by Scott Negelspach

Created on: June 02, 2009   Last Updated: June 03, 2009

Ever since the dawning age of man, when cavemen started eating fermenting fruit, we have been constantly experimenting with alcohol. From our ancestor's fermented fruit, to our modern day liquors, wines, and beers, mankind has made an art out of ethanol. In this article, I'll be discussing the history and production of one of today's most popular varieties of liquor: rum.

Rum is a hard liquor, meaning it's ethanol content is higher than 30% (or 60 proof), that is traditionally gold to dark amber in color, although clear filtered versions are also available. Rum can trace it's rich coloring to the ingredients from which it's made: sugar cane and molasses.

The sugar cane plant, when raw, contains a sugary pulp. This pulp is mashed up, filtered for solids, concentrated, and dried out, leaving only a dark thick syrup of molasses. This molasses is then mixed up with a mixture of yeast and water. Yeast, like other small life forms, is very efficient at eating sugars.

When a yeast eats up a sugar molecule, however, it excretes ethanol as a by product; this is why yeast is so important to the alcohol industry. It creates the alcohol itself, to be then flavored, filtered, and purified. Once the yeast is mixed in with such a sugary mixture as molasses, and it begins converting the sugars to ethanol, you start getting raw rum.

The yeast will continue turning the sugary molasses into ethanol until you have only pure ethanol. While this may sound obvious, it is actually one of the most important factors in how a rum tastes. At some point, before you purify the mixture, you must filter out the yeast. How soon, or late, you do this will determine how much of the mixture is sugar, and how much is pure ethanol.

The sooner you remove the yeast, the sweeter the rum. Once you have filtered out the yeast from the mixture, you have a relatively weak alcoholic mixture that still has many of the microscopic impurities left behind from the pulp. In order to remove these, the mixture is distilled.

The process of distillation is a simple, if effective, method to refining alcohol. Distillation works by manipulating the different boiling points of different chemicals; if one chemical will boil before another, and you can carefully moderate the temperature of the two chemicals, you can turn one into steam while the other remains liquid.

In the case of liquor distillation, the two ingredients you are looking to seperate are water and ethanol. Since ethanol will boil at 173 degrees fahrenheit, and water at 212 degrees fahrenheit, you can seperate out the ethanol from the water by maintaining a temperature above the boiling point of ethanol, but below that of the water. The steam is then colled, condensed back into liquid form, and usually redistilled, to further remove impurities in the ethanol. A skilled liquor taster can detect the difference in flavor of an alcohol that has been distilled anwhere between 1 and 7 times (beyond that, the human tongue cannot detect the few impurities that are left).

Once this mixture is distilled as many times as the maker chooses, the mixture is remixed with a concentrate of the filtered, and sometimes spiced molasses mixture for flavor, and aged in wooden barrels. This not only helps to bring out flavors, but also to color the rum further. In clear rums, these last two steps are skipped, and the rum is either mixed with pure chemical flavor additive, or else left as an unflavored clear rum.

A lot of work goes into making rum, so the very next time you need a conversation piece at a party, delightfully explain just how much work went into that Mai Tai they're holding.

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