Wild fermented Jaggery/Jaggary rum

[TheJollyBrewer]

Hi Guys, I thought I'd share my experience with you re jaggary, fresh dunder and wild fermentation.

First things first, I made a 25 litre batch of straight jaggary rum using a commercial rum yeast, distilled it in my boka style still and collected a good couple of litres of 88%, very flavourful spirit. When diluted down to about 60% I force aged (freeze, microwave) for a few weeks before taking to a family gathering. It was a great rum, rich, fudgey and tasty, but it was super smooth and lacking in complexity.

Prior to stilling this one I grew up some wild yeast from blackberries in my garden, simply making a 1 litre, weak, jaggary solution In a pyrex 2 litres flask, lightly crushing the berries between my fingers as I added to the solution (about 8 berries). I added some DAP as well. Fermentation took off within about 48 hours and after it had stopped I allowed it to settle, made a fresh new starter, poured off the liquid from the yeast and added the new starter. Yeast took off imediately.

On the day I ran the gen 1 jaggary I saved 15 litres of dunder and made a 30 litres batch with more jaggary to an og of around 1.075. Fermented it hot, around 30-35ºC for a good 8 weeks with the wild yeast starter I'd grown up, smell from the fermenter was incredible, like concentrated chacaca, or rhum agricole.

So I ran this in the same way I did the first run, but seemed to run into tails very quickly, only getting less than a litre of hearts (I added the feints from run 1). But the flavour and aroma, it was incredible. Funky, fuel like (in a good way) fruity and just all over delicious. I didn't bother to age any on oak, I just proofed down to 50% and bottled it.

That was about 8 weeks ago that I ran that, I had a few drinks over Christmas (great in a Daquiri) but haven't really touched it since, but I poured myself some last weeked and it's even better. I'm soooo pleased with it. It's quite sweet, still really funky, but complex and so moreish.

When I made gen 2 I started a new batch adding half dunder and racking straight on to the yeast from batch 2. Fermentation started pretty quickly and I kept it hot like batch 2 (30-35ºC). Last couple of weeks it's got cold here so I turned of the heat and let it chill to drop the yeast a bit. Planning on running this soon with the feints from gen 2 and hopefully getting a bit more usable product this run, of equal (if not better) quality than gen 2. I have jaggary lined up for the next batch.