If any rummies are in Tampa this weekend

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YO HO HO, here's to toasting rum
By CHRIS SHERMAN, Times Food Critic
Published March 22, 2006

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There are beer nuts, wine connoisseurs and single malt snobs. Then there are people like Ed Hamilton and Dori Bryant.
They are rum lovers, although in centuries past they might have been called rummies, dunderheads and worse. Today Hamilton and Bryant are among a growing group of devotees who champion rum as the most magical and diverse of liquors, as refined as Cognac or a rare Scotch and infinitely tastier than vodkas, no matter how clever the packaging.

To celebrate, they are hosting the first Rum Fest International Cane Spirits Tasting in Tampa this weekend. "People want bigger and bolder flavors,'' Hamilton says, and ordinary "white liquors'' don't have the diversity or rum: from crisp, powerful overproofs to rich, aged anejos, amber gold and as dark as molasses.

Rum and other spirits made from sweet sugar cane are a serious passion, happily both avocation and vocation for Bryant, a veteran promoter who moved from New York to Clearwater, and Hamilton, a former Tampa resident, Caribbean sailor and self-appointed "Minister of Rum."

Hamilton has rank and seniority. He created the ministry in 1993 in Puerto Rico as a home port for cruising the Caribbean in the Tafia, sampling the area's rums and writing at least three books about them. It was preferable to chemical engineering, which he had studied at the University of South Florida in the late 1970s.

Bryant came to rum later, like most American drinkers. Although she had been involved promoting liquors, she was a whiskey fan until a Bacardi executive introduced her to its better grades.

Today her personal cellar still includes 20 single malts, a dozen tequilas and 10 high-end bourbons, but they are outnumbered by more than 25 rums. "I think I like things that are aged. When you drink it you can taste generations who made it and see all their faces.''

So Bryant and Hamilton invited dozens of rums and hundreds of the people who love them - distillers, blenders, writers from around the world and lots of local buccaneers - to Ybor City.

They expect judges to taste almost 100 rums, rons and rhums, from all the traditions of the Caribbean and Latin America, plus cachaca, the sugar cane lightning of Brazil and beyond. Bartenders will mix up brave new cocktails, and the public will have a shot - at least a quarter-ounce taste - at dozens of them.

Tampa's Ybor struck the organizers as a perfect setting because of its ties to Cuba, one of rum's historic homes, and its proximity to the Caribbean. Indeed there is a contention that the Cuba libre cocktail of rum and Coke was born in Ybor.

The variety in rums is hard to categorize, even in the Caribbean, Hamilton explains, because each island has different distilling traditions, ingredients and aging methods.

For example, Barbados, Jamaica and Guyana are close in many ways because of their British backgrounds and similar processes in making rum from molasses. Yet molasses can have different flavors, and Guyana's Demerara sugar cane is robustly distinctive. When rum is aged, it develops more flavor and aroma, sometimes borrowed from wood barrels.

Hamilton estimates there are between 1,500 and 2,000 rums around the world and thinks modern diners have a taste for them. Sailors and tourists have brought some of them back to Florida, and rum shelves continue to grow in liquor stores and at smart bars, such as the Conch Republic on North Redington Beach, where a recent visit turned up 50 labels.

These rums are best in drinks made with fruit juice, or sipped slowly like the rich taste of history and geography they are.