Rum

Rum is a distilled spirit made from sugarcane byproducts, most often molasses left over from sugar refining, and it developed in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century alongside the region's sugar plantation economy. Enslaved laborers on Caribbean sugar plantations are credited with discovering that molasses could be fermented and distilled into alcohol, and rum production quickly became tied to the transatlantic slave trade, forming one leg of the so-called triangular trade alongside sugar and enslaved people. Rum varies widely in style by island and colonial tradition, from the light column-still rums of Puerto Rico and Cuba to the darker, pot-still rums of Jamaica, and it remains a defining spirit of Caribbean cuisine and cocktail culture.