medford rum

Also known as “New England rum”. New England rum is a defunct generic category for term for rums produced in New England, generally under the descriptive name “Medford” rum, from colonial times until Prohibition. (Medford is a Massachusetts town where, or in close proximity to where, many of the rum distilleries and warehouses were located.) The cold and clammy conditions there made for rums with similar character to London dock and navy rums. They were both highly acclaimed and denigrated, leaving the pall of mystery over the category. Besides whatever character that (modest) aging in the North clime imparted to Medford rum, the essential factor is that it was distilled exclusively from imported fermented molasses, far from the sugarcane fields and sugar refining of the Caribbean, which meant it was made differently than the rums of its time and more similarly to the rums of today. As David Wondrich points out in Imbibe! (Second Edition, page 74), “it’s all New England rum. There’s not a hell of a lot we can do about that.” Abolition of the slave trade (and disruption the slaves-sugarcane/molassas-rum triangle) crippled Medford’s rum production in the late 1860s, and Prohibition essentially killed it off. In latter years, there was an actual branded rum named Medford, but the term itself was a generic one previous to that, and remains so today. Microdistilleries in New England are attempting to revive rum production in the region.