Molasses Technology

[DST]

Hello everyone. First post here (although a veeeery old forum reader).

I've been producing rum for 2 years now. I'm located in Venezuela where we get some of the best class sugar cane molasses for a very low price (aprox $1/gal.)

We want to bring our small production to the next level so we ordered a Hillibilly Flute due in a couple of weeks.

We are also planning on doing some investment towards standardization and quality control. For that reason we got together with ppl producing rum at large scale here and told us the "secret" behind molasses its Brix grade therefore we should get a refractometer.

More than that, anyone around who has experience with molasses/rum production? What key variables should be controlled in our molasses/wash?
any reading suggestions?

Many thanks in advance.

Here go a couple of pictures on our molasses (they look like oil!!):

Analyzing molasses Density


Pouring molasses into fermenter

[LWTCS]

What key variables should be controlled in our molasses/wash?
any reading suggestions?

I think many of those answers will largely be predicated on your physical plant as it is currently set up and your existing recipe..

Can you offer more back ground about your current operation?

[kenfyoozed]

What grade of molasses are you using? I've used feed grade and fancy food grade. The difference is night and day! Tasted some gum from a distillery I visited that tasted like the rum I made from feed molasses that I tossed out. Better in = better out.

[Barney Fife]

I'd say you first need to establish what type of rum flavor you're after(IE: rot gut cheap rum, "high end" rum, or something unique, perhaps?), figure out how to do it consistently, including the aging part.

Since you apparently have access to better molasses than do most of us, I'd suggest you go after full-flavored, rich, sweet, very molass-y rum, and decide how you want to age it, if you wish to age it at all.

Are you planning on re-using previously discarded heads and/or tails in with each new boiler charge? I ask because we can make very different rums by keeping the "first run" rum hearts as one product(rum), and making another type of rum from running an all-heads-and-tails run. And we can even do an all-heads run, and then an all-tails run. The all-heads rum will be closer to a neutral, and if you leave a good bit of flavor in the final blend, it will likely be a fairly harsh, "raw" tasting rum. The all-tails rum will tend to be rather sweet and rich. You can also blend all of these back into the first-run hearts to create your final rum, but here you'll need more than one well-trained "blender" in order to know what percentage of each to add to the blend in order to produce a consistent final product.

Good luck! Keep us posted with your progress.

[blind drunk]

More than that, anyone around who has experience with molasses/rum production? What key variables should be controlled in our molasses/wash? any reading suggestions?

Here's a couple of things -

http://distillers.tastylime.net/library ... /index.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

http://distillers.tastylime.net/library ... /index.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

There's one other one I can't remember where it is on line. Someone else will know it.

[DST]

Barney Fife:

Thanks a lot. Since we have a small max output, we found no point in going for a "boring" mass production formula. Instead we are trying to go for rare/exclusive formulas. For instance we have included a little bit of pure cocoa in the barrel to add a different taste (we saw that at a famous local distillery).

The formula used is from a major local rum producer (Destilerias Unidas http://www.ministryofrum.com/rumdetails ... earch=Find ).

We visited their production site. Off cooourse they wouldn't share their recipe. However we learned their exact proportion of water/molasses used for fermentation. They used a Kilos/Kilos formula. X Kilos of water and Y Kilos of molasses.
Water has a typical density of aprox. 1ton per cubic meter or 1Kg per liter. Our question here was to get the quantity in liters of molasses to use. Very simple equation. What we confirmed first (I had read it in papers before) was that molasses density changed a lot from one supplier to another (even for one same supplier). This change was based on suspended solids in the composition of molasses. So far so good.
for our fermentation we assumed that molasses should have similar sugar quantities if they had similar densities (I know... big mistake). So our alcohol yield has never been similar.
Reading a bit more from my old chemistry books I found that the relevant thing is the brix variable. Okay all other suspended solids affect the taste, etc. However it is the brix level what should tell you the amount of sugar that can convert into alcohol through fermentation.
Molasses in Venezuela are considered some of the best (according to several books I've read) because sugar production here is a pretty bad process full of inefficiencies in which a lot of SUGAR is left in the end (as part of the molasses).
also, probably in other places you can get a molasses bottle with a "Nutrition Facts" label giving you a lot of info about your molasses. Over here you just go to a sugar plant, give them a metal barrel (200Lt) and they fill it with molasses (the barrel then weights about 300Kg!). You pay and leave. That's about it.

So no labels, no info, no nothing. Hence our need to do some sort of analysis lab in order to learn about molasses and select the right ones!

The patents shared are very interesting in deed as for the processes involved in fermentation, etc. However the question still remains: How to tell one type of molasses from another. What is important knowing so that we can get what we want (in terms of taste, alcohol yield, etc.).

With regards to our distillation process it is probably the worst in terms of methodology. We have a 13Gal Mile Hi Torpedo Tower. We are producing about 52Gals of wash for every production round. That translates into aprox 4-5 distillation rounds.
This question is out of this topic, however I think it is better to keep all the info together so here it goes:

Should we collect all heads and all tails from the 4-5 distillation rounds together? Then produce a blend and then age?
At this time we have clearly identified tails and heads, however we have not separated them a lot (only following the anti-methanol rule).
We just store in the same oak barrel all the alcohol from the 5 distillation rounds. The reason is that from 56gals of wash we're getting aprox 5 gals of alcohol and our oak barrels are 5 gallons.

When the new Hillibilly Flute arrives in a month or so we will have a 200Lt milk can and what I believe is a more reliable distillation tower. However if we don't have the basic procedures right it will make no difference from now!

Thanks a lot for our your help. If this turns out good I'll ship a bottle to each one of you! hehe.

Regards!

[LWTCS]

Hi DST.

As an aside,,,for me personally, I rather enjoy the fact that each batch has it's own identity...

More on topic,,,,Stabilizing a brix reading from batch to batch may very well mean different ratios of molassas to water from batch to batch....That reminds me of trying to stabilize a boiler temperature. Big pain in the ass....

Barney touched on the subject of blending. That (for the time being) may be a very helpful way to stabilize the consistency of your finished product....

By always saving a quantity from previous batches and blending back that quantity to current batches,,,you may be able to more precisely control your flavor profile with a bit of a time investment.
I am reminded of a solara styled aging system.

[blind drunk]

Also -

However the question still remains: How to tell one type of molasses from another. What is important knowing so that we can get what we want (in terms of taste, alcohol yield, etc.).

You may have to make a small test wash with each new batch of molasses. This way you can determine the brix, etc. Then you can distill it and gain further information.

Then you'll know how to proceed with that particular batch of molasses. Bakers use that same test method because of the variations in flour, from batch to batch and from season to season. Just a thought.