Yo-ho-ho for the library's sake!

One good dram deserves another. That’s the spirit behind an upcoming fundraiser for the Friends of the Library.

The group is set to host an evening of rum tasting after its recent scotch tasting event was a huge hit with local crowds.

“There were several people said, ‘We would have come. Do a rum tasting,’ ” said Valerie Spink, the group’s president. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we try that?’ So that’s what we’re going to do.”

She even signed up a local connoisseur to host. Gord Whitehead is well known as a former broadcaster but he is also the wine and spirits ambassador with Vines Wine Merchants in Edmonton’s Terwillegar neighbourhood. He knows a lot about the subject of rum and is eager to share his knowledge over some tasty sips with some new friends.

In addition to a description of the ingredients, the distillation and aging process, he will offer a history of rum as it relates to the settling of many regions. This includes how it was a key role player in the slave trade many years ago, he continued.

The tasting itself will involve four sipping rums from various countries, most likely from Guyana, Venezuela, Peru and Colombia.

“The evolution of rum in the last five to 10 years in our region has been interesting. It has gone from a cocktail mixer [such as] Bacardi and Coke to spiced rum and Coke and now the sippers.”

The sippers, he elaborated, are generally premium rums that sell in a higher price category that can run up to $300 per bottle and can have “wonderful depths of flavour and smoothness.”

“At Vines, we sell a number of them from a wide geographic area, but generally from Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Rum is produced from one of two sources, sugar cane syrup or the cooked version of that, molasses. Some molasses is more heavily ‘cooked’ than others and can have a much more profound back end taste.”

“There are no hard fast rules but a Peruvian or Columbian rum will generally be lighter in body than a Jamaican rum. Also, the French and Spanish roots of these nations will dictate style. Martinique, for example, produces rum agricole (sugar cane syrup) while Panama produces a more robust, molasses style.”

The variety of flavours will surely have something for everyone.

“I had no idea that there was so much out there in the way of sipping rum,” Spink added.

“What will be constant is a wide profile of flavour and smoothness that has seen many whiskey drinkers also adding rums to their list of favourites. And with winter approaching I can assure you a glass of a fine sipping rum on a cold night can warm the heart very well!” Whitehead concluded.

Spink is eager to continue to build on the popularity of these unique and eclectic library fundraisers, especially in the wake of the discontinuation of the crowd-pleasing Reel Mondays. That annual film series helped to raise several thousand dollars over its 10-year lifespan, but the redevelopment of the Grandin mall lot meant that the venue, the former Grandin Theatres, would no longer be available.

She and the Friends are still trying to revive the popular fundraiser but they have been stymied in finding a new location for it.

“It’s a sad state of affairs. We really need to find another location if we can. We have lost that way to raise money and we’ve got to look at other things.”

That includes the sale of Out of Print book-cover clothing that is available for sale in the library for one month only. She suggested that STARFest runs with the assistance of the Friends of the Library and so the group needs to pursue every source of funding if possible.

“It’s small potatoes, but we have to.”