Page 1 of 1

Sorghum Rum

Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2009 10:21 am
by shawnboy101
This is posted elsewhere, but I thought that it may be more appropriate to be posted here under a title that is a little more accurate.

I am happily consuming my sorghum rum and I consider my project a huge success! I want to post my recipe so that anyone interested can give it a try and some of you more experienced distillers can give me a few pointers.

I started by boiling 5 lbs of mollasses and 5 lbs of white sugar with a tsp of yeast nutrient and added water to get a total volume of 7 gallons of wash. After it cooled, I pitched one pack of baker's yeast and one pack of champagne yeast. I'm not sure which one worked, but something did. The fermentation was a little slow and it took about 20 days to ferment dry.

Once fermentation was done, I reused all of the backset with 7 lbs of brown sugar. Even though I did not use yeast nutrient, this fermentation was much faster. I allow the backset to cool before pouring it back into the fermentor and it too right off from the yeast left in the sludge in the bottom.

Once this fermentation was done, I reset the dunder again with 7 more pounds of brown sugar following the above steps.

I then combined the three runs for my spirit run. I removed about a pint of foreshots and about a quart of heads. I collected down to 50%. After diluting to 80 proof, I still had well over 2 gallons of rum.

I spiced this rum with ginger, cinnamon, and cloves; following a recipe from the parent site for spiced rum. If I had it to do over, I would add less cinnamon. Other than that, it was great. The rum had a buttery smell and a smooth mellow taste. It didn't have as much flavor as some of the dark rums that I have tasted, but it is still very good.

I realize that to a certain extent, my rum was a light, brown sugar rum. My goal was to utilize the sorghum that was readily available and I feel that I was pretty successful in that. Just for reference, this was my third attempt at creating this recipe and the first 2 didn't turn out nearly as well.

I welcome any suggestions that anyone has to improve this recipe and would love to hear from anyone else that has been incorporating sorghum into their product.

Re: Sorghum Rum

Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 1:36 pm
by Big J
That's cool. I've worked with malted grain sorghum, but never sorghum syrup. I'd be really curious to taste the final product. Does sorghum syrup taste more like cane sugar molasses or more like barley extract?

Cheers,
J

Re: Sorghum Rum

Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 4:16 pm
by zymos
In my very limited experience, it is very similar in flavor to malt extract, and not at all reminiscent of molasses.
It made an incredibly buttery rich rum!

Re: Sorghum Rum

Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2009 4:24 am
by shawnboy101
It does vary in flavor from traditional rum in a way that at this point I am unable to describe. Thanks to the brown sugar though, the rum does have a real hint of cane molasses. It does smell and taste incredibly buttery and most of my friends like it more than traditional rum (the fact that it's free probably contributes to this). :lol:

Re: Sorghum Rum

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 5:50 am
by jake
I love Sorghum on my biscuits. not much for it in my rum .
Instead of brown sugar I went to the trouble of carmalizing table sugar and used a quart of sorghum.
Most of the folks I gave it to either loved it or they greatly prefered the rum I make with regular cane molases.
But to each there own.