Making Muscovado Rum (part 1)!

19 August 2019
Introduction So we are having a dab at making rum. Not just any rum, but muscovado rum? What it is? Well, it is a rum made from muscovado. Let's dive in deeper! What is rum? Rum is an alcoholic beverage made from sugar cane byproducts. Sugar cane is a plant that grows in the tropics and contains (the name gives it away ...) high levels of sugar. By pressing the juice out of the sugar cane stalks, a sugary liquid is obtained. When that liquid is boiled, a brown, dark sugar (sometimes called muscovado or panella) can be made. By further refining this raw sugar, the molasses (brown, tasty) and actual sugars (whiter and sweeter) can be separated. Sugar is used, well, to sweeten up basically anything, while the molasses are a great as table top syrup, animal stock feed, or base for rum production. The more refined the sugar gets, the more heavy the resulting molasses will be. Heavy C-grade and blackstrap molasses create heavy style rums, where the use of muscovado or panella (the original non-refined reduced sugar cane juice) creates a better yield at lower taste intensity levels. Muscovado, to conclude this paragraph, should make for a great light rum. Molasses are better for the heavier styles.

Muscovado sugar ...

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Making Muscovado Rum Wine The first batch we are making - until we get in bigger quantities - is in a simple plastic fermenter. In order to make 200 liter of rum wine (scalable):
  • Add around 150 liter of 35 degrees Celsius water;
  • Then add 34 kilo's of muscovado sugar and stir it in;
  • Top-up with cold water to achieve a total of 200 liters;
  • Now add the appropriate amount of iFeed (iStill's new yeast feed and fermentation stabilizer);
  • Sprinkle 125 grams of dried granulated baker's yeast on top;
  • Close the fermenter and add the water lock;
  • Fermentation starts in a matter of hours and will take around 4 days;
  • You'll end up with around 200 liters of 9% rum wines.
Interested in seeing how we distill it into a rum? Stay tuned. The follow up iStill Blog post will probably be up in a day or two.

Fermentation has started ...

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