Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/518118
94 / the tasting panel / june 2015 T here may be a number of myths surround- ing the origin of the phrase, "The Real McCoy," but for documentarian Bailey Pryor, there's only one truth—and he owns the trademark for it. Pryor captured the phrase for his 2012 documentary, The Real McCoy, the story of Prohibition-era rumrunner Bill McCoy. It was a little film that paid off big, winning five Emmy awards in 2013—one for each year in the mak- ing. (Pryor has a career six Emmys.) And he legally secured the phrase when he discovered that, despite its wide use over the decades, no one had ever copyrighted it. It was the push Pryor needed to turn a fantasy he was entertaining into a reality: to replicate a rum McCoy would have made in the 1920s—dry, pure and unsweetened. "McCoy was known for never adulterating the alcohol. And during Prohibition all the other guys who were copying him did, [adding] wood alcohol, turpentine, prune juice and water," Pryor said. "Those products got called booze, hooch and rot gut, and McCoy never did that, so everyone called his product the real McCoy." His product was so popular that fishermen and aristocrats alike braved the waters of New York Harbor to dock beside McCoy's rum-filled boat some three miles out in neutral, international territory waters, quench their thirst, and flout Prohibition's rules—without breaking them. "Usually when they think of Prohibition, people think of Chicago and Al Capone and Eliot Ness— they don't think of the Rum War at sea and all the rumrunners and what they were doing out there," the filmmaker said. "So McCoy represented this great part of American history that hadn't been fully explored. He ended up becoming the sort of face of defiance against Prohibition." Pryor said he never saw McCoy as a mischief- maker, but rather, an "ingenious person who was doing something unique for the time period. He was the first one to see those loopholes and exploit them." While researching photo archives for the film, Pryor noticed the rumrunner posed with custom- stamped barrels from Barbados. While he knew the spirits were running up from the Caribbean, this was his first clue to McCoy's source. He hopped a plane to Barbados, met the head of state archives and inquired about a distillery from the Roaring Twenties that might still be in operation today. She directed him to the 1820 R.L. Seale Company, the oldest rum-trading family on the island, which now operates Foursquare Distillery. Pryor approached fourth- generation distiller, Richard Seale, with the idea of replicating a rum that had all but disappeared from the public imagination. "I said I want to make a rum that is exactly what Bill McCoy would have had in 1920," Pryor, ever the documentarian, recalled. "[Richard] loved that idea because he's a real purist and he said back then they wouldn't have added anything to it." The like-minded men struck a deal: no enhancers, no sweeteners and no juice—just a specifically aged product that would be like nothing anyone has drunk since 1920. To accomplish that, Seale uses molasses blended from local sources (every plantation's sugar cane is pressed by the state-run sugar mill) and from a long-time supplier in South America. Once back on the estate, the processed material is distilled using a mix of modern and heritage stills. Seale uses a combination of a three-column still and a 1,500-liter pot still. Pot stills matter, says Pryor, because it is much more difficult, time consuming and expensive Going Big with The Real McCoy by Lana Bortolot / photos by Doug Young Who's Who W O F R U M �