Bacardi

BACARDI rum, no matter where it is made or where it is served, is always the same: a pure, high-quality rum with a distinctively fine, dry taste. Product standards were set more than a century ago, when there was only one Bacardi plant, but they are still uniformly maintained today in the many Bacardi plants in different parts of the world by a comprehensive system of quality control. Bacardi, the giant liquor conglomerate, began with the emigration of Facundo Bacardi y Maso from Spain in 1830. Born in Sitges, Catalonia, Bacardi arrived in the Caribbean port city of Santiago de Cuba, then a Spanish colony populated by many fellow Catalans. There the 14-year-old Bacardi began importing and selling wine. While working for an Englishman named John Nunes, who owned a local distillery, Facundo started tinkering with ways to upgrade the quality of aguardiente (fire water). Also known as rumbullion (then shortened to "rum"), Facundo hoped to "civilize" the dark liquor from its early incarnations as a coarse, harsh liquid swilled by buccaneers. As rum production had changed little in the last 200 or so years, Facundo decided it was time to elevate the spirit into something smoother and more refined. In 1843 Facundo married a young woman named Amalia, the daughter of a French Bonapartist fighter, and soon began a family. Around this time his rum experiments had paid off and he offered samples of his newfangled light rum to relatives and friends. Facundo's secret formula enabled him to ferment, distill, and blend from molasses a rum one could drink straight, almost like wine, without mixers or additives. Since molasses was a byproduct of processing sugarcane, Cuba's largest export, there were ample quantities around the island. On February 4, 1862, Facundo, his brother Jose, and a French wine merchant joined forces to buy Nunes' tin-roofed distillery for $3,500, which had the necessities (a still of cast-iron, fermenting tanks, and aging barrels) for creating and selling a Bacardi brand of rum. Buying the old distillery lock, stock, and barrel, Facundo also received an added bonus in the deal--a colony of fruit bats--who later came to represent the Bacardi name. The Bacardi enterprise was a family affair, and Facundo's three sons--Emilio, Facundo (Jr.), and Jose--joined the company when they came of age and learned their father's secret formula for making what was fast becoming the Caribbean's finest rum. Emilio, the oldest, worked in the office; Facundo Jr. worked in the distillery; and Jose, the youngest, eventually worked in selling and promoting his father's products. Facundo Jr., in honor of his father and to celebrate the new family business, planted a coconut palm tree just outside the distillery. As the Bacardi boys learned their father's trade, another young man named Enrique Schueg y Chassin, who had been born the same year Don Facundo purchased the Santiago distillery, was maturing and would soon join both the business and the family. In the ensuing years, as the business thrived, young Facundo's coconut palm did, too, and became an enduring symbol of the Bacardi family and its spirits operation. Just before Don Facundo and his partners bought the Nunes distillery, an Australian named T. S. Mort perfected the first machine-chilled cold storage unit. Three years after Bacardi was established, Thaddeus Lowe debuted the world's first ice machine. Though these two inventions seemed completely unrelated to Don Facundo's premium rum, they later helped Bacardi conquer the social drinking marketplace by making ice and cold mixers commonplace. Yet such thoughts were far from Don Facundo and his family's minds, for they had no idea how widespread the appeal of their smooth, fine rum would one day become. Instead, they greeted Bacardi's increasing popularity in Santiago and the neighboring villages as a pleasant surprise. As was proper in the day, customers brought their own jugs and bottles to the distillery, which Bacardi family