Consider rum a local food.

In an industrial park in Ipswich, Privateer Rum is rolling out the Hungarian, French and American oak barrels and firing up the shiny distilling equipment to make an artisanal rum like a “fine spirit.”  It’s owners, Andrew Cabot and Nelse Clark, are playing around with toasted and charred oak, and have brought in a professional blender to tease out different themes: masculine rum with notes of sandalwood and cinnamon, and a feminine, buttery rum with a “velvety, silky mouth-feel.”

 

Cabot and Clark say their product is part art and part science, which makes it a premium bottle that we should reach for the way we might reach for a Cognac.  Rum is made from a grass, not a grain, just the beginning of the technical challenges to creating a fine liquor from it.  Privateer begins with great raw materials - molasses for the English style of making rum, and sugar cane, for the French Agricole style of rum-making, which Cabot claims has less bacterial fermentation, and produces a rum more in the style of a wine.

 

The distillery has been filling barrels only since last June, but Privateer has already won a Silver Medal at the 2011 Ministry of Rum Tasting Competition in San Francisco.

Even better about this story, Privateer has roots that reach back to the18th century, when private citizens amassed great fortunes in rum and privateering, businesses that went hand in glove.  Andrew Cabot, upon researching his family history, discovered an ancestor six generations back - also an Andrew Cabot - who had been a successful privateer, and who also owned a rum distillery on Water St. in Beverly.  Privateers were private citizens who basically made up the navy our budding country couldn’t afford, freely attacking British merchant ships of behalf of our independence, but happily keeping the booty for themselves.  On a good day they were considered merchant marines, on a bad day they were pirates. When they won, they won big, but they also took all the risks of being on the seas and engaging in battle.

As Cabot says, privateers made millionaires out of fish mongers by filling a great social void.  Rum went along with those fortunes.

And now, two hundred years later, the Cabots are back in the New England rum business, no slavery, no pirates, just a beautifully produced spirit of which perhaps that most genteel of Colonists, Thomas Jefferson, who had so hoped to make fine wine the American beverage, would be proud.

Privateer produces a white rum - usually destined to be a cocktail - but the Privateer version is gorgeously sip-able even without the ginger beer and basil.  I tasted it neat, in a Dark and Stormy, and a few more variations.  The Privateer Amber rum doesn’t taste like rum at all, but like something served in a snifter and savored by a fire.  I sipped all seated at the Privateer Bar, at which I believe that 18th century Andrew Cabot would have been right at home.

 

Here are some more delicious ideas from our local Privateers:

 

Privateer Rosemary Ruby Cocktail

Ingredients

1 1/2 ounces Privateer Silver

2 ounces ruby grapefruit juice

1/2 ounce simple syrup

rosemary sprig

Instructions:

Shake first three ingredients in a shaker, and serve over ice with a sprig of rosemary.

 

PrivateerWinter Daquiri

 Ingredients

2 ounces Privateer Amber

1/2 ounce toasted cinnamon simple syrup

1/2 ounce lime juice

Instructions

Shake all ingredients in a shaker, and serve either up in a martini glass or on ice in a cocktail glass.

 

Toasted cinnamon simple syrup:

Hold a cinnamon stick gently over the flame on your stove until lightly charred, and tuck it into either your own simple syrup or a purchased bottle.  Allow to infuse.