CigarsLover Magazine I 2023

SPIRITS
Aging Rum
A brief history of the love story
between rum and wood.
by Vincenzo Salvatore
While in the past rum aficionados were not so
invested in the casks used for maturing their
favorite aged spirit, today premium rums are
all about cask aging and special finishs.
The love affair between rum and wood is as old as in
whiskies, but the mass success of different styles of
rum made it slower for aged rum to emerge as one of
the most recognizable premium products. Even in rum’s
case, it was well known that the prolonged aging enhanced
the spirit by bringing in aromas from the wood, but
also and above all by developing new ones through specific
chemical reactions: coloration, oxidation, and esterification
are the three most important features brought
by cask aging. Obviously, the choice of the cask greatly
influences the final aromatic profile. For the greatest
part of the past century, the two most widely available
types of casks were American white oak bourbon cask
and French Limousin oak Cognac cask, because both
spirits require virgin casks that after one use get disposed
of on the secondary market. More recently, the
success of sherry flavors in the whisky world led many
rum-makers to experiment with sherry butts which, in
turn, opened rums to a whole new realm of experiments
with alternative woods and casks.
The ratio between the quantity of liquid and the contact
surface with the wood is another important variable.
Different types of casks have different capacities
and characteristics. For example, the standard size of
an American oak barrel is 200 liters, while that of a Cognac
barrel is 300 liters and that of a sherry butt 500
58 #1-2023 CigarsLover Magazine