Today, 80 percent of the world’s rum is produced in the Caribbean. All spirits start with a plant, and rum starts with a species of grass called sugarcane. But it took sugarcane almost 10,000 years to make it to the Caribbean. And it wasn’t until the mid-1800s when it started tasting decent. Up until then, it was harsh.

Here is the short story. We know sugarcane is indigenous to South Asia, and it is believed that the sweet grass was first domesticated on the island of New Guinea around 8000 BCE India is known to have first extracted and crystallized the sugary plant around 350 CE, and from there trade merchants brought it to Africa and then Spain.

By the 1400s, there was a huge demand for the “sweet salt” (sugar) in Europe, so the Portuguese began planting sugarcane on the Island of Madeira. They soon realized that it was an extremely labor-intensive task in all processes of growing, harvesting, and production. Slaves were therefore imported. In 1493, Christopher Columbus attempted to bring sugarcane seedlings to the Caribbean, but they did not survive the voyage. Spanish conquistador Diego Velázquez was on the ship with Columbus and settled in Hispaniola (Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the tiny islands around them) to be of service to Spanish knight and soldier Nicolás Ovando y Cáceres, who a couple years later became the governor of the Indies.

In 1501, Pedro de Atienza was the first to successfully import sugarcane seedlings to Hispaniola. He harvested his first crop four years later. In 1511, on behalf of Spain, Diego Velázquez conquered Cuba, bringing Hispaniola sugarcane with him. In 1518, a royal decree from Charles V (ruler of the Spanish and Holy Roman Empire) licensed 2,000 slaves to be imported to Hispaniola to work the sugarcane fields. And in 1523, another royal decree imported 1,500 slaves to Hispaniola and 2,500 to other Caribbean islands such as Puerto Rico and Jamaica. The Portuguese took their production to Brazil and by the mid-1500s, there were almost 3,000 sugar mills. The Dutch started taking sugarcane seedlings to plant on any Caribbean island they could. Barbados and the islands around the Dominican Republic were among the first. By the 1600s, rum in daily rations was common for the Royal Navy.
 

In 1758, George Washington campaigned for the Virginia House of Burgess by offering free Barbados rum to voters, and he won. In the 1700s, the Caribbean Islands were losing money on their tobacco and cotton crops due to America growing their own, so switching to sugarcane crops solved this problem. Thus began a mass production of Caribbean rum.

In 1810, the first hospital in Sydney, Australia, was financed by local businessmen in return for a contract that licensed them to import 60,000 gallons of rum to sell. The hospital was called Rum Hospital. In addition, in 1862, Don Facundo Bacardi began filtering his Cuban rum through charcoal.