Soooo…if you’ve been following me for a while you *may* have picked up on my enthusiasm for rum. Well, my personal rum interest is actually quite recent (just about a year old), and I owe it all to the amazing Smuggler’s Cove book. This book is amazingly written and is an absolute must have; in fact, it won the James Beard award as the best beverage book of 2017. To be honest, I ordered it on a (slightly tipsy) whim from Amazon after having a few drinks at home last winter – but hey, that’s when the best decisions are made, right?

Let me tell you, it single-handedly catapulted my interest in rum from almost nil (I was stockin Captain Morgan and Malibu and considered Zacapa my ‘premium’ rum) to an obsession to learn everything I could. It took me from hating and avoiding tiki drinks (my cocktail palate tends to lean on the drier/less sweet side and I always associated tiki with sugary fruity drinks) to obsessively refreshing the webpage to book and attend the largest tiki event of the year last summer (Tiki Oasis in San Diego!). Case in point, this is an incredible, literally life-changing book, and you should pick it up.

If you are ever visiting San Francisco, please please make sure you pay a visit to the actual Smuggler’s Cove bar…which was actually one of the first EVER bars I fell in love with, even before my rum obsession. Martin Cate (owner and co-author of this book) is a tiki and rum mastermind and is also intimately involved and invested in Hale Pele (Portland), False Idol (San Diego), Lost Lake (Chicago), and Whitechapel (SF gin bar). If you can’t make it to any of those fantasy-lands (and even if you can!), I hope his book will be an inspiration to you all as well to learn more about one of the most underrated and misunderstood spirits out there. If anyone ever wants to talk rum, hit me up.