Sometimes you just have to plunge in and be a tourist for a few hours. It’s just fine to protest that you’re a “traveler” and not a “tourist”, but we’re all just tourists in other countries when you get right down to it. The thing that has given tourist activities a bad name, though, is their “fakeness.” So, is learning to mix rum cocktails in a state-of-the-art mixology classroom fake? We think not.

The day begins as all days do on a vacation in San Juan, Puerto Rico: the day is beautiful, it’s hot and sunny (with intermittent showers predicted), and we have the whole day stretching out before us to do with anything we please. What we please to do today is to visit Casa Bacardi, the home of the famous rum distillery, something we’ve never done on any of our previous visits to PR. Let’s just back up a moment, though. How did we get here this morning, tickets in hand?

A few months before this trip, Patty was perusing some of her favourite travel YouTube Channels and stumbled upon one titled: Five things you must to in San Juan…or something like that. Four of them were “been-there-done-that” kinds of things, but the fifth was “take a mixology class at Casa Bacardi.” We do like a rum drink (among other libations), and we have certainly drunk our share of Bacardi rum. Add onto that the fact that we have visited rum distilleries in the past on Caribbean islands, and this is not a tourist experience we need to repeat. But a mixology class? That sounded interesting, and above all, fun.

So, a bit of online surfing to the Casa Bacardi web site established that they offer three options for your visit: the historical distillery tour, the rum tasting tour and the mixology class. Naturally, our only interest was in the mixology class, so we surfed to the calendar, chose our tour time and paid for our tickets about three weeks before we left home. The mixology class was $60 (USD) per person and worth it in our view.

So, that’s how we had our tickets in hand when our taxi from the Condado area of San Juan, where we always stay, drops us off at the entrance to the guest pavilion at Casa Bacardi.

As you probably already know, Bacardi rum is among the most storied in the world. We feel as if this experience is a must, given that our next stop will be Santiago de Cuba where Don Facundo Bacardi Masso first began his business as a wine merchant and importer. Of course, with all that sugar cane about, he began experimenting with distillation of spirits eventually buying a local Cuban distillery in 1862. After a series of wars and fires that pushed the business out of Cuba, the Bacardi distillery reemerged on the island of Puerto Rico in 1936 and, as they say, the rest is history. Today, Bacardi rum is, at least according to Bacardi, the number one rum in the world. So, here we are.

We are given “beepers” and told that we should make our way to the bar where a mixologist will prepare for us a rum drink of our choice while we wait for the beginning of our tour. Since we know we will be mixing a series of drinks during our class, we approach two older women waiting at a table and offer them our “free drink” tokens. They are only too happy to take them off our hands. It was really unnecessary for us to have come as early as we did – the web site suggests at least a half-hour in advance, but we needn’t have. Anyway, there are lots of people milling around, but we do notice that not all of them are wearing a blue “mixology tour” bracelet. Oh yes, they give you a bracelet with the beeper.

Finally, it is 1:30, our appointed time, and the beepers begin to vibrate. We head toward the waiting tram and are delighted to find that there are only seven people in our group. We can only surmise that the rest of those waiting were on cheaper tours!

Our tour guide is a petite woman who is as rapturous about rum as you might expect of a Bacardi employee. And she is knowledgeable. We listen attentively while she tells us about the distillation process, but we are really here for the class. After this presentation and a view over the acreage and San Juan across the bay from the roof deck of the building, we are off to class.

We follow our guide as she makes her way toward a closed door. We’re not really sure what we had been expecting, but this wasn’t it. The sight before us was mesmerizing: a large (really large), superbly equipped, state-of-the-art, sparkling mixology classroom/lab, reminiscent of cooking classrooms on board the Oceania cruise ships, but much larger. Our little class of seven is almost lost!

Now it’s time to learn to mix rum cocktails.

Each of us is positioned at a station where there are three mini bottles of rum (see how smart we were not to imbibe too early?), mixing glasses, stainless steel mixing spoons, cocktail shakers, muddlers, glasses, ice, sugar, lime wedges…everything a budding mixologist needs! Our guide and teacher had, earlier in the tour, introduced us to the three drinks we would be making: the Cuba Libre, the daquiri, and of course, the Mojito. We were more than ready.

We first mixed the Cuba Libre, a lowball rum and coke, where she gave us the secret to the best rum and coke: squeeze a lime wedge over the ice to season it before adding the rum then the coke. A familiar drink to us, for sure.

Then we shook up a daquiri – one of the best we’d tasted owing to all that fresh lime juice we have squeezed in. Finally, the mojito. To our surprise, the real trick to this delicious drink is rectifying the mistake most bartenders make, according to our petite teacher. That mistake is muddling the mint leaves along with the lime. No, no and no, she says. Muddle the lime in the glass, slap the mint leaves between your two hands to release the aromas, wipe the leaves along the rim of the glass and then drop them on top of the limes before adding the rum and soda. She was so right.

The whole experience is one and a half hours long and great fun. Our pre-Easter dinner drinks this year will be inspired by our newfound knowledge. Our family is delighted – since we’re hosting!

Next up…we’re off to Santiago de Cuba. Cheers!