Aged rum to white rum

[Dokimos]

An experiment for making white rum

I've made white rums before using the following methods on separate occasions:

1. 100% molases, distill to 95% ABV, no muck or dunder, just rum feints in spirit run, tight cuts

2. 100% molasses, double pot still, clean dunder in wash, muck in the spirit run, somewhat wide cuts

3. 100% molasses, reflux to 85% ABV, no muck or dunder, tight cuts

4. Half and half sugar contribution from white sugar and molasses, clean dunder in wash, double pot still, muck in spirit run, moderately tight cuts

5. Half and half molasses and sugar, double pot still, muck in fermentation and spirit run, wide cuts

I like big, bold flavors (Islay scotch and Jamaican rum are a couple favorites of mine) so attempts 2 and 4 were well within my wheelhouse after several months of aging. However I never quite liked the flavor of my unaged rums. I think there is something in there that needed to chemically change in order to be good according to my tastes. That explains why most white rums are barrel aged then filtered of color. However the refluxed rums I made (attempts 1 and 3) didn't have the ester flavors (treble) or rich molasses notes (bass) that I enjoy in some commercial white rums.

Also, I don't have the filtering technology that commercial spirits have, so I decided to try something else. I wanted to try an alternate way of making a flavorful, estery white rum. So here's what I did.

I fermented an all molasses wash with US-05 and refluxed to 85% ABV with a tight heart cut to get a good molasses base with minimal off flavors. This was attempt 3 from above. Then I aged it for 9 months on used whiskey oak at 65% ABV. The resulting spirit had a nice cola and molasses flavor but lacked the esters I enjoy (go figure) and it wasnt funky at all. So I added 3 quarts of this spirit, about 2 mL of concentrated sulfuric acid, and 1 quart of 8 month old muck (frozen in my shed for the last 4 months lol) to my air still.

My thinking was that the rum was already cut with no heads and no tails in it. So any esters produced in the distillation will be hopefully the desirable kind. That way I didn't have to cut heads during this run, and could keep the esters coming from the muck. I just had to cut tails to keep the nasty organic acids like vinegar out. I also had some copper scrap in the boiler to reduce sulfides.

I kept some funky tails that reminded me of grass, and a weird (clean) diaper smell. I also added the "foreshots" and "heads" even though they smelled like solvent and fake fruit. I was reluctant to add these, but I'm usually rewarded when I'm more aggressive with cuts than I think I should be.

The final spirit came out at 70% ABV and I recovered probably 75% of the volume of spirit I started with. It isn't nearly as funky as J. Wray and Nephew overproof, but it is smooooth. I could drink it at 70% if I was inclined to. It has a substantial caramel/molasses sweetness and still has the cola note it had before redistillation but with a crushed pineapple finish. Pretty nice, really. It's not as estery as I'd hoped but the molasses flavor was improved with the addition of pineapple and maybe some strawberry which I didn't detect before redistillation.

The pH of the stillage after the final run was about 3.5 so I could have added a bit more sulfuric acid, but I also was nervous about it. Concentrated sulfuric acid can be diluted by a factor of 1000 and have a pH around 1 so I proceeded carefully.

Anyway, let me know what your thoughts are. I don't drink much white rum so I probably won't do this again, but I'm glad I did it. It also taught me a little about rum distillation. For instance:

-A majority of the esters in a high ester rum must come from fermentation since redistilling clean aged rum with 25% live dunder didn't result in too many esters.

-Redistillation doesn't reset the clock for rum and make it taste unaged. It mostly just removes the color and maybe adds esters when done with live dunder in my experience.

-I think refluxed and oak aged rum with tight cuts and a clean fermentation is boring, hence my willingness to mess with it.

If anyone else has redistilled aged rum with muck, let me know what your results were.

Cheers,
Dokimos

[subbrew]

What type of molasses are you using? There is a new rum distillery in my town and I talked to the owner last weekend. He started out as a home distiller. He suggested if I wanted a white rum that can be drank soon after distillation (he did not define soon) to use the fancy molasses rather than blackstrap. He uses the golden barrel supreme molasses in his distillery. The rums I tried had nice molasses flavor but not a lot else, no esters I could detect.

[Dokimos]

I'm using golden barrel blackstrap. The white rum off the still isn't bad, but it doesn't taste like commercial rum to me. I'd be interested to try feed molasses and supreme molasses as a point of comparison.

[MooseMan]

That's my next planned Rum experiment.

The SBB Rum, run slow and cut tight, is delicious after just a few months on oak, but it's certainly not a light rum!
I've made a much lighter rum by using a gallon of dunder and rum lees in a subsequent ferment with just white sugar, then doing a 1.5 run with the feints from the SBB.

