Hogo and the Case for Funk

Esters, dunder, and why the most divisive rums on the shelf are the most useful ones behind the bar.

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Pour a high-ester Jamaican rum for someone who’s only had column still rum and watch their face. Overripe banana, glue, olive brine, something almost medicinal underneath. The first reaction is rarely pleasure.

That quality has a name — hogo, an English corruption of the French haut goût, “high taste.” It’s produced by long fermentation, pot distillation, and in some Jamaican distilleries the deliberate use of dunder: the acidic residue left in the still from the previous run, added back to the next fermentation to drive ester production.

It sounds like a description of a mistake. It’s a centuries-old technique practiced on purpose.

Why bother

Because in a cocktail, funk is structure.

An exotic cocktail typically has a lot going on — two or three rums, citrus, one or two syrups, a spice element, bitters. A clean rum in that context gets buried. You’ve added alcohol and taken away nothing else. A high-ester rum survives the crowd. It gives the drink a spine and a finish, and it’s the reason a great Jamaica-forward drink tastes like something rather than like sweet cold liquid.

The classic move is proportion. Half an ounce of an aggressive pot still rum alongside an ounce and a half of something rounder does more for a drink than two ounces of either alone.

Learning to read it

Start by tasting the loud ones neat, in small amounts, next to something mild. You’re not trying to enjoy them yet — you’re building a vocabulary. Once you can identify the banana-and-varnish register, you start noticing trace amounts of it in blends, and you start understanding what a producer was reaching for.

Not a virtue in itself

Funk is a tool, not a scoreboard. There’s a strain of rum enthusiasm that treats maximum ester count as maximum quality, which is how you end up with drinks that are unbalanced in an unusual direction rather than balanced.

The skill isn’t loving hogo. It’s knowing how much a given drink can carry.