Rum

I had an unexpected surprise recently while browsing a liquor store at the Shore - a trip to Puerto Rico. There it was on the shelf at Circle Liquors in Somers Point: a three-star bottle of Ron del Barrilito, a rum made in such small quantities and so sparsely distributed that I hadn't seen it since I visited the island five years ago. When I poured the brandylike elixir over ice with a squeeze of lime, the caramel, fruit, nut, and spice-tinged aromas...

A Cumberland County restaurant manager bent on winning a $70 bet apparently drank himself to death Sunday night by consuming more than 16 ounces of rum and a beer chaser, a New Jersey state trooper said yesterday. After bragging that he "could drink anyone under the table," John D. Williamson, 44, of Bridgeton, collapsed at the bar of the Alloway Village Inn, said James Ford, a friend who had accompanied Williamson to the Alloway Township watering hole. Williamson died several hours later at Bridgeton Hospital.

Wine is the star when it comes to drinking at a.kitchen, but the well-chosen lineup of brown spirits should not be overlooked. Most of it is fine whisky (from Springbank to Yamazaki), but it was the single brand of rum - El Dorado - that caught my eye, most notably for its age, in 15- and 21-year-old editions. Old rums are rarer than old Scotch because of the Caribbean climate's accelerated evaporation. But when you sip these spirits from Demerara Distillers in Guyana, the possibilities unfurl on the tongue like a brooding high-seas romance.

Gary Melendez was not a family man. That was not disputed at his sentencing hearing yesterday in Montgomery County Court. He once gave the mother of his child a mug of blood for trying to leave the hotel room in which he had them locked up. He took money intended for baby formula and used it for liquor. He went to jail for having sex with a 15-year-old baby sitter. Melendez is going back to jail, this time to state prison for killing a 20-year-old Pottstown factory worker over a cheap bottle of rum. But Melendez did not talk about prison yesterday - not even when Judge William R. Carpenter was moments away from imposing the 22- to 60-year sentence.

When Peter Schriber began working the Old City restaurant scene five years ago, the trendy drinking crowd was lining up for designer vodkas and frequenting martini bars. Then came single-malt Scotches (and cigars), wine bars, champagne bars, sake bars, and a brief shot at tequila that, save for a few exceptional mainstays, still hasn't quite caught on. Now Schriber is a general manager and beverage director at Cuba Libre, the Havana-fantasy restaurant/nightspot on South Second Street.

It can feel like the tropics around here when Philly hits the muggy final weeks of its hot season. So it's little wonder I've been gravitating toward aged rum as my dark summer spirit of choice. The better the rum, the less adornment it needs. But one of rum's best qualities is also its ability to mix well without losing its character - as long as you keep it simple. A splash of brisk ginger ale (twice the quantity of rum) and a slice of lime over rocks has become my default drink.

The title of Claire Denis' beautifully observed 35 Shots of Rum is never fully explained, but that's part of the quiet mystery, and majesty, of this elliptical portrait of a group of French Africans living on the outskirts of Paris. There's a story to be told about drinking down the 35 consecutive glasses, but Lionel (Alex Descas), the taciturn train conductor who is one of Denis' central characters, never quite gets around to it. Wrapped in gentle melancholy, and featuring long, wordless passages as people ride trains, cook meals, and motorbike through the Paris night, 35 Shots of Rum is visual poetry, but poetry that examines the human condition with insight and illumination.

Traveling to foreign countries is much tougher with kids in tow. But it's possible to get that exotic travel experience without taking the typical beach or all-inclusive resort trip. In Puerto Rico, it feels like you've left the States: Spanish is the primary language, gas is sold in liters, and architecture resembles Mexico much more than Maryland. The island, though, has been a U.S. territory since 1898, and along with highway postings in Spanish, you'll see familiar road construction signs for the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, and all the chain stores you get at home.

IN HIS REVIEW of Amber Heard's new movie, "The Rum Diary," Daily News film critic Gary Thompson referred to Heard as "a dish. " It's an objectifying term, for sure, but one from a previous era - the type of term Alan Ladd might say about Veronica Lake, or Robert Mitchum in referencing Marilyn Monroe. And it's fitting for Heard, whose beauty and style is from another era. Yes, she's been on the cover of Maxim , but her image could just as easily be painted on the side of a World War II plane, like Betty Grable, or working for French director Roger Vadim in the 1960s, like Brigitte Bardot.

AT THE END of his life, Hunter S. Thompson worried that he'd be remembered as a caricature of himself, not as the brilliant writer he actually was in the 1970s. For the drug/booze antics referenced in his books, not for the books themselves. So it's with some consternation that we consider "The Rum Diary. " It plays into Thompson's worst fears by tallying his years in Puerto Rico as a bar tab, but it also resulted in the publishing of the author's unfinished "Rum Diary" novel, apparently quite good.

Q: For the first 40 years of my life, I rarely drank. Then I had a really bad day about four years ago, and I decided to have a couple of shots of tequila to reduce my agitation. Well it worked, and it also made me very horny. I started making it a nightly ritual. Over the next three years, I slowly increased the amount of alcohol I drank to maintain the effect. When I hit eight shots a night, I realized this might be a problem and started cutting back. Over the next year, I reduced the number of shots to two, then changed what I was drinking.

Wine is the star when it comes to drinking at a.kitchen, but the well-chosen lineup of brown spirits should not be overlooked. Most of it is fine whisky (from Springbank to Yamazaki), but it was the single brand of rum - El Dorado - that caught my eye, most notably for its age, in 15- and 21-year-old editions. Old rums are rarer than old Scotch because of the Caribbean climate's accelerated evaporation. But when you sip these spirits from Demerara Distillers in Guyana, the possibilities unfurl on the tongue like a brooding high-seas romance.

A legal rumble about whether or not Havana Club rum constituted a false advertisement of the liquor's geographic origin came to a halt today when a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals here said that "no reasonable interpretation of the label as a whole" could lead to that conclusion. Havana Club rum is a premium brand is manufactured by Bacardi USA, Inc. and distilled and crafted in Puerto Rico through a formula that was developed in Cuba in the 1930s by the Arechabala family.

I had an unexpected surprise recently while browsing a liquor store at the Shore - a trip to Puerto Rico. There it was on the shelf at Circle Liquors in Somers Point: a three-star bottle of Ron del Barrilito, a rum made in such small quantities and so sparsely distributed that I hadn't seen it since I visited the island five years ago. When I poured the brandylike elixir over ice with a squeeze of lime, the caramel, fruit, nut, and spice-tinged aromas...

The title of Claire Denis' beautifully observed 35 Shots of Rum is never fully explained, but that's part of the quiet mystery, and majesty, of this elliptical portrait of a group of French Africans living on the outskirts of Paris. There's a story to be told about drinking down the 35 consecutive glasses, but Lionel (Alex Descas), the taciturn train conductor who is one of Denis' central characters, never quite gets around to it. Wrapped in gentle melancholy, and featuring long, wordless passages as people ride trains, cook meals, and motorbike through the Paris night, 35 Shots of Rum is visual poetry, but poetry that examines the human condition with insight and illumination.

It can feel like the tropics around here when Philly hits the muggy final weeks of its hot season. So it's little wonder I've been gravitating toward aged rum as my dark summer spirit of choice. The better the rum, the less adornment it needs. But one of rum's best qualities is also its ability to mix well without losing its character - as long as you keep it simple. A splash of brisk ginger ale (twice the quantity of rum) and a slice of lime over rocks has become my default drink.