Museo de Ron

            Today during our excursion to discover Havana, we went to see the Rum Museum.  Growing up in a family of people who love everything to do with the eating process, alcohol has always been around.  Rum was never the biggest bottle in our liquor cabinet, but let me tell you, thanks to my dad I can lay down some information about Maker’s Mark whiskey.  The process to distill and create rum is not very different from that of making whiskey just a few minor differences.

            Rum is distilled from the remains of the refining process of sugar cane and the leftover sugar allows for the entire fermentation process to occur.  Sugar cane originally came to Cuba in 1513 and quickly became the staple crop produced on the island.  The rise of the slave trade provided the many workers needed before the semi-industrialized process of refining came about.  The first locomotive actually came to Cuba in 1837 and with it a flood of new technology that slowed the massive need for slave workers.

            After the distillation of the leftover cane pieces go through three different boiling processes with varying temperatures, the remaining liquid is put into barrels and aged.  The first pull off of any rum barrel is called Añejo Blanco and is the most common rum sold under the label of Havana Club.  While we were touring the museum, our guide told us that you needed five things to be a good rum connoisseur.  You need to have a good nose, good taste buds, have worked in a sugar factory for 10 years, have a degree in Chemistry, and be a drunk.  The most well renowned rum connoisseur in Cuba is a man by the name of José Pablo Navaro and apparently is famous for fulfilling all of these qualifications.

              I am not a big rum drinker so I wasn’t tempted to buy the 1,700 C.U.C (national money of Cuba that under the current exchange rate 1 C.U.C equals $0.87) bottle that they had available to buy.  Apparently, Spain, Germany, and Canada are the most major importers of the Havana Club label but our guide said that if the embargo with the Unites States were ever to lift, that would easily be the biggest market.  It was definitely a cool thing to see the whole process of making rum because a bottle of rum here costs less than a 2-liter bottle of water.  I have a theory going that Cubans don’t drink water, they just drink rum and so far my theory holds.