Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

When I first started out making real rum I was reading a lot of stuff on HD about adding peppercorns, pineapple & other shit, but after a while decided to just age with time and charred oak.

I've now found that my rum is almost too smooth and lacks the bite of most spirits, weather this is good or not I'm yet to decide, but it's so easy to drink now I tend to over indulge at times :oops:

Well today I found a bottle that's about 12 months old and has a sticky note on it saying "spiced rum" and had a few peppercorns in it and a small piece of vanilla pod.......... it's fucken disgusting and near made me puke.... how did I used to drink this shit and think it was nice? :roll:

So now that I have a really mellow rum I'll be looking at ways to improve it before aging, maybe some pepper for a bit of bite but that'll be about it.

At the Bundy rum factory a couple weeks ago we tried various types of their rum and was pretty foul, tasted like tails with some early heads mixed in and had been aged for 2 yrs..... :shock:

Cheers.

I find it hard to believe that you would over indulge at times :lol:

sorry guys, i know i've asked this before,Roughly what amount of oak/L suits your taste?
(just as a personal taste kinda thing, not a rule of thumb or anything :D )

Just go by colour and taste. It will depend on the toast/char level of your oak and the size of the chips/sticks. It's just something you learn to suit your taste.

When the spirit is a nice dark colour (remembering that you still have to break it down from 65% to drinking strength) without tasting like a tree.

If it takes from six to eight weeks to get there it'll be about right. I take most of the sticks out then and just leave a small amount in for a long time.

Just bottled some stuff I had on oak for ages, it's real good!

A little oak for a long time has worked really well in the past and only getting better now, had some over oaked shit that needed chucking out so am really conservative with it now.

This stuff has been charred oak for 3 months and is the best yet :mrgreen:

i use a commercial grade 15lt plastic container (with a snap seal lid) that i got from howards storage world.
had to inscribe the litreage on the side myself... but, i have 2 packs of the plantation chips from the shop in the bottom and just keep topping it up each time a make a wash.
i ahve one for jack daniels and one for rum....

a usual wash for me is fairly mixed as the bloke who mows my law (and get paid in hearts!) likes jack, my missus drinks vodka/gin/schnapps and i drink rum (mostly!)
so once the wash is done a dilute it and sepparate it all in to where it needs to go!

G'day Bushy,

I was doing the same with Jamiacan Rum Oak Sacks where I would just keep throwing new ones ontop of old ones each time I added new neutral. It got to the stage that I had about a quarter of the demijohn filled up with flavoured oak chips and it ended up being a pretty ordinary product. Emptied out all the old chips, started fresh and walah my rum was good to go again.

If (in the future) you find your product quality to be slowly declining this maybe the issue.


Cheers, Heffers

Sorry to dig up an old thread but I wanted to pick brains about making a rum a little more 'harsh'. I've only had my first molasses wash rum ageing for about 10 days now, but a sneaky sample was really smooth and lacked that harsh dirty rum flavour. How can I get that flavour? Is it more to do with the still than the ageing or what? All of my samples (hearts only, hearts and tails etc) are like that and only differ in smell.

Just add some of your heads or tails and you'll get the flavor your after, hmm your tails taste the same, weird, ok make up a turbo batch say 25liters then add the heads or tails from that, that should fix it.

If you want the harsh burn and bite of Bundy rum add heads to your blend ;)

But dont complain about the headaches :lol:

Nardy wrote:Sorry to dig up an old thread

Nothing wrong with reviving old threads..... why leave them lying dead?????

Cheers for the tips - I'll do my cuts in smaller jars with this next batch and try blending differently.

More mollasses will give more hard rum flavour.

I like to water my spirit charge down to 28% using wash. It gets the spirit out around barrel proof (65% after cuts) and means i don't have to water down the flavour at all till it's aged.

The use of recycled dunder in the wash will give you harder flavour too. A couple of peppercorns can give it a little bite .

Just been giving the subject of oaking / aging rum some more thought mostly in regard to giving it a bit more bite (bundy style)
From what Ive been told at the factory the old Double OP bundy or 33 OP as it was labeled back then was bottled at barrel strength. This stuff hasn't been sold over the counter now for well over 20 years, I happen to have a bottle sitting in front of me, still full and its lable reads 75.9% ABV. As far as I know normal OP and UP are just diluted versions of this. This seems to be a much higher ABV than most recommend for oaking/ageing.
Maybe this is one of the reasons why Bundy has the unique taste that it does. Have included a quote from Kiwis experiments on oaking at different ABV's which possibly support this idea.
Im not saying its the answer to getting a rougher rum....just that it could be worth experimenting with for anyone interested.
SBB
Quote: Kiwi
Toast, 70% - VERY vanilla nose, but quite harsh and burning. A HUGE tannin hit, heaps of texture right to the back of the throat. sort of like chewing on sawdust. Nasty.
Char, 70% - Rougher nose. lack of fruit. lots of vanilla and not much else. spirit is noticeably less smooth in the mouth with more burn, but taste is VERY light, not much flavour. just vanilla. no fruits.

Iv just started doing rums and when done my spirit run I had to blend alot if heads back in to get something I liked the smell and taste if. No headaches yet though. The hearts really lacked a distinctive rum flavor I thought. Maybe more molasses and Dunder next time.

Been reading up about oaking rums as pretty soon Im going to have some to experiment with.
Some say light toast, some say dark, some say charred and some age in old bourbon barrels it seems.
Has anyone tried using American Oak to oak rum without charring or toasting it.....just raw oak. If so what were the results??
Ive also got a small American Oak keg thats been used to store cheap port in, would it be worth giving it a good rinse out and maybe throwing some rum straight in to it and see what happens???.

And they told me at the home brew shop when I first started..." Its easy....ya just put this in here and then that in there and the grog comes out here and you drink it " :roll: :laughing-rolling:

SBB,

Aging some in that port barrel would be a top idea in my opinion, I've aged some a while back on staves that had come from a red wine barrel and it was awesome.

I havnt tried raw oak, I like mine aged on HEAVY toasted the best

Cheers.

Anyone got a recipe for coloring rum?. Thanks.

Cheers

googe wrote:Anyone got a recipe for coloring rum?. Thanks.

Cheers

Oak

http://rumproject.com/rumforum/viewtopi ... 58194a01a0

Caramel. :handgestures-thumbupleft: