Rum may be made from molasses or from cane juice. Which is sorta molasses. But they're different pressings of the cane. Cane juice is less strongly flavored than molasses.
And the second question is "distilation and degree of filtration.
As You Know, Bob, alcohol is what happens when yeast eats sugar. And then, once you have a liquid which used to have sugar in it and now has alcohol, you can then take that liquid and distill it.
In a good-qualty fractional distilation operation, you extract ethanol from the wort. And ethanol is ethanol, whether it comes from potatoes, corn, cane sugar, rye, barley, or what-have-you. It's the same organic molecule.
So, obviously, the characteristics of various liquors have to do with the impurities in the distilation process.
But those impurities are only one of the things that give different liquors thier different characteristics.
In the case of dark and strongly flavored rums, the majority of the flavor comes from things added after distilation, during the aging and maturing process. Rum, like all liquors, starts out its life as a water-clear raw spirit. The degree of "molasses" flavor this raw spirit contains is pretty minimal. In some rums, molasses, caramel, and/or burnt sugar are added to the spirit according to a distilery recipe. In some, the rum is simply aged in some form of wooden container to add the characteristics of the wood.
But Cuban-style rum, for instance, like Bicardi, has virtually no molasses characteristics at all. It's made from sugar cane, but the flavors that they go for aren't molasses-based.
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Date: 2007-03-05 03:29 am (UTC)Rum may be made from molasses or from cane juice. Which is sorta molasses. But they're different pressings of the cane. Cane juice is less strongly flavored than molasses.
And the second question is "distilation and degree of filtration.
As You Know, Bob, alcohol is what happens when yeast eats sugar. And then, once you have a liquid which used to have sugar in it and now has alcohol, you can then take that liquid and distill it.
In a good-qualty fractional distilation operation, you extract ethanol from the wort. And ethanol is ethanol, whether it comes from potatoes, corn, cane sugar, rye, barley, or what-have-you. It's the same organic molecule.
So, obviously, the characteristics of various liquors have to do with the impurities in the distilation process.
But those impurities are only one of the things that give different liquors thier different characteristics.
In the case of dark and strongly flavored rums, the majority of the flavor comes from things added after distilation, during the aging and maturing process. Rum, like all liquors, starts out its life as a water-clear raw spirit. The degree of "molasses" flavor this raw spirit contains is pretty minimal. In some rums, molasses, caramel, and/or burnt sugar are added to the spirit according to a distilery recipe. In some, the rum is simply aged in some form of wooden container to add the characteristics of the wood.
But Cuban-style rum, for instance, like Bicardi, has virtually no molasses characteristics at all. It's made from sugar cane, but the flavors that they go for aren't molasses-based.