Ron Miel & Canarian Rum

Ron miel is Canarian rum blended with honey — sweet, golden, about half the strength of a normal spirit, and served in a small glass at the end of almost every meal on the islands, very often on the house. If a waiter puts a little glass of something amber in front of you after you have paid, that is what it is, and the correct response is to drink it.

Behind the liqueur sits something more unusual: the Canaries have a genuine rum industry, made from cane grown on the islands, which has been running continuously since the nineteenth century. That makes this the only place in Europe where rum is produced from local sugar cane at any scale. The two things — the serious rum and the sweet honey version everyone takes home — are worth keeping apart in your head.

This page covers what ron miel actually is, how the islands ended up distilling rum in the first place, the brands you will see, how locals drink it, and what to buy.

What ron miel actually is

Ron miel is a liqueur, not a rum, and the distinction is legal as well as descriptive. Rum is a distilled spirit, typically bottled at 37.5 per cent alcohol or above. Ron miel is that rum blended with honey and usually a little water and spice, which brings the strength down to something in the low twenties by volume, with some brands sitting nearer thirty and a few lower still. Under EU labelling rules the honey-sweetened category is ron miel or rum honey, and Ronmiel de Canarias carries its own protected geographical indication — meaning a bottle with that name on it must have been made on the islands, from Canarian rum, with honey.

The honey matters. A good one uses real Canarian honey, often from bees working on the flowering plants of the high pine forest or the barranco scrub, and the result tastes floral and slightly waxy rather than merely sugary. Cheap versions use syrup, and they taste like it. The colour is opaque gold; it should look faintly cloudy in the glass, not clear.

How the islands ended up with sugar cane

This is the part most visitors never hear. Sugar cane was planted in the Canaries almost immediately after the Castilian conquest in the fifteenth century, and for roughly a hundred years the islands were the most important sugar producer in the European world. The mills of Gran Canaria and Tenerife made fortunes for their owners and were worked, in large part, by enslaved people brought from West Africa and by conquered Guanches — the sugar and slavery story is the uncomfortable foundation of the modern islands, and it is also the reason the cane is here at all.

Columbus took cane cuttings from the Canaries to the Caribbean, a detail covered on the Columbus page, and within a few generations the Caribbean plantations had undercut the islands completely. Canarian sugar collapsed. The islands turned to wine, then cochineal, then bananas. But the cane never entirely disappeared from the wetter northern valleys, and in the nineteenth century, when distilling became the more profitable use for it, the islands started making rum instead of sugar.

Arehucas and the signed barrels

The name you will see everywhere is Arehucas, whose distillery sits in Arucas on Gran Canaria, in a handsome nineteenth-century building below the town's improbable neo-Gothic church. The firm dates from the 1880s, when the local landowners built a factory to process the surrounding cane, and it has been distilling on the same site ever since.

The detail worth the visit is in the ageing cellar. Arehucas keeps a hall of American oak casks, and for decades visiting musicians, actors, politicians and royalty have been invited to sign the barrel heads in paint. The result is a cellar wall of signatures accumulated across most of a century, read like a guest book of everyone who has passed through the islands, with the rum quietly ageing behind them. The distillery visit includes the cellar, the bottling line and a tasting; it is one of the more genuinely interesting rainy-morning options on Gran Canaria and it is a short drive from Las Palmas.

Arehucas is not alone. Other island distillers and blenders produce ron miel, and several bottle aged rums that are worth taking seriously — dark, molasses-heavy and closer to a Spanish Caribbean style than to a Jamaican one. On La Palma there is a long tradition of rum-making tied to the island's own cane fields, sold locally and barely known elsewhere.

How it is actually drunk

Four ways, in descending order of frequency:

• The chupito after the meal. A small glass, straight, at room temperature or lightly chilled, brought with or just after the bill. In a family restaurant this is often free and it is not really optional. Related customs are described in how eating out works here.
• Straight from the freezer. Many Canarian households keep the bottle in the freezer. The sugar stops it freezing solid; it comes out thick and syrupy and is far better this way than warm.
• Over ice, or with cola. Younger drinkers mix it long. It is sweet enough that it does not need much help.
• In coffee. A splash in a cortado, or poured over ice cream, or added to the layered barraquito in its more indulgent versions.

Ron miel and the other sweet island drinks

It sits in a family of sticky Canarian things. Mistela is a sweet fortified wine; guindilla is a cherry liqueur from the northern Tenerife villages; banana and palm-honey liqueurs turn up in every souvenir shop, and palm honey itself — the reduced sap of the Canary date palm, nothing to do with bees — is often confused with ron miel by visitors reading labels quickly. They are entirely different products. The islands' drinks sets out the full range, from the wines to the beers to the coffee.

Cooking and puddings

Ron miel is not only a digestif. Island kitchens pour it over grilled goat cheese instead of palm honey, use it to soak the sponge in príncipe Alberto, spike ice cream with it, and add a spoonful to the filling of Christmas truchas. Several of the classic puddings take it, and a plate of hard Majorero cheese with a small glass of ron miel beside it is one of the better simple things on the islands.

What to buy, and what it costs

Prices move and vary by shop, but ron miel is inexpensive by British standards and a good bottle is one of the best-value souvenirs available here — supermarket shelves carry it at a fraction of what a comparable liqueur costs at home, and the airport is the most expensive place to buy it. Things to look at on the label:

• Ronmiel de Canarias — the protected designation. Without it, the bottle may have been blended anywhere.
• Real honey in the ingredients rather than glucose syrup or "honey flavouring".
• Strength. Anything much below twenty per cent is heavily watered.
• The aged rums. If you actually like rum, skip the honey version and buy an aged Canarian rum instead — they are far less well known abroad and considerably more interesting.

Spirits go in the hold or are bought after security, and the islands' odd position outside the EU's VAT and excise territory means the allowances that apply on the way home are not the same as those from mainland Spain. How duty-free works from the Canaries explains the mechanism; check the published HMRC figures before you fill a case, since the numbers change. Everything else worth packing is on the food souvenirs page.

Worth trying?

Yes, though be clear about which thing you are trying. Ron miel is a sweet liqueur and is not pretending otherwise: drink it cold, in a small glass, after a long lunch, and it is close to perfect. The aged rums behind it are the more serious drink and deserve more attention than they get. And the cane in the fields above Arucas is a direct survival from the first European sugar colony in the Atlantic, which is a considerable amount of history to find at the bottom of a free glass at the end of a meal.

If the evening carries on from there, the islands after dark is a separate subject, and the morning after is what the barraquito exists for.