A friend of my flatmate, whom I’d not met before, came round last friday – a really nice chap from Newcastle. After supper I offered him and my flatmate’s boyfriend a drop of whisky (I didn’t have anything special in, just the duty free J&B I’d bought on special offer from Frankfurt airport).  We had  a few drinks and got talking, it transpired that he worked for a large drinks company, training bar tenders. I asked him what this entailed and he stood up, saying he’d be back presently. He returned with an enormous rum-branded bag from which he produced bottle after bottle of rum. ‘I’ll show you exactly what I do,’ he said . He proceeded to give me a potted history and a tour through the world of rum. It was a fascinating experience, not having ever had any interest in rum.  We tasted around eight differnt rums including: Pussers (the original navy rum, a harsh and very strong rum  that British sailors recieved as a daily ration right up to 1970) Bacardi 8 (probably my favourite of those I tasted and the only one I would consider drinking straight), Havana Club, Bacardi Oro, and Appleton Jamaican Rum. The complexity of flavours – including wood, brown sugar and butterscotch – present to varying degrees in all these rums was unexpected, and the evening changed my entire preception of Rum.