Boozehound - Jason Wilson [74]
“Tiki was a very unironic big night out,” said Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, who has spent the last decade researching tiki culture and writing a series of tiki books, including my favorite, Sippin’ Safari. “There wasn’t anything kitschy about it at the time. It was an escape. In the 1940s, people didn’t travel. A tiki bar was where the midcentury Organization Man went to escape his white-collar job, his big mortgage, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.” It’s no wonder Tricky Dick would drag the likes of Henry Kissinger out to the Trader Vic’s in Washington for Mai Tais.
Rum, of course, is the foundation on which tiki drinks are built. It makes sense, since rum also fuels so many aspects of the warm island fantasies that flow deep in America’s cultural veins. Rum is the drink of umbrella cocktails and Love Boat cruises, of steel drums and Club Med, of dreadlocks and sex on the beach. “Where I go, I hope there’s rum!” sings Jimmy Buffett and his Parrothead followers. Rum exudes romantic danger: think pirates and smugglers and guerillas and Hemingway and la revolución.
When I was visiting Hans Reisetbauer in Austria, after we’d finished the hours-long tasting of some the finest eaux-de-vie on the planet, Hans asked me, “Would you now like to taste something really special?”
“Special?” I said, dazed. “More special than the eau-de-vie that’s made from thirty kilos of wild raspberries picked by hand in Serbia?”
He smiled. “Would you like to taste a rum from the cellar of Fidel Castro?”
“Of course,” I said.
He left me in his tasting room and returned a few moments later, lumbering in with a heavy clay jug covered in straw. “It’s from 1928.”
As the story went, Hans had a friend who imported cigars from Cuba and had become friends with Fidel’s cellar master. Hans had accompanied this friend on a trip to Havana and was invited to tour Fidel’s cellars. The cellar master offered to sell Hans any spirit that caught his fancy, so Hans chose this jug of rum. It cost him five thousand dollars to finally bring it back to Austria.
Now, he poured two glasses. The rum, clocking in at 120 proof, was wild and smoky, yet totally smooth on the finish. “This isn’t a clear distillate,” Hans said. “It’s actually a dirty spirit. But sometimes it doesn’t matter. This is a classic. End of story.”
As we sipped, I thought about this rum from 1928. Presumably, Fidel had come by this rum somehow after La Revolución. Perhaps he appropriated it from one of the mobster-run casinos of old Havana? Maybe from the cellar of a wealthy elite who fled to Miami? Perhaps from the Bacardi family before they fled to Puerto Rico? Or maybe even from the cellar of the corrupt President Batista, whom he overthrew? Did he and Che have a swig of the stuff while they strategized?
Rum is always a short half step, or closer, to politics. Case in point: The Cuban government and Bacardi have been fighting for years over control of the Havana Club brand name, which Cuba sells internationally through Pernod Ricard. Of course, because of the embargo, Tio Samuel won’t let us have Havana Club, so I usually drink it in Europe.
Hans poured another glass of the rum. “Maybe Hemingway drank rum like this?” I asked, hopefully. I mean, if we’re talking Cuba and politics and rum, Mr. Hemingway can’t be far behind in the discussion. By now, we all know of Hemingway’s affection for the daiquiri, the “authentic” framed handwritten notes in Havana bars that read, “My mojito in La Bodeguita, My daiquiri in El Floridita,” the pissing away of his later years on a barstool.