Friday, May 16, 2014

The Bacardi Bat


Bacardi is the only rum that uses a free-tailed bat as its logo. There are two main reasons for this. The first is the bat's relation to sugar cane. Sugar cane is used in the production of Bacardi rum (as well as others) for sugar cane congeners. Mexican free-tailed bats are very great pollinators of the sugar cane plant and very efficient insect eaters. Like how the ladybug is valuable to the gardener, the Mexican free-tailed bat is valuable to the rum business because it eats the insects that destroy sugar cane. 

The second has to do with Bacardi's history. Bacardi was started by Facundo Bacardí Massó, a wine merchant from Catalonia, a region in northwestern Spain. He set out to try and "refine" the rum beverage to make it something valued at higher class taverns. When he began getting his formula off the ground, he and his brother Jose decided to move into a more commercial business. They set up shop in a Santiago de Cuba distillery that they purchased in 1862. In the rafters of the building lived fruit bats, which helped to inspire the Bacardi bat logo. 


 

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