Dockworkers’ tipple Rum & Black the new rock and roll?
The Bloody Foreland, Donegal, autumn, some time in the Seventies. It’s raining as we get off a bus that’s going no further. Over the breakwater the waves are pounding but such is the sea fret you can barely see them. You can, though, feel the spray and by the time we stagger into the bar where we plan to stay – Murphy’s, Halloran’s, O’Dowd’s? – we are soaked to the callow bone. Cue a welcome that brings two young travellers round. “You’ll be having a warm double toddy won’t yous?” Indeed a second rum and blackcurrant swiftly follows the first before our restorative drisheen-heavy fry-up appears.
I’d hardly given that evening a thought in half a century until a bottle of Salford Rum Company Rum and Black arrived in the post on a Yorkshire summer day that couldn’t have been more different than that Irish drencher. The R&B belongs deep in the memory bank like the Guinness and Black we also supped as students. They felt quite rock and roll. Lager and lime we shunned.
Mojitos weren’t a thing back then but, courtesy of Salford Rum’s head bartender Hendo,
the cocktail recommendation that accompanies our review bottle is a ‘Black Spiced’ take on the summery classic. In the absence of Licor 43 from my shelves I substitute Kamm & Co with its heady flavours of ginseng and grapefruit. Hardly like for like, but it does the job alongside mint sprigs, cinnamon syrup, lemon juice, a handful of fresh blackcurrants. soda and, of course, the Rum and Black. All that vitamin C coursing through us!
Historically the drink is known as ‘the drink of the dockworkers’, a working men’s club staple back in the 1800s and early 1900s utilising the exotic spices and rums filtering in via the Ship Canal. I expect the stevedores of old Salford Docks, when it was the UK’s third argest port, laced their grog with blackcurrant cordial. Updating it, the distilling team “fuse smooth rum with locally sourced blackcurrants from The Promise Co, a family-rum urban homestead in Worsley.” A gorgeous, collectable bottle, designed by ‘Dave Draws’ takes the tipple even further upmarket. Worth the retail price of £42 a 75cl bottle? At a 28% ABV it is quite delicate compared, say with a créme de cassis, but proof that it slips down well – we drained the bottle, even running out of soda, as the sun sank in the west, releasing the inner docker in ourselves.
• My own Ribes nigrum (blackcurrant) update. 1kg of freshly picked berries from my own urban homestead have been steeped in vodka for the past three months with sugar syrup to be added in time Christmas to complete my own créme de cassis, to let the festive Kir Royales roll.
