“Rum is my enemy.” I have a friend who claims that as his motto. And if you were to hear his stories of waking up in strange places, heaving all over a friend’s bed, insulting his host, punching a nun….you, too, would consider rum your enemy.

I think a lot of us have forms of alcohol that we really can’t even think about, let alone drink, so horrendous was an early experience. For me, it’s martinis. For a lot of people it’s Tequila. But I would encourage all of us to face our fears. Most of these experiences occurred in our dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks teens or twenties. You take a dirt-cheap, inferior form of the spirit, drown it in gallons of sugar-rich mixers and liqueurs and then drink it with all the heedlessness and energy of youth—if excruciating pain and embarrassment is all that results, you’re lucky. No jokes; it can be dangerous.

I’ve been introduced to higher forms of rum recently; like anejo Tequilas, they are designed to be sipped, not mixed. At the bedazzling Manhattan Cocktail Classic, held on May 14th at the New York Public Library (thousands of well dressed attendees, hundreds of bartenders and support staff, live music and costumery), two women in Caribbean finery (pic above) offered samples of a Ron Santa Teresa 1796 from Venezuela.

At RumBa in Boston I sipped Pyrat XO Reserve from Anguilla; Cruzan Blackstrap from St. Croix and Diplomatico Reserva from Venezuela. These darker rums exhibit rich molasses flavor (more than I ever thought I would like) enveloped in subtle spicing, nutty-caramel tones and soothing heat, and they go down like fiery silk.

The message isn’t that rum is back; everyone knows that. (Ye gods, even Tiki drinks are red-hot. It’s like spirits spirituality–no trend is dead forever.) And it isn’t that umbrella drinks are bad. All I want to convey is: you can sip your way to a truce with the spirits that haunt you.

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