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What It Is (and Where It Comes From)

In his treatise And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, Wayne Curtis sums up the spirit's carefree approach: "Rum embodies America's laissez-faire attitude. It is whatever it wants to be." Simply, if it's made from sugarcane or a byproduct like molasses, it's called rum. As for its origins, early distillers weren't always the best record keepers, but it's surmised that somewhere in the Caribbean (probably Barbados) the first heady dram was conceived. Today it's produced everywhere from Panama and Trinidad to Alameda, California and Puerto Rico and exported just about everywhere else.