Next experimental rum will be couple of tins of what we call in the UK "Black treacle" and sugar.

[howie]

my old method to get white light rum (bacardi type) was to reflux the feints off a dark rum spirit run.
no filtering, just diluted and bottled.
but as my rum became more esterised (?) through muck, rum oils etc i found the white rum to have a tang that i didn't like.
so now i do a completely separate ferment and still run for white rum.
50% bunderberg molasses
50% raw sugar
+ dunder only
bakers yeast
1 x strip, then 1 x reflux, tight cuts, bottled and ready to drink.
mmmmmmmmmmojito

[Yummyrum]

I used to do similar to Howie . Feint’s run left over from a All Molasses Pot still spirit run .Done in reflux still .

Then when switched to doing Rum in a Plated still , feints just didn’t work for a White reflux run .Plated stills do such a good job of compression that there is little in the feints worth scavenging .
So made dedicated all molasses wash . Stripped it and ran through reflux still . Made a great drop so up-scaled to 200l wash and ended up with several gallons of 95% and has lasted me several years .
Now at first , I was never all that happy with it . It was OK in a Mijito but on the rocks it had something too wrong for my liking.

About a year ago , I diluted about 6 bottles worth down to 40%abv and we’ve been slowly working through it .

Well just lately , I’ve noticed that the “something wrong” has transitioned unto something really nice and it has developed the characteristic notes I get from Bacardi ( I’m sorry I can’t elaborate on that as my “notes” description really sux )

So my take on this is that Even in glass with no wood or even oxygen exchange , the flavour of the white Rum had significantly improved ….. perhaps aged … over the last few years .
It’s still not perfect , but I’m happy with it .

[LWTCS]

I really would like to know how Wray & Nephew does it. Definitely a requisite for an assortment rum on a proper rum cocktail bar.

As with all things rum, I feel the most impactful improvement is that more often than not, it just needs more time.

A little distillery up in Gulf Breeze, FL. ages all of his new make for two years. That is to say that nothing leaves his distillery that isn't at least 2 years old. I'm not sure how long he let's his white round out before it even goes in the barrel? But whatever he is doing it's making a beautifully floral rum.

Not funky like Wray & Nephew, but really good for a domestic rum.

[Dokimos]

Yeah I'm curious what J Wray does. I haven't tried hanging onto white rum for more than 6 months or do. Maybe I just need to be more patient. Thanks for the feedback. When I refluxed feints from my all molasses rum, it came out fine, but with something off about it. A twang I guess. Rum remains a mystery to me.

[LWTCS]

Yeah I'm curious what J Wray does. I haven't tried hanging onto white rum for more than 6 months or do. Maybe I just need to be more patient. Thanks for the feedback. When I refluxed feints from my all molasses rum, it came out fine, but with something off about it. A twang I guess. Rum remains a mystery to me.

In my opinion, rum is far more nuanced to distill than whiskey.

[NZChris]

J. Wray and Nephew white is a blend of un-aged pot and column distilled rums.

It's not easy to make your choice of rum in a single spirit run, but I suspect a lot of us began this journey thinking we could.

For white, I keep a narrow cut specifically for that purpose. If the cut tastes good when I choose it, it will taste much the same if I find a lost jar years later.

[Dokimos]

Thanks for your input NZ Chris, always nice to see your contribution. Maybe I should bury the jamaican style rum I made in the yard haha.

After the rum has had time to settle, I've changed my mind. I probably will do this again because I'm very happy with it. It tastes like plantation 3 star which is my favorite white rum. I'm quite happy sipping it at room temp and I'm pretty discerning, at the risk of sounding pretentious. If someone wants to replicate this experiment, I'd love to hear the results. Since the pH of the stillage was 3.5, I'm not sure the sulfuric acid made a big difference so it could probably be omitted.

[Bitter_Brew]

Thanks for your input NZ Chris, always nice to see your contribution. Maybe I should bury the jamaican style rum I made in the yard haha.

After the rum has had time to settle, I've changed my mind. I probably will do this again because I'm very happy with it. It tastes like plantation 3 star which is my favorite white rum. I'm quite happy sipping it at room temp and I'm pretty discerning, at the risk of sounding pretentious. If someone wants to replicate this experiment, I'd love to hear the results. Since the pH of the stillage was 3.5, I'm not sure the sulfuric acid made a big difference so it could probably be omitted.

I believe from my experiments that sulphuric is essential for HE rum. If you don't use it, you end up with too large a proportion of the carboxlyic acids.

I get the feeling they don't throw any foreshots away either. I made the mistake of using the foreshots from my last batch as fruit fly traps... they smelled fantastic while the rum itself smelt (and tasted) pretty bad.