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What is rum and why do pirates like to drink it so much?
The oldest rum was born in ancient India, and ancient Indian medicine considered molasses as a health medicine forest. According to Ayurveda in Ayurveda and Qiroga Benji, a medical classic, it is recorded that in the 7th century A.D., doctor Vabata Vagabhata squeezed juice from sugarcane rich in the southern coast of India, and most of it was used to make Shimi rock candy. Fermenting, purifying and cooking the remaining bottom material to obtain an alcohol extract. Vabata takes this extract as the main ingredient, and mixes it with aged wine, mango juice and honey wine to make an ancient cocktail Shidhu, which is recommended for weak men to drink at parties, which is helpful to keep fit and enhance friendship.

With the increasing number of ocean-going ships carrying rum, especially slave ship, which is regarded as a big sheep by pirates, they often carry a lot of rum, which makes pirates of the Caribbean often get a lot of this stuff after a successful robbery, even if they don't buy rum themselves. For a free pirate, it is definitely a wonderful thing to have a sip of rum after a robbery that risked his life.

This ancient rum formula has also been restored by modern people. However, the Shidu rum brewed by Wabata has a high sugar content. Because of the ancient method of making sugar with rock sugar, the extraction of sugar was very wasteful, and the fermentation work was primitive, which led to the low alcohol content of this molasses wine, but it was not a simple sugar water, and it was highly valued in ancient Indian medicine. Around the 8th-9th century AD, this practice spread westward to Asia Minor, especially in Cyprus, where birds were suitable for sugar cane and sugar beet.

According to the records of Polish historians, King Peter I of Cyprus visited ancient Poland and provided a kind of "molasses wine from eastern countries" for foreign monarchs. Compared with Stuart in Chebata, Peter I's molasses wine has been greatly improved, purified the alcohol content and reduced the sweetness, and began to spread in small and medium-sized European medieval nobles. However, at that time, in pursuit of taste, Peter mixed this molasses wine into almond dew called Soumada. On the other hand, Kyle Poirot also came into contact with another invented version of molasses wine in his adventure. When traveling in Hande, Ilg, Kyle Poirot drank a kind of wine with "strong sweetness" and felt good. Upon inquiry, it was learned that this recipe was learned by sailors living in Guri from Malays in Southeast Asia, and it was fermented with sugarcane juice at one time. This version of molasses wine, named Brum, was recorded in The Travels of Marco Polo.

According to the confirmation of modern archaeologists, Bloom belongs to the product of primitive fermentation just after human beings left the category of chewing wine, which can be traced back to the end of Neolithic Age at the earliest. However, Brum was not included in the development route of ancient rum because it was fermented with freshly squeezed sugarcane juice at one time, rather than with the "bottom material" with less sugar content in modern molasses wine for many times. In a word, although ancient rum failed to make any breakthrough, after all, its circulation circle was too small, but it also became one of the wines accepted by Europeans.

After the formula of rum was circulated in a small area for nearly a thousand years, it finally ushered in explosive development in the era of great navigation. In the bird plantation in Barbados, which was colonized by the British Empire, Rumbullion, a black slave, happened to find that waste molasses had a good aroma after refining sucrose once. However, the ancient sucrose extraction technology was carried out step by step: sugarcane juice was mixed with lime water, and alkaline environment and quicklime were used. Due to the exothermic effect of the incoming water, sucrose is precipitated in the form of saturated crystals, and the remaining sugar water is called "head water".

The head water is mixed with fresh lime water to separate out sucrose crystals, and the rest is "dihydrate", which is very viscous and turbid, that is, "molasses", which is the raw material of the molasses wine of Wabata and Peter I; When dihydrate is mixed with fresh limewater, sugar crystals are precipitated, and the residue is sticky, and most of the sugar is mixed in the residual liquid with complex components. It was useless waste at that time and was regarded as "bottom material" or "waste honey" At the bottom stage, the residue has already started yeast fermentation, and it stinks, so people dare not go near it.

On the other hand, the ancient molasses wine, which was originally circulated among European nobles in a small scale, was also brought to the New World-by the way, there was actually no sugarcane in the New World at first, which was a cash crop brought by colonists. The Norwegian navy began to brew its own "ancient molasses wine" and taught its production method to the French who were also committed to the colonization of the New World. During the period when historical records were missing, the two brewing methods had a wonderful ecological reversal in the New World.

Let's talk about a knowledge that is not particularly cold: in the middle and late period of the great voyage era, the wages of ocean-going sailors were deducted with rum. This is because in the second stage of European colonists' plundering of the New World-sucrose period, the only way that molasses "bottom material" can be treated is to brew molasses rum. However, the reprocessing of molasses by European colonists and their slaves is not original, but a second repetition of the new era. Through the combination of the fine wines carefully brewed by nobles and the popular tastes painstakingly studied by slaves, the strange smell that may exist in molasses reactants in the past has also been isolated and removed, showing multiple rums, the highest quality black and gold, and suddenly the taste of old brandy. In some documents, it is recorded that rum brewed by early slaves can cause stomach pain. This is a fact-some chemicals in sugarcane may produce unpleasant substances during fermentation, but with the systematization of rum production, this phenomenon gradually disappears.

In just ten years, the pillar of the colonial industry in New England was replaced by rum, and the "light rum" developed in Rhode Island, that is, white rum, tasted like whiskey and was very popular, especially in the hands of water who could not afford high-quality whiskey or wine. As a result, for decades, sailors' wages have been rum, and rum and gold have become universal equivalents, and the demand is huge; On the coast of West Africa, 4 English gallons of rum can be exchanged for a slave, while 3 English gallons of rum is enough to hire a sailor for half a year. This in turn stimulated the sugar industry. In addition, Europeans love sugar to a crazy degree, and the sugar industry exploded, which further promoted the rum industry. Until the eve of American independence, between the Caribbean Islands, the West African coast and New England, there appeared many "New triangle trade" where sugar and rum factory owners made a lot of money.