My Bastard Child Rum Recipe

[Belatu]

So this recipe is a little different, or at least it's different to what I've come across before. it requires a whiskey run to be done first because I use the Whiskey Backset for the Rum...

To start of with I make a 50 liter grain based whiskey mash, it's designed to bring in some Caramel, Coffee and Dark Chocolate right into the newmake, and then aged on 50/50 American Oak and Maple.

This whiskey for me comes through with a flavour profile I really like, perhaps not for everyone, but I love this, it's sweet with a lot of caramel and vanilla flavours, it has strong sweet orange kind of almost marmalade flavour with a nice raisin finish with dark chocolate staying in the mouth after.

Whiskey Ingredients:
6.5kg Inverted Sugar (Yeah, I know)
3.5kg Malted Corn (Can also use un-malted)
2kg Pale Ale Malted Barley
1.5kg Oats
0.8kg Caraaroma Malted Barley
0.5kg Roasted Barley

Whiskey Recipe:

1. Mill all the grains, the finer the better, but it depends on your setup.
2. Mash your grains in enough water to cover the grains at between 65°C and 68°C for an hour.
3. While the grains are converting in your mash, invert the 6.5kg of sugar in about 10 liters of water, I use about 1 tsp of citric acid to invert.
4. Tap off your wort into a fermentation bucket/drum and sparge up to about 35 Liters.
5. Add the inverted sugar, this should give you +- 50 liters at about 1.080 specific gravity.
6. Add your favorite whiskey yeast and let it ferment out dry.

The above should give you about 50 liters at roughly 10-12%.

Once done I run my whiskey wash through my pot still I get a really nice newmake out of it that has hints of coffee, dark chocolate, caramel and vanilla, most of the newmake is oaked at about 58% ABV, but it also makes an excellent base for coffee liquor etc.

Now for the Rum:

Rum Ingredients.
25kg Black Strap Molasses.
Top up the Fermenter with the backset from the Whiskey to 50 Liters.
Belgian Ale Yeast and Belgian Saison Yeast co-pitched.

Rum Recipe:
Pretty straight forward, Dissolve the molasses in the whiskey backset, adjust the PH to about 4.5-5.0, I didn't need to adjust at all, but ymmv, and pitch the yeast I use is Fermentis BE-134 for the ability to ferment dry and go pretty high ABV and Fermentis BE-256 for the banana and clove esters.

This should give you a wash of about 1.120 that should ferment out to about 10% leaving a bunch of unfermentable sugars and flavors behind.

Once done I run my Rum wash through my pot still I get a decent amount of flavour in my rum with this, banana, clove, vanilla, lots of coffee, caramel and tropical flavour.

When I blend my Rum I do cheat a little, I mix some dark Belgian Candi sugar into the portion that I age on Oak, it adds a hint of sweetness and a distinctive burnt caramel flavour.