Premium Rum and a Worthless Moto License
Premium Rum and a Worthless Moto License
Rum in the Kingdom of Cambodia
I was brooding in a Phnom Penh bar about the 50 bucks I’d spent on changing my driver’s license to a Cambodian one. The day I applied for it, I was told by an acquaintance that the Cambodian government had recently abolished driver’s licenses for light motorbikes like my second-hand Honda Click Plus from 2007. The agency that helped me avoid the pain of applying for the license myself evidently forgot to mention this crucial detail. I had the new license, but didn’t need it.
To celebrate this expensive new trinket, I asked the bartender about the rums they had. “Well, we have our own, the Samai rum. With coke, or in one of today’s special drinks?” he said. Normally I am not a big fan of diluting spirits, but I decided to have it on the rocks, just to cool it down a bit.
The rum came in a big wine glass, and I admired its subtle sweetness that balanced well with its creamy texture. This rum could have easily been mistaken for a Caribbean one.
The bartender told me it was made by two guys from Venezuela and that it was Cambodia’s first ever premium rum. The bar wasn’t really a bar: it only opened as such on Thursdays. The rest of the week it was a distillery. As the evening progressed and I found myself talking to the distillery’s co-founders, Antonio and Daniel, both in their early thirties.
They told me the origin story. “A couple of years ago, while drinking cheap rum in a bar here, we both realized how much we missed Latino rum,” Daniel said. Added Antonio: “First we thought about distilling just for ourselves, but when we started looking into details of what equipment was needed, stills and washbacks etc., we realized that we might as well go all the way. So here we are.”
They are right about cheap rum: Cambodia doesn’t lack for sugar cane, but southeast Asia’s rums are a mess. You’re most likely to find them mislabeled as cheap whisky, which is insulting somehow to both spirits.
This is what Samai is trying to change. In the spacious distillery/part-time bar, with roofs high enough to ward off any claustrophobia, I saw plenty of sherry butts lying on top of each other, making room for their new make to grow old. The back wall of the illuminated patio was made of old reddish bricks. Just in front of it, their retro-style Portuguese copper-still was burning hot – turning the fermented molasses into over-proof spirits.
On my next visit, I sat alone again. This time I watched the Samai team including the female master distiller, Champichi, doing a blind tasting for their fifth batch. All of them taking notes, sticking their noses into Bordeaux glasses, looking dead serious.
In keeping with my spend-thrift habits in Phnom Penh, I doled out another 25 bucks for a bottle of Samai’s premium rum. Unlike my useless new license, this seemed a sound investment.