Rum and Cocaine: how both entered our lexicon and mouths...

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Capn Jimbo
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Rum and Cocaine: how both entered our lexicon and mouths...

Post by Capn Jimbo »

Rum and Coke: the original rum drink?


Of course not. what we'd call rum originated on Barbados, the home of the longest continuous producer of rum - Mount Gay - and was called kill-devil. The spirit spread first to Jamaica but relatively quickly appeared all over the Caribbean basin.

The competing nations - England, France, the Dutch and Portuguese, Spanish all competed and piracy - the real kind and not the cartoonish Captain Morgan figures of today - reigned. Perhaps the first "real" mixed drink was likely something called "bombo" or "bumboo" - a mixture of kill-devil rum, water, sugar and a bit of nutmeg (credit to Wayne Curtis). This probably had to do with the poor quality of the rum but also based on the Captain's wishes to keep his crew functioning.

But as always, I digress.

Sugar and rum both grew to make the Caribbean the center of wealth and much influence both in the US and UK, but finally faded and replaced with whisky by 1900 or so. It was not until World War II that the modern but brief renaissance of rum occured, with great thanks to comedian Morey Amsterdam, who stole the song he called "Rum and Coca Cola" (and was successfully sued), based on a calypso song he'd heard in Trinidad.

What had happened during the War was that the United States greatly restricted the production of whisky, et al, as the government ordered our distilleries to produce pure industrial alcohol for the war effort. Caribbean rum rushed in to fill the gap and production exploded once again.


So why Coca Cola?

According to Curtis the drink was popular because both of the ingredients - run and Coca Cola - were cheap, and could be simply mixed in any proportion from mild to wild. Keep in mind that the use of and taste for bitters (much from Angostura) had grown, and the Coke of that era likewise produced a unique combination of bitter and sweet that helped hide the many lower quality rums of the times. It was common, of course, to add a squeeze of lime or not.

As so well put by Curtis, rum and coke was a drink of "inspired blandness", designed for the masses and first accepted in America's South. The rest is history: Bacardi and Coke and the rest.


Finally! The cocaine part...

The Coke of old is perhaps not the Coke of today. America is the country of snake oil saleman selling all manner of secret concoctions elixirs with supposedly healing qualities. They all contained alcohol, the main "miracle" ingredient, of course. Americans were particularly attracted to exotic ingredients (like todays gins). Coca Cola was not particularly original but was originally developed to compete with the big seller of the times, called "Moxie". Coca Cola was developed by a chemist from Atlanta using "infusions of the coca plant from the Andes, high caffeine kola nut from Africa" and seven other ingredients. It was named Coca Cola for obvious reasons.

What made it successful though, was not particularly the product but like Bacardi, masterful marketing. The first slogan was "Delicious and Refreshing". The rest is history, and that my fellow idiots is the rest of the story. Almost!


C'mon!!! Did it contain cocaine or not?


Like all great questions of our time, it is settled by Politicfact (not!) or better yet: Snopes. The envelope please, and the answer is...
"Coca-Cola was named back in 1885 for its two "medicinal" ingredients: extract of coca leaves and kola nuts. Just how much cocaine was originally in the formulation is hard to determine, but the drink undeniably contained some cocaine in its early days."
So... yes, it did. The owners had a problem. The public was beginning to turn against cocaine (until then actually used). Since their formula could be copied, again like Bacardi they turned to trademark protection for the name and formula of "Coca Cola". So that meant that a trace of cocaine had to remain in the formula to retain their protection.

And it did. For how long? Stay tuned...
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