From the Caribbean and beyond, many rum styles are easily defined in terms of location More than practically any other spirit, rum seems to have an air of anarchy about it. It can vary dramatically in taste and colour and be made in a bewildering variety of ways in regions as diverse as the Caribbean and Indonesia. The tangle of haphazard rules governing the drink means that what is officially accepted as rum in one country would be rejected out of hand in another.
And in some places, there are nearly as many illegal versions of the spirit as there are brand names. The simplest definition of rum is that it’s a distilled alcoholic beverage made from sugarcane by-products, like molasses or sugarcane juice. But even that doesn’t always fit, since quite a few spirits made from sugarcane can’t be called rum.
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