Arecent stop at a gas station provoked almost as much speculation as the gold and oil stocks in my pension portfolio. The high price tag on the pump demonstrated what happens when our leaders threaten almost every oil-producing state in the world with mayhem while refusing to take any serious measures on fuel economy at home.
The second tag, at first glance, counterbalanced that churlish impression. It said that the fuel contained 10 percent ethanol. However, any warm ecological glow induced by this concession to renewable fuels disappears when you consider that, according to some reports, it actually takes more than a gallon of fossil fuel to produce a gallon of ethanol.
They should have imported rum instead. Rum is alcohol made from sugar cane, and Brazilians run their cars as well as their caipirinhas on it. Sugar cane is the gold standard for producing alcohol. It grows rapidly and its stalks contain a huge percentage of sugar, which does not need expensive treatment to ferment like the starch in corn (from which ethanol is made) does. In fact, once you add water in the tropics, this sugar ferments almost of its own accord. It takes little in the way of fossil fuel to process, since efficient sugar mills and stills use the crushed cane stalks to fuel the furnaces.
This is why Brazil is using all the stuff they do not drink to reduce their oil import bills – and to preserve the planet, since of course all that sugar cane is regrown, virtuously trapping the carbon dioxide. I should perhaps declare an interest. My most recent book, Rum: A social and sociable history of the real spirit of 1776, explores the thesis that sugar and rum provided the liquidity to build the modern Anglo-Saxon empires. The American Revolution was not about tea. It was about smuggling molasses and rum.
The book took years of arduous and intensive hands-on, on-site research around the Caribbean and in bars across the world. It was very rewarding, though, with insights into, for example, branding. Bacardi paid over $3 bn for Grey Goose vodka – and vodka, as Grey Goose founder Sydney Frank points out, ‘is just water and alcohol.’ As Bacardi moves into vodka, Frank has been considering moving into ‘super premium’ rum from Australia – ‘super premium’ being code for ‘fancy packaging and outrageous pricing.’
I will stick with Caribbean rums, however, because my old days as a union agitator taught me that nothing moves the spirit like a judicious cocktail of altruism on the rocks with a big splash of straight self-interest. Altruism? Indeed. Since the Caribbean can’t sell its sugar in competition with heavily subsidized, high-fructose corn syrup from the US and sugar beet from the EU, the region’s best development bet after sex, sand and sun is high-valueadded, branded rum.
Then there’s the added element of avian flu. During the dark days of the Spanish flu after the First World War, the French government nationalized the whole empire’s supply of rum for its military because the best doctors advised that rum was effective against flu. Now might therefore be the time to go long on rum stocks. Rum may or may not work against avian flu, but the same is true of Tamiflu. And at least rum will make you feel much better, whether it works or not.
Rum: A social and sociable history of the real spirit of 1776 is published by Nation Books.
