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As we all know, baijiu is a Specialty of China and one of the six major distilled spirits in the world, the other five major distilled spirits are brandy, whiskey, vodka, rum, and gin. What is the origin of these six distilled spirits? When did they appear? Wire brother comprehensive query information, plus some personal inferences, let's talk casually.
Rum
Earlier we talked about grape shochu brandy, beer Daddy whiskey, fighting nation's energy supply vodka, and today we talk about a legendary distilled spirit, the lifeblood of Pirates of the Caribbean - rum!
1. Bloody wine
When it comes to rum, everyone's first reaction will most likely be a pirate,
In many classic pirate-themed movies,
From the protagonist to the minions,
From the small shrimp rice that just debuted to the old oil with gray hair,
From the evil man to the attractive woman,
Whether it is a pistol, a sword, a cable, or a rudder in your right hand,
The left hand must be carrying a bottle of rum.
Pirate captain who loves rum
Whether it's a fierce fight or a lonely thought,
He or she would take a big gulp from time to time.
Whether he ends up sinking to the bottom of the ocean or continuing his adventure
The moment there was Rum, the world was piping hot for him!
In the world of the big screen, rum has become deeply tied to pirate culture.
In reality,
The origin of the birth of rum is indeed the Caribbean,
It also has a certain relationship with pirates,
But the whole process of birth is definitely not as romantic as in film and television works,
Rather, it is full of blood and suffering.
Rum pirates of men and women who do not leave their hands
2. Rum introduced
Rum is a distilled liquor produced from sugar cane or sugarcane molasses.
Originating in the Caribbean, Cuba is now widely believed to be the origin of rum.
The common degree of rum is between 38 ° and 50 °, and the round, sweet and fragrant taste not only has the flavor given at the time of brewing, but also pays attention to the same as brandy and whiskey, relying on the storage period and the flavor blessing brought by oak barrel aging.
Rum has a variety of ways to classify,
According to the raw materials of manufacturing, it can be divided into fragrant rum and strong aromatic rum.
According to the production and storage cycle, it can be divided into:
Silver Rum:
Silver rum, also known as white rum, refers to the distilled wine that needs to be filtered by activated carbon and aged in barrels for more than one year. The wine has a dryer taste and is not strong in aroma.
Gold Rum
Golden rum, also known as amber rum, means that distilled wine needs to be aged for at least three years in old oak barrels burned on the inside. The wine is darker, slightly sweeter and more fragrant.
Dark Rum
Black rum, also known as red rum, refers to rum that needs to be added to a certain flavor juice or caramel toner during the production process. The wine is more intense (dark brown or brownish red) and has a mellow taste.
3. Origin story
Origin – about 1500 AD
Place of origin - Caribbean Waters
The climatic conditions in Europe are not suitable for the cultivation of sugarcane, so the European people have very little access to sugar, and can only find some sweet comfort from naturally sweet foods such as honey, pumpkin, sweet potatoes and so on.
Columbus
All these changes began in Columbus, in 1492 Columbus discovered the New World, found that the Caribbean climate and soil are very suitable for growing sugarcane, so it is natural to turn this place into a colony of European powers, and then bring sugar cane here, and from Africa to bring black slaves to plant sugar cane for European colonists, opening the development of the sugar industry there.
Take Barbados, the easternmost part of the Western Indian Ocean archipelago, for example, a small island with a total area of 430 square kilometers, 4/5 of the arable area is used to grow sugar cane, and there were 900 sugar cane plantations in the colonial era!
The sweetness of the lives of the European peoples of that era was based on the suffering of the black slaves on the plantations.
Friends who know something about winemaking must have guessed that with sugar cane, it is simply a natural thing to invent wine. To this day, sugarcane is also one of the important raw materials for the production of edible alcohol in China.
But the original rum is not directly brewed with sugar cane, for the colonists who came to plunder can not be kind to use sugar raw materials to make wine, at the beginning, rum is a by-product of sugarcane sugar molasses in the sugar process, sugar cane through pressing to obtain sugar liquid, sugar liquid after concentration and precipitation of crystalline sugar, the residual tan viscous liquid is molasses.
In modern times we know that this is mainly used for re-fermentation and as feed.
In the context of that time, there were not so many animals to raise, and the only thing everyone needed to do was to grow sugar cane and boil sugar.
So initially molasses were discarded waste.
By chance, the slaves who worked on the sugar cane plantations discovered that the waste could be fermented again, and that fermentation meant that it could be made, and rum might have been invented.
There is less clear information that the original rum may have originated in Barbados.
Caribbean and Barbados
It was documented in 1651 that "the inhabitants of Barbados often drank a liquor called Rumbullion, which they called killing demons 'kill devils' because of their ability to cure ailments." This wine is made from sugar cane and has a very hot taste. ”
The French missionary Jean Baptiste Labat 1663-1738 also recorded "the indigenous people, blacks, and a small number of inhabitants of the island living in a primitive state, making a pungent drink from sugarcane juice." After drinking, it can make people excited and can eliminate fatigue. This drink is fermented. Europeans knew about this method as early as the 18th century. After passing through the pirates, the merchants came to Cuba. One of them, Francis. Drake is best known for calling Draque a popular drink that uses sugarcane shochu as a base wine.
Brewery
The rapid development of rum after its invention is inseparable from another bloody history: the Black Triangle trade.
The Black Triangle trade refers to the slave trade that began in the 16th century, when slave traders brought textiles, rum, and small commodities from Europe to Africa in exchange for a large number of slaves, and then sold African slaves to the American colonies for planting and mining, and finally shipped sugar, cotton, and minerals from the American colonies back to Europe.
For the peoples of Africa and the Americas, the colonists and slave traders from Europe were naked pirates!
Therefore, the invention and development of rum is also a history of the blood and tears of the American and African peoples.
Black slaves laboring on sugar cane plantations
In the context of large-scale circulation around the world, cheap and powerful rum has quickly gained the love of a wider range of people. Therefore, in many countries and regions around the Caribbean, rum is produced, such as the Antilles, Colombia, Honduras and Mexico, Brazil, etc., they are obtained by fermentation and distillation of sugarcane molasses, compared with the rums of the Republic of Cuba, which is clear and transparent, and the flavor is better, so Cuba naturally becomes the origin of rum in people's minds.
Nowadays, many countries also try to brew rum directly from sugar cane, and seiko fine materials naturally achieve better taste and results than the rum originally brewed with scraps.
Part of the content of this article is excerpted from Baidu Encyclopedia entry, forgive the wire brother for not really much interest in foreign wine, no matter how good the taste, personally think that compared with Chinese liquor is really too much worse, not a level. Writing these pieces of content is also because in the process of finding the history of the development of Chinese liquor, at the end of the six articles in this series, there should be a summary, which can compare some very interesting places.
In the study, learning the origin of the world's six major distilled spirits, the full text collected and sorted out a large number of information, combined with personal inference, after writing found that the total text of more than 30,000 words, the length is too long to read, so split into independent short stories published, interested friends can pay attention to the account, continue to understand.
If there are any mistakes in the article, please point out that on the way to studying liquor, it is necessary to communicate with you more. Some of the images come from the Internet, if there is infringement, please contact the editor to delete.