Yo Ho Ho and a Barrel of Rum

This is what you get when you hire Hungarians to renovate your house. They slack off and drink all of your rum!

From Reuters Here:

BUDAPEST (Reuters) – Hungarian builders who drank their way to the bottom of a huge barrel of rum while renovating a house got a nasty surprise when a pickled corpse tumbled out of the empty barrel, a police magazine website reported.

According to online magazine www.zsaru.hu, workers in Szeged in the south of Hungary tried to move the barrel after they had drained it, only to find it was surprisingly heavy and were shocked when the body of a naked man fell out.

The website said that the body of the man had been shipped back from Jamaica 20 years ago by his wife in the barrel of rum in order to avoid the cost and paperwork of an official return.

According to the website, workers said the rum in the 300-liter barrel had a “special taste” so they even decanted a few bottles of the liquor to take home.

The wife has since died and the man was buried in a proper grave.

This may sound shocking, but these men have bottled one of the rarest drinks in the world- Nelson’s Blood. Nelson’s Blood is the name given to rum that is tapped from a cask full of rum and old Naval War Heroes.

One of my favorite stories of Admiral Horatio Nelson is here:

Nelson’s Blood – Another name for Pusser’s Rum, and still in use today by old salts – especially in Great Britain’s Royal Navy! At the Battle of Trafalgar on October 21st, 1805, Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson engaged the combined fleets of Spain and France. His flagship was HMS VICTORY. Although outnumbered, he sank or captured 17 of the enemy’s ships to not a single loss of his own. This victory still lives as one of the greatest in the annals of naval warfare. Unfortunately, Nelson was mortally wounded and died knowing that victory was his. Legend has it that to preserve his body for the long passage back to England, that it was placed into a large cask of Pusser s Rum. Upon arrival, when the cask was opened, his pickled body was removed, but the jack tars had drilled a small hole at the base of the cask through which they drained most of the rum, thereby drinking of Nelson s Blood. Since then, the term Nelson s Blood has become synonymous with Pusser s Rum, and is still in wide use today.

Now I’m craving a Pusser’s Painkiller.