Rumors about a man named Stephen Remsberg surfaced early on when I began researching this history of rum. This Remsberg fellow, I had been led to believe, was an attorney who lived in New Orleans and liked rum. He liked rum a lot. He had also amassed what knowledgeable people told me was the largest private collection of rum in the world. Naturally, I was intrigued. So when I went to New Orleans (not long before Hurricane Katrina rearranged the city's culture and geography), I tracked Remsberg down and called him up. Yes, he said, he was the Stephen Remsberg who collected rum, and yes, he would be happy to meet with me. He invited me to stop by his law offices not far off Canal Street.

Remsberg is 58 years old and has a slight paunch and an expression that suggests he's often undecided whether he means to express surprise or disdain. He speaks slowly and with some deliberation. His office is clean and tidy, as one might expect of a lawyer who specializes in commercial contracts, and the space is otherwise unremarkable save for the views toward the Mississippi River. A few minor rum graphics are hung here and there, but little else to suggest an unhealthy obsession.

Nor was there anything to suggest that he had arrived at his abiding interest in rum through a long and profound love of tiki drinks. His first sip of a Polynesian-style drink, which he recounted dreamily, occurred in London in the 1960s. He had gone to visit his older brother, and the two set off for Trader Vic's at the London Hilton. He ordered a vodka drink made with pineapple and coconut—"a sort of a beginner's drink" is how he describes it. But his experience at Trader Vic's was not unlike that of an agnostic who visits the Vatican and comes away devoutly Catholic.

While at law school in Washington, D.C., Remsberg spent his weekends unwinding at the local Hilton’s Trader Vic's. Later, living in Chicago, Remsberg had the good fortune of residing just around the corner from Don the Beachcomber's restaurant. "I discovered Don's early on," he said, "and then I found paradise." Remsberg is perhaps one of a handful of people who not only recognizes that tiki drinks can vary widely in style, but can discourse knowingly about them. "I prefer the Don the Beachcomber's bartending style," he told me. "Trader Vic's drinks are very good, and I think his mai tai is fabulous. But his drinks are certainly sweeter."

Remsberg in time became a serious tiki cocktail detective, and devoted hours to cracking codes and recreating drinks of the era. One major discovery occurred when he was visiting Don the Beachcomber's flagship restaurant in Los Angeles some years ago (it's since closed) and he noticed that the bartender finished his cocktail liturgies at the bar, eschewing the usual custom of slipping into the back and doing it in the sacristy. Remsberg noted he added a few dashes from a pair of unmarked cruets. So he casually inquired what they contained. Pernod and Angostura bitters, he was told. For years Remsberg had been trying to figure out the "secret ingredients" in the Beachcomber's tiki drinks, and here it was, laid out before him, much simpler than he ever thought. It was as if he was Howard Carter and here was the door to Tutankhamen's tomb.

Remsberg's interest migrated from specific drink recipes into rums in general; one of his early epiphanies was that outstanding tiki drinks required outstanding rums. What's more, many drink recipes he uncovered employed identical juices and sweeteners, and varied only in the types of rums that were used.

So rums became a small hobby of his. Then they became a large hobby. He acquired bottles when he traveled to the Caribbean, and before he knew it he had a growing collection of hard-to-find rums. Friends and relatives started to seek out obscure rums for him on their travels. He started prowling old bars for historic bottles of rum and, more recently, has delighted in what one can turn up on eBay. ("What do you search for?" I asked. "I type in 'rum,'" he said.) As will happen when one embarks on such an endeavor, the collection became somewhat unwieldy. At the time of our meeting he said he had in excess of 700 different rums, although he hadn't taken inventory in some time. And that didn't include the little airline-sized bottles, of which he had maybe twice as many.

We swapped notes about some rums we enjoyed, and speculated on what had happened to once popular brands. But my time was winding down. I rose to leave. He looked up at me from behind his desk, and I was uncertain if he was regarding me with surprise or disdain. "What are you doing tomorrow?" he then asked. "Do you want to stop by the house?"

***

Stephen Remsberg's house might be regarded as the Louvre of rum, that is, if the Louvre were about 250 square feet, was built around a kitchen and spilled into a small adjoining room with a thatched-roof tiki bar. It was smaller than I expected, but he had fit much into the space, mostly by attaching to the walls many linear feet of narrow but tall shelves about the width of, say, a rum bottle.

What's striking about the collection is not the sheer acreage of liquor—which is actually quite impressive—but that it's an active tasting collection. "I don't collect empties," he said. " I collect rum, not bottles. And I'll open any bottle that I have two of." As such, Remsberg's house is more than a mortuary of defunct brands. It's a museum of tastes, some of which have been wholly lost.

Strolling around the collection with my knowledgeable tour guide, we visit with some old friends of mine. "This is my one sample of the old heavy rum from Puerto Rico that was especially made for planter's punch. That would have disappeared around 1950." He points. "And these are three old Barbados rums, and this"—a bottle of Finest Old Jamaican Rum, dating to about 1910—"is one of the first two or three rums I believe to be sold as a brand in the bottle." (Rums before that were invariably sold in bulk from the barrel, he explained.)

Remsberg clears a spot on his kitchen counter, sets out some short glasses and we work our way though history, an inch at a time. We sample dense Jamaican rums Wederburn and Plummer-style rums, named after nineteenth century plantations. Both were popular in England, Remsberg said, and neither very popular in North America or even Jamaica. We sample London Dock rums, shipped from Jamaica or Guyana to be aged in the barrel in the cool, damp environs of the London docks, which gave it a rich, mellow taste that was in much demand. We take a brief detour to sip an Egyptian rum, which was curiously floral and not very pharaonic.

"And these are my six remaining New England rums," Remsberg says. His Boston rums date from the last gasp of the Boston rum era, with samples from the early to mid-20th century. They include Caldwell's, Pilgrim, Old Medford, Chapin, Il Toro, and one privately bottled rum that likely was collected by a butler right from the barrel at a distillery. We sample Caldwell's, and it is just as I hoped it would be—dense and cloying and filled with the rich, yeasty taste of molasses. "By 1900 they were making a serious rum in New England," Remsberg says.

He returns to his shelf and pulls down a bottle of white rum—a rarity here, since he generally prefers dark. "This doesn't look like much," he says. He's right; it doesn't. It's a bottle of white Bacardi dating from 1925, straight out of the crypt of Prohibition. I wrinkle my nose slightly—I find most Bacardi white harsh and industrial tasting, and I drink it only when nothing else is available.

Remsberg notices and smiles. "You should really taste this, " he says to me. "This would have been the old Bacardi White Label they used to make the first daiquiris in Havana. This would have been aged four years, then they would have stripped the color out of it by filtering it through charcoal. I don't have limes or I would make you Constantino's El Floridita daiquiri. But you can say this is what started the daiquiri—this rum."

He pours our a bit more than a thimble-full into a glass, and I bring it under my nose. It's not in the least medicinal, but complex and inviting. I sip. My word. It's like tasting in technicolor—it's full, complex, and not too flowery, but also lacking any trace of unpleasant heaviness. It's unlike any other white rum I've tasted.

Remsberg was grinning at my inability to hide my shock. "So you can see why Prohibition-starved Americans flooding El Floridita would have said, 'This is good!' There was something about those early Cuban cocktail rums. They were just better rums than the world had seen. Nobody is producing a white rum today as pleasing as this."