Don Facundo combined four important and then very new rum-making techniques to create Bacardi Carta Blanca. White rums existed before Bacardi Carta Blanca, but they were harsh and unrefined, being bottled straight from the still. Bacardi was the first aged white rum and it set a new standard which others followed to create a new rum category, which Cuba became famous for.
Popular myth, and indeed the Bacardi marketing department, has it that the famous Bacardi black bat set in a red circle logo was the idea of Don Facundo's wife, inspired by fruit bats living high in the rafters of the distillery.
Bats were considered lucky in both local and Spanish folklore, and in s Cuba, many people were illiterate so the bat symbol made for a clever visual aid to distinguish Bacardi rum. The business prospered and was eventually taken over by Don Facundo's two sons. The eldest, Emilio, expanded his father's company to Spain and the United States. He was also a major influence in Cuban independence and was arrested and deported twice by the Spanish for anti-colonial activities.
However, he became disenchanted by the American government's interference in Cuban politics so he resigned his post to focus on managing his family business. When he died, shortly after the completion of a new distillery in , Santiago's shops closed for two days in mourning. Enrique Schueg, Don Facundo's son-in-law, was also politically active and in was arrested by the Spanish governors.
Thanks to the intervention of France's Minister of External Affairs he escaped execution, but was deported to Haiti until the end of the Civil War. He would later become the Bacardi Company's third president.
Worldwide demand for Bacardi grew rapidly and the company's distilleries were working at full capacity, and in the company opened a distillery in Mexico and in another in Puerto Rico. The present Cathedral of Rum distillery in Puerto Rico was opened in It was a time of widespread corruption and government interference in business.
In doing so, he moved the ownership of trademarks and the Bacardi Company's proprietary formulas outside Cuba. The choice of the Bahamas for the 'offshoring' of Bacardi from Cuba was understandable.
During Prohibition the Bahamas had been the trading post where firms such as Bacardi sold their goods to smugglers for sale in the important U. As a member of the British Commonwealth, the Bahamas offered addition protection and security.
With no income tax, corporation tax, capital gains tax, value-added tax VAT or wealth tax, Pepin Bosch's choice of the Bahamas looks like a wise one to this day. Meanwhile, Fidel Castro promised democratic elections and an end to government corruption, so understandably Bacardi backed his struggle. On 31st December , Castro succeeded in his revolt to overthrow the Batista government.
Castro was welcomed as a liberating hero and the Bacardi family believed Cuba was finally becoming a free and just place. However, in October Castro's administration instigated a program of forceful expropriation and confiscated all private assets on the island without compensation. El Coco, the palm Don Facundo Jr. Local prophecy that El Coco symbolised the company's strength and vitality proved to be correct, as all of the Bacardi Company's assets were confiscated and the company was nationalised by the Cuban administration.
The Bacardi family and business were exiled from their homeland. Fortunately, the company's intellectual property was safely off the island. It was not just the trademarks that eluded Castro's government.
An oversight led to the company's headquarters being raided a full day after the warehouses, distillery and other offices, so giving Bacardi's distillers Maestros de Ron time to destroy the all-important yeast cultures La Levadura Bacardi and their secret charcoal recipe. The women of the family were exiled to Jamaica. Bacardi continued to be passed down as a family business through three generations and moved its headquarters to Havana in He spent much of his time at the Floridita Bar drinking daiquiris made of Bacardi, His love for this cocktail lead him to immortalize them in his posthumous novel Islands in the Stream.
Bacardi even through the famous author a party when he won the Nobel Prize in Eventually, it moved its operation to Puerto Rico and Mexico, which proved beneficial in trading with the United States. As a result, Bacardi is not found at bars or grocery stores in Cuba today. The main brand on the island is Havana Club, which Bacardi acquired at one time, and is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with the Cuban government over trademarks and ownership.
What makes the exterior of the building so unique are the more thpaxan 28, blue and white tiles depicting flowers constructed by Brazilian artist Francisco Brennard. In the midth century, it was described as, "a hot vile liquor By the late 18th century, however, rum had evolved from a fiery "rotgut" spirit to a high-quality beverage. At his inauguration in , for example, George Washington insisted that only the finest, Barbados rum should be served to his guests, even though the importation of that rum violated the Continental Congress's embargo on the importation of British goods.
