Bacardí Reserva Ocho

Bacardí, the largest family-owned spirits company in the world, manages a battalion of 200 brands;  produced in twenty factories, distributed in 170 countries. Bacardí has ​​recently partnered with Lonely Whale with the intention of eliminating single-use plastic straws globally. A truly challenging task as the straw can be considered an integral part of the cocktail and sipping a drink with tube almost as a ritual. It may be mere affectation, though.

Bacardí used its own distribution channels to reach partner bars and persuade them to use numerous alternatives (glass, metal, paper and even pasta) or to stop decorating cocktails with a straw at all. The manufacturer promotes such solutions both at its own and co-organized festivals. Bacardí also sent a letter to the Unicode Consortium - an organization devoted maintaining software internationalization standards including emoji catalog - to modify the pictograms 🥤 and 🍹. It was postulated to remove the digitized straw.

Some purists haven't found even a single plastic-straw-emoji in the hydrosphere and therefore found the fight against the real ones to be futile since they represent only 0.02% of plastic waste globally. Accordingly I picture in my mind the "Great Pacific garbage patch" (three times the size of France's surface) filling tightly the gardens and balconies of similar malcontents.

Emojis devoid of straws will probably lose their legibility, nevertheless the aim of the initiative is to attract attention, make us reflect and sensitize to the problem of ubiquitous disposability. Media buzz around this topic is something already.

The molasses comes entirely from suppliers certified by Bonsucro; mainly from the Dominican Republic. The fermentation (from yeast originally selected by Don Facundo) brings after 20-30 hours a mash with 10-12% alcohol content. The Puerto Rican distillery in Cataño produces 100,000 liters of rum per day.

Two types of distillates are produced: thicker in taste but lighter in strength aguardiente (single continuous distillation in a copper and cast iron column still) and high-percentage redestilado (five separate continuous stainless steel columns). The distillates are shipped to Jacksonville in Florida, blended and aged in white oak ex-whisky barrels (mainly after Jack Daniels). Before bottling, rum undergoes a filtration process (a mysterious mix of thirteen types of tropical wood and coconut shell).

Bacardí 8 Year Old started as a brand in 1995 and has only recently been renamed Bacardí Reserva Ocho. It was assigned to the premium line in 2018 between Añejo Cuatro and Gran Reserva Diez on both flanks. The Spanish number in the name indicates the minimum aging period. An ocho bottle contains 12 grams of sugar.