For thirty-nine years I brought my father a bottle back from every trip I took. That is the whole of it. There is no clever origin story underneath, no moment of inspiration in a distillery. There is a man, his son, and a shelf that kept filling up.
How it started
It started with surfing, which is how a lot of things start.
The Bahamas first, then Barbados, then Central America — going where the water was good and paying no particular attention to what was in the glass afterward. Then at some point I did start paying attention, because rum in those places did not taste like rum at home. One island to the next, the same spirit was a completely different drink.
Through the 1990s I travelled to nearly every country in Latin America. Work, mostly, and the sort of trips that turn into something else. Everywhere I went there was a local rum that nobody outside that country had heard of, and I got into the habit of bringing one home.
The bottles were for my dad.
My father
George Papagno — Papa George — was born in the spring of 1919 in a small town in Rhode Island. He served in the United States Navy, and afterwards spent his working life as a postman. He kept working until he was 92.
Unlike me, he was the quiet type. Well mannered, kind to everyone he met, and he kept that smile.
He had crossed a good deal of the same water in uniform decades before I ever saw it, and he never made much of that. What he did make much of was history — where a thing came from, who made it, what it was for. You could not hand him a bottle without being asked where it was from and what the story was, and if you did not know, that was a reasonable prompt to go and find out.
So the ritual had a shape. I would come back, we would open whatever I had carried home, and I would tell him where I had been. He would ask questions I could not always answer. The next trip, I made sure I could.
What we actually learned
Over that many bottles you notice things.
The first is that a great deal of rum is sweetened, and nobody tells you. You can taste it once you know what you are looking for — a softness at the front, a short finish, a flatness in a cocktail that no amount of adjustment fixes. Some of the most expensive bottles we opened were the worst offenders.
The second is that the good ones were almost never the famous ones. They were the bottles a bartender in a small town recommended, or the thing a distillery sold only at the gate.
The third is that a number on a label can mean almost anything in rum, which is a longer story told elsewhere.
None of that was research. It was two people drinking rum at a kitchen table over four decades and slowly getting fussier.
Why it is built this way
People ask why we are so rigid about the additives, and the honest answer is that it is not a market position. It is what thirty-nine years of opening bottles with my father taught us to care about.
No added sugar. No caramel. No colorants. No chill filtration. An age statement that means the youngest drop. We call it the Bombarda Rum Pledge and it is really just a list of the things that disappointed us.
He did not live to see the brand. Papa George passed in April 2020, surrounded by his family, and the first prototype bottle did not arrive until that August. Every rum carries the name of a gun because he taught me that history is worth knowing, and the whole thing is dedicated to him.
Your turn
If you have a version of this — a father, a brother, a sister, a shipmate, someone you shared a bottle with — we would like to hear it. Send it to captainjames@bombardarum.com with a photograph and we will send you a code for your next order.
Raise our rums high and celebrate your own.
Victori Spolia.
Captain James Papagno
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