jamaican rum for a gorgeous Mai Tai dat will ring-a-ding da bells in yo head; or make a razor-bright Highball from it for the hottest of summer arvos.

We will leave you with a healthy thirst for a quenching Ti' Punch and the last picture of probably the most famous rum drinker of them all: