Rum

Rum is a liquor made by fermenting then distilling sugarcane molasses or sugarcane juice. The distillate, a clear liquid, is usually aged in oak barrels. Most rums are produced in Caribbean and American countries, but also in other sugar-producing countries, such as the Philippines and India.

Barrels of rum

Rum plays a part in the culture of most islands of the West Indies as well as the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland, in Canada. The beverage has famous associations with the Royal Navy (where it was mixed with water or beer to make grog) and piracy (where it was consumed as bumbo). Rum has also served as a popular medium of economic exchange, used to help fund enterprises such as slavery (see Triangular trade), organized crime, and military insurgencies (e.g., the American Revolution and Australia's Rum Rebellion).

Quotes

• There's nought, no doubt, so much the spirit calms
  As rum and true religion: thus it was.
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1824)

• Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.
  • Winston Churchill, According to Churchill's assistant, Anthony Montague-Browne, Churchill had not coined this phrase, but wished he had.

• Fifteen men on the dead man's chest-Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883) Ch. 1, The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow.

• But why's the rum gone?.Oh. That's why.
  • Captain Jack Sparrow, in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) written by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio

• Hide the rum.
  • Captain Jack Sparrow, in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) written by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio

• I prefer rum... Rum's good.
  • Captain Jack Sparrow, in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) written by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio

• Making port, where we can get rum and sultry wenches... once every ten years.
  • Captain Jack Sparrow, in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) written by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio

• "Rum's not drinking, it's surviving!
  • Romer Treece, in The Deep (1977)

• "Rum," said I—happy to have found something I could talk about—"rum has very little to do with taste. It isn't just a simple drink—it is a-friend, more. A friend who makes everything easier. It changes the world.
  • Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades (1936)

• We are Republicans and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents are rum, Romanism, and rebellion.
  • Samuel D. Burchard: in a speech in New York (29 October 1884)