One of my favourtie lines in a film is by the thoroughly gazeable Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean (can't remember which one) "Why is the rum always gone?" So true and so funny when my youngest spouted it out of the blue in Sainsbury's. I really must stop hanging around the spirits aisle.
I love a drop of rum. Nothing fancy for me, just with Coke (full fat though as I can't stand the taste of sweeteners.) Though I quite like this rum straight too, for sipping. Sailor Jerry is a spiced rum which is a little less sweet than most dark rums, it leaves a slight vanilla, toffee and cinnamon taste which is an altogether very pleasant experience indeed!
The brand began life as a clothing company established as a nod toward the legacy of Norman 'Sailor Jerry' Collins whose iconic tattoos are still hugely popular today. Norman Collins really was a sailor, (he joined the US Navy when he was 19) and spent his life sailing the seven seas, learning the art of tattooing along the way. Aside from his tattoos Sailor Jerry's other important legacy was his work towards reducing the disease associated at the time with tattooing by making sterilization a standard practice amongst tattoo artists. According to the official Sailor Jerry site he hoped to, 'legitimise tattooing as a trade.' He was said to have kept his own tattoo parlour as clean as a medical facility and drew lots of practices in his trade from medical texts. Making a rum in Sailor Jerry's honour seemed a fitting tribute to the man and a natural progression for the original company.
I love the Sailor Jerry bottle with images of his tattoo pin-up girls, especially the one peeking out from the inside of the label as the bottle gets drained.
I also love the line in this official Sailor Jerry promo film, 'tonight I'm gonna be a rum drinking son of a gun'. (Best attempted with your finest Johnny Cash voice - go on, you know you want to.) Well said sir. Tonight I'm probably going to be cooking tea and applying calamine lotion to a chicken pox ridden child, but in spirit I'll be a rum drinking son of a gun.
