I was thinking over the weekend about my recent vacation in the Caymans, and for whatever reason, one of the things I remember is the bottle of Havana Club my wife and I drank. That bottle opened my eyes about rum.

I’ve never been much of a rum drinker, mostly because I felt it had no flavor at all. I always felt rum was the fruity-drink mix, the silent assassin, the liquor for people who don’t drink liquor.

But the Havana Club — which is of course Cuban and thus unavailable in the USA — had a unique and hard-to-describe taste. We tried the white rum, and it had an edge to it that I guess I’d describe as ‘unfiltered’ — a sort of green-ness to it that has to come from sugar cane when it hasn’t been processed to within an inch of its life. It was much more interesting than your basic Bacardi.

Also tried in the Caymans: Caybrew, the local beer. It had the light body and hot-weather drinkability that you find in most of the Caribbean beers — and I liked it (as I did Kalik in the Bahamas) far more than the ubiquitous Red Stripe. Bonus: It was cheap at most of the bars.