Rum’s back: 9 things you didn’t know about the pirates’ top tipple

With the popularity of whisky and gin soaring over recent years, rum has been somewhat forgotten about – that is, until now.

Thanks to the efforts of global rum ambassador Ian Burrell, rum is becoming the new go-to spirit.

Burrell went from being an international recording artist known as The Dude – his recordings have been used in several Hollywood films – to creating the world’s first international rum festival, the UK RumFest, in 2007. This inspired subsequent rum festivals around the world including in Miami, Berlin, Paris, Rome Madrid, Prague, Cape Town and Hong Kong.

Yes, Hong Kong! Rum fan and local bar owner Max Traverse, a.k.a. “The Word on Rum”, has organised five rum festivals in our city. The last one took place in early June, and Burrell was on hand with his unique style of “edutainment” masterclasses. We picked his brain, between rum shots, on some lesser known facts about rum.

Here are 9 things you probably did not know about rum:

1. Although most countries in the world produce their own rum, the Caribbean still produces 80 per cent of the world’s rum. “Barbados is the spiritual home of rum as it was the first country to produce rum,” says Burrell.

2. What does rum have that whisky and malts never had? Social media, says Burrell. “The rum trend is growing at an alarming rate,” he says. “This is because of the internet and social media. When I started the first rum festival in 2007, the whole idea was to bring people together – connoisseurs, the casual drinker, distillers and rum makers under one roof, a place where they could experiment and try something different from the crowd as everyone is there under one roof. This was before social media really took off. Now people can see all this in a matter of minutes – so it’s a different time than a few years ago.”