Another reason why rum distillation was slow to develop in Spain's Caribbean colonies was Madrid's prohibitions on the production or export of distilled beverages. It was revoked in , but restrictions limiting the amount of rum that could be imported into Spain remained. England, on the other hand, encouraged the production of rum, seeing it as a homegrown alternative to importing expensive brandy from France and Spain.
By the midth century, small-scale distillation of aguardiente was widespread throughout Spain's Caribbean colonies. Most of what was produced, however, was from small, unlicensed distillers. These bootleggers produced a harsh spirit, usually from sugar cane juice, that was barely drinkable, and then only when mixed with other beverages like juices or coffee.
Cuban sugar cane has particularly high levels of sucrose, resulting in a hot, rapid fermentation that often produced many off flavors in the resulting distillate. Bacardi's new rum style was the result of four important innovations. Little is known about his efforts in identifying this specific strain of yeast - whether it was a chance discovery or the result of a systematic search for a particular yeast that yielded the aroma and taste profile he was looking for.
This specific yeast is now called Levadura Bacardi the Bacardi yeast. It is one of the factors responsible for the distinctive aroma and taste profile of the company's rums. Stocks of the "Bacardi yeast" are kept under close security at the company's distilleries in Puerto Rico and Mexico, the only two distilleries where rum is currently produced.
Yeast tends to mutate over time, a phenomenon that geneticists call genetic drift. The company considers its proprietary yeast strain so valuable that when the Cuban government seized Bacardi's distillery on October 14, , it discovered that the company had killed the yeast stock at its plant to ensure that it did not fall into the hands of Castro's government.
Fortunately, for rum drinkers, samples of Levadura Bacardi were already available at the company's Puerto Rican and Mexican distilleries. It's believed that an additional sample of its proprietary yeast is also kept for safekeeping at the company's international headquarters in Bermuda. A second innovation was the use of charcoal filtration.
The charcoal was made from a combination of tropical woods and coconut shell. Charcoal is a form of carbon that is produced by the heating of wood or other organic substances in the absence of oxygen.
When the oxidation of carbon is carried out by high temperature steam, millions of pores between the carbon atoms are created and the charcoal is considered to be "activated. The practice was already widespread in the production of Tennessee whiskey. The charring of oak barrels, although not quite the same as "activated charcoal," produces a similar effect.
He was, however, the first distiller to use it in the production of rum. Moreover, the source material of the charcoal also affects its filtration properties by determining the range of pore sizes that are produced. These typically range from micro-pores of less than four nanometers nm , a nanometer is one billionth of a meter , to macro-pores of to 2, nm. The greater the proportion of micro-pores, the more effective the absorption of the activated charcoal is.
Coconut shell activated carbon typically has 85 to 90 percent of is pores in the micro-pore range, so it is particularly effective at absorbing contaminants. Charcoal first began to be used as a filtering agent in the de-colorization of sugar at the beginning of the 19th century. British chemists in the mids first described the use of coconut shells to produce activated carbon. The specific combination of material used in the production of Bacardi's charcoal is still a closely kept secret.
What impact the other tropical woods have on the filtration process is unclear. The charcoal not only absorbed contaminants that gave the rum a harsh taste, it also decolorized it, giving it a clear appearance. A third innovation was the use of two different distillates, or "marks," that were subsequently blended to produce Bacardi's signature rum. This is the method used to produce many of the world's better-known spirits, including Jamaican rums, Scotch whisky and Cognac.
The first distillate was called aguardiente. It had an alcoholic strength of around 65 to 70 percent. The second mark, a much more rectified spirit, called redistillado , had fewer taste and aroma elements and an alcoholic strength of 85 to 95 percent.
At the time this was a very unusual approach to the production of rum, although it is much more common today. It was very similar, however, to the process used in the production of Spanish brandy. The two distillates were then blended together to create a consistent aroma and flavor profile.
The final innovation was the practice of aging the spirit in oak barrels. The use of oak for the aging of distillates wasn't particularly new. It was already a common practice in the aging of rums in Jamaica and Barbados, as well as the aging of Cognac and whisky. He was the first, however, to use to it to age the distillate being produced in Cuba. This style of rum came to be called Cuban light rum and has become, by volume, the leading style of rum sold worldwide.
It's unclear why the Spanish government specified the creation of a light rum. It may be that it wanted a product that would be different from the English style rums being produced in Great Britain's Caribbean colonies. It may also have wanted a spirit that would be very different from Spanish brandy.
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