This is where the Captain comes into his own. While the locals of Caribbean islands like Jamaica were squeezing out the sweet sugar cane juices to create molasses, fermenting, distilling and aging to create dark rum, those in Cuba and Puerto Rico were keeping their liquid clear through a very short period of aging after distillation.
The result was a refreshing tasting white rum with a subtle and sweet taste. Toggle navigation. Nowadays, rum is crafted in many parts of the globe, with producers employing traditional rum-making methods and a multitude of blending and aging techniques. After sugar cane was introduced to the Caribbean by Christopher Columbus, slaves were the main consumers of the molasses created during the sugar production process.
Modern rum is usually made using one of three methods : Directly fermenting sugar cane juice, creating a concentrated syrup from sugar cane juice and fermenting the result, or processing the juice into molasses and fermenting that. The climate and the soil will impact the final rum taste, which is why rum produced from molasses from Barbados will taste different than a rum made from Dominican molasses, even if the two were distilled in exactly the same place with the same method.
The vast majority of rum distillers use molasses to make rum, but not all molasses is created equally. On the fermentation side of things, distilleries can then choose from a couple of different paths. If they go with natural fermentation, the sugar product will sit in open vats, letting the natural yeasts in the air do their thing and turn sugar into alcohol.
Another option — and one most larger companies use — is to introduce pre-determined strains of yeast themselves and from there control the fermentation from beginning to end. Once fermentation has completed, distillers are left with a low-alcohol product sometimes called the low wines. After that comes aging or the lack thereof.
Distillation happens in stills, which are made of copper or steel or typically come in two varieties: continuous or pot. There are other kinds of stills — and variations within each — but those are the two main kinds.
Distillers can opt to use one type or the other, or some mixture of both. Depending on the type of rum, it may go through the distillation process a second time, raising the alcohol even higher. As with every other element of the distillation process, the choices here will affect the final taste of the rum. However, they are noted for possessing a similar but distinct flavor profile all their own, typically described as being lighter, fruitier, grassier and funkier than molasses-based rums.
In other words, they tend to retain more of the character of the plant from which they derived. Indeed, we know little about which cultures even distilled sugarcane juices first, with hypotheses and fragmented accounts that range from the Mediterranean, to the isle of Cyprus, to South America.
Legend would have it that this happened in Barbados, but who knows for sure? British etymologist Samuel Morewood suggested that the term might ultimately have come about as a shortened version of the Latin word for sugar, saccharum.
On Barbados itself, though, those early rums possessed another name—one that perhaps more accurately conveyed both the potency and corrosive quality of those dangerous spirits. Because the vast majority of the whiskey we consume comes from heavily regulated industries in a handful of countries U.
These terms are universal and strictly enforced. Although various Carribean and Central American nations have their own distinctions for various rum terms, the rules for what can appear on labels in the U. Some of the bottles from our recent tasting of bottom-shelf white rums. Some are aged for years in used or newly charred oak, which does impart a degree of color—color that is then largely removed from the liquid via carbon filtering.
Aging a rum in newly charred barrels, for instance, will contribute a darker color much faster, while aging in used barrels contributes much less color—one of the reasons why caramel coloring is also sometimes a hot-button issue in scotch, which is almost exclusively aged in used barrels. What makes these particular rums so dark that they become almost opaque? Most of them are aged for only a couple years, if at all, which you should really be able to tell by looking at their relatively low price tags.
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