Home Distiller

Here's how I make my rum. makes around 15 gallons wash

1 gallon of black strap molasses, mixed with 1 gallon of hot water
2 gallons of backins from previous runs
20 lbs of dark brown sugar disolved in 4 gallons of hot water
ad 6 gallons of fresh cool (not cold but cool) water, rainwater is best.
2 packets of champagne yeast.

allow it to ferment in a cool dry place, it'll ferment slow but makes a beautiful rum.

do a hot and fast strip run, keep back a couple gallons of wash, as well as tails from your previous run, to mix with low wines for the spirit run

load your still for spirit run, I use a thumper but you don't need to.
bring it up to tempurature and dial the heat right back once you start to drip.
toss the fores, collect the heads to run in your column later (everyone here has a potsyill and a column don't they?)
don't add your hearts to your next run, you can, but its just a waste of time in my opinion.
keep the collectionrate at a steady drip, just below a solid stream untill you've collected most of the heads.
turn the heat up to a solid pencil lead sized stream, for the hearts, or even a bit faster.
I collect in beer bottles and taste the progression throughout the run.
once you've made your cut between hearts and tails, collect in a larger container untill you're distillate comes off at 20% or lower.
theres lots of good flavor in the tails, just add it back to your next run.

I don't use dap or any yeast foods, it does ferment slower, but in my mind it comes out cleaner. I think the real key to cleaner flavor is the longer cooler ferment, and no additional ingredients.
Not had good success with feed molasses, so I'd rather pay a few dollars more and get some blackstrap

Thanks for the recipie, always good to see what others are up to.

I'm kinda just playing with the opposite approach with a rum wash I've just put down. I'm using an English Ale yeast (Safale S-04, will also try the US ale S-05 after this.. supposed to be not as estery) which are characterised by ester production especially at the warmer end of ferments and can ferment fairly dry (as opposed to the champaign style yeasts which tend to add a pretty neutral flavour profile). I'm trying to ferment it on the hot side and have added DAP and a touch of vit B for good measure to speed things along. Trying to do a fast ferment and encourage esters. I'm using feed grade blackstrap molasses (manufactured in OZ) which has been sitting around in my shed for awhile because I haven't been doing alot of washes, but I clarified it at around 85 to 90 degrees celcius with a teaspoon of citric acid added the night before and let it cool. Was a reasonably worthwhile experiment as a fair bit of seddiment settled out. I use raw sugar to beef up the fermentables and add a different flavour (brown sugar is just white sugar with molases added to colour in NZ). Just starting to get bubbling now so must put a heat pad under it shortly as we are heading into winter here. May or may not work out, never tried it before this... that's the beauty of experimenting in this sport.

I have a wide range of commercial rums and seem to enjoy most on varried occasions, however for price, availability and flavour in this country you can't beat an Appletons VSOP or 8yo for mixing or 12yo + for sipping IMO. These are more on the fruity estery side of the range to my tastes (next batch will be using what most call fancy molases [bundaberg refinery molases] to see if I can get closer to an appletons flavour as blackstrap may be a bit to heavy for this goal).