My friend Bobby called the other day with a very pleasant surprise. It seems that while cleaning out his old house in La Pine, Oregon, he had happened upon a very rare treasure.
To the uninitiated, it might sound commonplace: Coconut rum. Today, everyone and his mother seems to offer the stuff, from Margaritaville to Malibu. I have tried them all over the years, trust me. I have searched the world over and there isn’t a coconut rum on this earth that even comes close to the rum we happened upon in Grand Cayman back in the 1980s.
Sangster’s Old Jamaica Coconut Rum is 80 proof of liquorious delight that is so smooth, so perfect that you dare not dilute it with even a sliver of ice. It rolls on the tongue, sweet coconut with just a bit of burn, syrupy in character that is nothing short of absolute perfection.
If you think you can run off to the liquor store and buy it, don’t bother. You can’t. That has a story attached to it, but let me take you back to Grand Cayman when I was just a wee lad of 25 or so.
I am not by any stretch a drinker of hard liquor. Don’t really care for shots of tequila or a glass of Chivas served neat. It’s just not my thing. So when the bottle of rum was first passed to me in Cayman, I handed it off to the next guy. He handed it right back, chiding me about being a bit of a woose.
I gave in and downed a bit of it right out of the bottle. My eyes lit up. This was amazing shit. Like nothing I had tasted before or since. It became my immediate friend in the islands.
We would drink it morning, noon and night. Some of the guys would pour it into their morning glass of milk, taken to alleviate their inflamed ulcer. Not sure how that worked, given the fact that half the glass was rum. But any reason to drink some Sangster’s.
For our part, Bobby and I happened on the idea one day of marrying the coconut rum with a green coconut. For you mainlanders, no one on the islands eat the ones we buy in stores in the states – they consider those past their prime, verging on rotten. The green ones are the gold. The meat of the coconut is still gelatinous and super sweet.
We found two of them lying on the front lawn of the condo. We put them in the freezer so they would get super cold. Two days later, it was time to put our invention into action. There was just one problem: How do we make a hole in the coconut. We not only had to go through the husk of the shell, but also through the thick, fibrous outer layer. Finally, I found a long utensil in the kitchen drawer. It was a knife sharpener I later learned. Well, it may have sharpened knives, but if you pounded on it endlessly with a large rock, it can also finally poke through into the interior of a green coconut.
All that was left was to pour in the ingredients. We had pineapple juice and Old Jamaica Coconut Rum – the perfect pina colada. As the finishing touch, we fashioned really long straws to fit in the hole so we could tuck the coconut under our arm and still be able to drink from it.
We were all set. We were supposed to do the pirate trial that evening. Part of the script had them stripping us of our swords and weapons. The actor tried to take our coconuts as well. This is the closest I’ve ever seen to an unscripted fight in the play. Bobby and I would have none of it and threatened to bash the guy over the head with our coconuts if he insisted on taking our rum.
Whenever we headed back to Seattle, we took as much rum as we could carry. Each of us would gladly pay the $6 per bottle price in the duty free shop and lug back a dozen bottles each as our carry ons. I would always try to be the first to customs so that I could be the first to claim the rum. The customs guys would always let me slip by without paying any duty, given that we were only allowed to bring two bottles back under the law. By the time the sixth guy came through and 60 bottles had already made their way into the country, the customs guys weren’t in such a charitable mood.
You’d think that a couple dozen bottles would last a long time. But there aren’t many left. For years we would pop them open at a moment’s notice and share them among friends. We had no idea that the supply would dry up eventually. There seemed to be no end.
I hadn’t enjoyed the delectable taste of the rum for many years until I went to Seattle the last time. Bobby had scored a bottle from Black Bart. Cassie, Bobby, Pierre and I shared a toast at Bobby’s house in Ocean Shores. Then another, then another. Soon, only a quarter of the bottle remained. This was always the problem with Sangster’s Old Jamaica Coconut Rum. It had a horrible evaporation problem.
Now for the rest of the story. I learned a couple of years ago the fate of the Old Jamaica Coconut Rum. As we drove over the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, the bus driver told us that the distillery had had a fire some years before. One by one the tanks of coconut rum burst, sending the rum into the creek.
Downstream was a monastery that used the creek for their drinking water. It seems that the monks noticed that a miracle had occurred as the water turned to rum before their very eyes. They ended up having quite the little party by the creek. Given that they had taken their vows or poverty and abstinence from alcohol, it caused quite a scandal on the island, those Drunk Monks of Jamaica.
Out on the Treasure Coast, wondering if it’s too early for a little taste,
– Robb