Last Night's Tipple

Last night, I returned to Pusser's Rum. You will recall that it is distilled in wooden pot stills in Guyana that at one time produced the rum that was given to sailors in the Royal Navy. Yes, that's what I wrote: wooden pot stills. I guess that it shouldn't surprise me that the ingenuity of man would arrive at a pot still made from wood. It certainly is cheaper than copper and is probably easier to fashion into a pot-still-looking thing. And it's not just rum where wooden stills were used: some of the small-scale Bourbon distillers in the early days of Kentucky would distill by "running the log," which was a pot-still-like contraption made by hollowing out a log, filling the cavity with distiller's beer, and heating that beer by running steam though copper pipe in the cavity.

One of the great arguments in whisky production is about the value of using wooden fermentation tanks (as opposed to stainless steel). Proponents of wood say that the wood imparts more flavor to the distiller's beer, which in turn imparts more flavor to the new-make whiskey. Proponents of stainless steel say that that is hogwash and that stainless steel is better because it's a heck of a lot easier to clean and maintain than wood. I don't know who's right. I do know that any influence of wood in the fermentation tank has to pale in comparison to the influence of wood in the still. Remember that the more copper contact alcohol vapor has in the still, the lighter and purer the resultant new-make spirit will be. This is because copper will react with impurities and congeners in the vapor, which has the effect of filtering out impurities. Well, wooden pot stills will have very little copper in them. That means that spirit coming out of them is likely to be heavy, full-bodied, and congener-rich, to say nothing of whatever flavor the wood directly imparts.

As logic would suggest, Pusser's Rum is heavy, full-bodied, and congener-rich. As I mentioned when I first wrote about it, it has an overwhelming musty aroma that doesn't blow off with time in the glass. I would never guess that this was rum from nosing it. Tasting it makes it more obvious what it is: it's very sweet, with some of the flavor overtones that I associate with rum. But there is no vanilla that I can detect, despite the oak aging. I still can't decide whether I like this stuff. Maybe it will grow on me.