It’s the taste of college rock concerts. That exhilarating thrill of guitars, eddying dust and smuggled rum: sweet, heady and watered-down, slugged slyly from beat-up plastic water bottles.
The taste of summers at the beach: lukewarm rum and Coke gritty with sand and a slick of displaced sunblock. Later, it’s the taste of your first foray into the bar scene, where you drink it army style to impress dates, with a pinch of salt and a lemon wedge. Or order a slew of marginally more elegant Cuba Libres, clinking with ice and spiked with lemon juice (which you inevitably regret the next morning, holding your head and groaning gently over paracetamol, tea and toast.)
India has had a long and tumultuous affair with Old Monk rum. It’s cheap. It’s accessible. And it’s somehow always managed to be cool. Despite the clunky packaging and egalitarian price tag. Or perhaps because of it.
When founder Brigadier Kapil Mohan (retired), Chairman and MD of Mohan Meakin and the creator of this iconic desi dark rum, recently passed away at the age of 88, social media saluted him with a rush of memories and memes. You know all the details by now, thanks to a flurry of press. How he was a teetotaller, and yet created the most popular rum in the country in 1954. And how Old Monk, brewed in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, went on to develop a loyal fan following with virtually no advertising or marketing.
A dip in sales, which set off alarm bells in 2015, triggered rumours that Old Monk would stop production, leading to an army of loyalists buying up and hoarding bottles in an emotional frenzy. Of the many posts and memes that emerged, one stands out: a picture showing a bottle of Dettol and a bottle of Old Monk side by side. Both are similar in shape and size, except for the labels, and the text underneath: ‘Dettol, for external wounds. Old Monk, for internal wounds.’
Rum and Cola Cuba Libre with Lime and Ice
This is commonly acknowledged to be the drink of the 70s, 80s and 90s. But millennials still dive in, from Chennai to Copenhagen. Even now, when it’s tougher to source in trendy restaurants and lounge bars, you’ll find it in homes and hip flasks. The drink, with its sweet, rich and pungent notes of vanilla, toffee and spiced pudding, has loyalists all over the world.
Sample The Rum Howler Blog, which promises “spirited reviews,” where reviewer Chip Dykstra waxes eloquent about its opening notes of “dark brown sugar accented by maple syrup and rich baking spices”. He poetically continues to explain how they “evolve into a scent of licorice stained molasses. Hints of soy sauce and exotic spice wander into the air with sugar-covered walnuts and pecans sitting underneath.”
On the whisky exchange, where it is labelled “one of the largest selling rums in the world, almost all thanks to word of mouth,” Jeffo304 says “straight ice cold, best rum I’ve ever drank”. While another user says he “tried this rum for the first time in Lagos, Nigeria, Excellent!”
Old Monk seems to bring out the poet in everyone: Mr Surgeon says, “This is not just a rum. Once you take a sip, it’s like an orchestra that plays for you. Heavens come to protect you. Angels flirt with you...”
Indian fan clubs are no less spirited. On Facebook, look for COMRADE (Council of Old Monk Rum Addicted Drinkers and Eccentrics), a group of more than 2,000 fans of the rum. There’s the Old Monk Appreciation Society, with more than 3,000 members. And an Old Monk community followed by 18,000 people.
Gareth, who runs this community, says he began it in 2015 as a page, called ‘Saving Old Monk’. He created a series of posts under the title “in a world without Old Monk” (...Men would not know the price of lemons.) The cover photo of the page read, “Save the rum by having some,” and it got nearly 4,000 likes in 24 hours. It garnered a following of 10,000 people in the first three weeks of its existence. Gareth says this is despite doing no marketing. “I refused to advertise the page by putting money in, to keep in line with the way Old Monk does their marketing — organic and by word of mouth, only.”
He adds, “I believe Old Monk tugs at the very fabric of a classic Indian gentleman, without squeezing his pockets dry. It’s great to taste and suits most palates. It doesn’t hail from a massive corporation, it doesn’t try too hard by advertising, and above all, it’s almost too inexpensive to be true.”
