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Evaporated Cane Juice Rums

grim
edited September 5 in General

Anyone ever mess around with evaporated cane juice to get a style closer to agricole?

Would love to get my hands on a few totes of cane juice, but that's likely never going to happen up here in the Northeast US. I don't think anyone even juices to tote and refrigerated shipping would be way too cost prohibitive.

Looking for something less like jaggery/piloncillo/panela which seem to all be fired at higher temperatures, and already undergoing caramelization. I know some ECJ's are evaporated under partial vacuum and are a bit lighter.

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Comments

  • SingleMaltYinzer

    No need for sugar cane. You have a resource around you that is plentiful that makes a great substitute: Corn. I did it last year and it turned out great. We processed the corn stalks the same as sugar cane with a cane juicer.

  • grim

    Wow, mind blown.

    How much liquid is extracted from stalk? How much would you need to yield a liter/gallon?

    So many questions.

  • grim
    edited September 5

    Looks like even General George Washington himself tried it.

    The False Hope of Corn Stalk Rum during the American Revolution @ Age of Revolutions

  • richard

    Interesting read

  • SingleMaltYinzer

    @grim said: How much liquid is extracted from stalk? How much would you need to yield a liter/gallon?

    Yeah, not much with the crap equipment we were using. The Brix was pretty high I remember but I can't recall the exact number. I believe we ended up with around a 6-8% wash. We did about ~2000 sqft of corn stalks. Our cane juicer was not set up properly so our yield was horrible. We were able to make around 1 gallon of finished product.

    The issue we keep running into is that you can only really use sweet corn. You need to harvest the stalk while it's still green. Dent corn sits in the field until it's dried out. So you have to play the game of when the farmer harvests the sweet corn and how long it sits until you can get at it. At this point it's beyond peak as up to that point the farmer is making more off of the corn than what you would pay for the stalks.

    We're thinking of paying a farmer to grow corn just for us. I believe we would need 5 acres or so for a decent test batch.

    I will say - the fresh juice and the final product smells amazing. It smells/tastes like cachace/agricole rum.

  • grim
    edited September 4

    Poking around a bit - seems you can spike the liquid production by not allowing the sweet corn cobs to develop. That said, you’d be growing a field of stalks, so the economics might not really make any sense at all.

  • SingleMaltYinzer

    Yeah it's more of a gimmick than serious spirit due to the economics. I mean, even for a regular sugar cane agricole, as a sales go, if it were super popular there would be more of it made.

    It's fun and interesting so as something unique it could sell small amounts. I don't see anyone making this as their only thing*.

    *Of course someone going to do it just to prove me wrong. ;)

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