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National Rum Day is celebrated on August 16th.
In colonial America rum was the drink of choice. A tax on non-British West Indies produced molasses was a bone of contention between the American colonists and Great Britain. The Molasses Act of 1733 created the tax to try and give molasses from the British West Indies (islands such as Jamaica and Barbados) a leg up over that from the French West Indies. However, the colonists effectively nullified the Act through smuggling of molasses from French and Dutch sources and it was repealed in 1767.
Rum is made from molasses which comes from sugar cane. Spirits such as rhum agricole and the Brazilian cachaca, while similar, are made from fermented sugar cane juice.
Rum or rhum is made around the world. I have bottles of it from Barbados, Jamaica, Colombia, Panama, Martinique, Haiti, and the US (Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands) in my collection.
There are a number of rums that come from the state of Hawaii. A quick search on the Internet finds rums being distilled on the islands of Oaha, Kauai, Hawaii, and Maui.
As has been extensively reported, wildfires on the last island mentioned, Maui, have left homes destroyed, people killed, and families uprooted. One factor that made the wildfires worse was the decline in sugar cane production which let non-native invasive grasses to flourish. These dry grasses provided an abundance of fuel for the fire. There had been upwards of 36,000 acres of sugar cane grown in the area around Lahaina through the late 1990s. The last sugar cane mill on Maui closed in 2016.
National Rum Day is a good day to remember our fellow citizens in Maui and to help them out. If you want to make donations, here are a couple of non-profits that I trust to spend the money wisely.
