Capn Jimbo's Rum Project Forum

[Capn Jimbo]

As has been noted Barbancourt's labels cite "made from fresh cane juice". Their website details meticulous and time consuming making of agricultural rum in the classic French manner. Any "controversy" is limited to one website and one person, and is based on one extremely dated scrap of alleged information (prior to 1997).

I've had the great pleasure of communicating with respected researcher/writers Ian Williams and Charles Columbe, as well as with Barbancourt - all of whom state that Barbancourt has always been considered an agricultural, cane juice rum from the inception of the company. Barbancourt told me they use "fresh cane juice", period.

I also learned there is some political background of some relevence. Turns out that the French term "rhum agricole" may have first been used in a derogatory fashion in reference to "clairin" - an early Haitian moonshine made from cane juice. It is surely a delicious contradiction that much later the French converted the term to a positive, while their term for molasses based rum - rhum industriel - continued as a pejorative, as molasses based rums were/are considered inferior by them. The marketplace decided the opposite, as molasses based rums account for about 97% of sales.

There is no love lost between Haiti and France, especially after Haiti gained its independence and was severely impoverished at the hands of Napolean. It is no surprise that the once derogatory French term of rhum agricole does not appear on their bottles.

One final note: you may surprised to know that Saint James in Martinique - who makes AOC designated agricoles - does not have the capacity to use all their fresh cane juice, so some is slightly concentrated into a cane juice semi-syrup until needed, when it is diluted to its original concentration, fermented and distilled.

Interesting, eh?
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[JaRiMi]

Napolean was a true visionaire, when it came to sugar.

http://cropwatch.unl.edu/web/sugarbeets/sugarbeet_history

In response to the English blockade, and also because of internal politics (French sugar plantasion owners were much hated, rich supporters of aristocracy, who the majority of French wanted to see in the guillotine), he managed to push France to become the first colonial nation which no longer needed a large-scale sugar industry in their tropical colonies. Thus ended the symbiotic existence of sugar industry and rum (the industriel kind, made of molasses) in the French colonies.

Since there was no large-scale sugar industry in French colonies, there was no need to extract sugar from the cane - and no molasses came out as a by-product. Cane was growing everywhere, so the locals resorted to the old ways, and started making rum directly from cane juice, however crude it may have at first been (as old documents reveal, referring to cane juice rum as rather horrid in taste).

This is the real story behind the fancy Rhum Agricole. It was never made in order to make the rum taste better - it was made, because there was no sugar industry, and no molasses as a result. Prior to this, even in French colonies the mainstream rum style had become rhum industriel for a century or more.

Economics often offer the real truth to why something was made the way it was. Nowadays the French marketing will tell you that agricole is made in their territories, because it is better quality - thats PURE BS.