THE BACARDI STORY

                                       A Fun Bat Story
     Facundo Bacardi Masso, a Spanish merchant, was born in Stiges, Catalonia in 1814, and with brothers emigrated to Cuba in 1830. Santiago de Cuba, a prosperous trading town at the beginning of the 19th century, attracted the four Bacardi brothers, the sons of a stonemason. Catalans had a reputation for being good tradesmen, so here they worked hard to establish a shop selling everyday goods, and they prospered.

  But in 1852, a series of earthquakes destroyed Santiago’s entire infrastructure, bringing public life and trading to a halt. Then a cholera epidemic forced the young family to temporarily return to Spain. When Facundo and his wife returned to Santiago, they left their young son, Emilio, with a trusted friend in Spain

  In the 1850s Facundo, after a failed business, turned his attention to making rum. Cuban sugar cane plantations were flourishing due to the favorable climate, and all possessed small distilleries in which produced   Aquardiente, a primitive form of rum  made from molasses, a waste product of sugar processing. Cheaply made, rum was not considered a refined drink, was used mostly medicinally and rarely sold in upscale taverns.

    Don Facundo began attempting to tame rum by isolating a proprietary strain of yeast, still used in Bacardi production, giving Bacardi rum its unique flavor. After experimenting he and a partner hit upon filtering the rum through tropical woods and broken coconut shells to remove impurities. To mellow the drink the rum was aged in white oak barrels, resulting in the world’s first clear or white rum.

  Moving from the experimental stage to a more commercial endeavor, they set up shop in 1862 in a Santiago de Cuba distillery that housed a copper and cast iron stil. Fruit bats lived in the rafters of that building. The bats were left alone to do their thing as legend said bats were good luck. When the first year of the white rum was more successful than anticipated Bacardi adapted bats as their logo. As shown the bat symbol has changed five times since 1862, the most recent change in 2012.

  Bacardi’s success influenced a whole new category of spirits, and Bacardi Limited remains the largest privately held, family-owned spirits company in the world.