How To Make A Spiced Rum

hey what's up guys it's Bu from my high distilling down here once again at Balmer Peak Distillery they actually make three incredible rums down here so last week we were down here and tried to make our own second time for me and you know it was it was good it was drinkable it was rum but we want extraordinary we don't know the name of mediocre here at Mile High we make amazing equipment works of art and we need to translate that into our spirit so we're going to be trying to clean this rum up today and it's going to be a great learning experience because we're also going to show you how to post flavor what we have here is a mighty mini pro this is the smallest of the pro series we make and this pro has an infusion Basket in the middle this is going to allow us to put all kinds of Botanical and spices in here and Infuse the flavor out and since we already have the flavor from our rum now we can just focus on getting that flavor from our Botanicals out aside from that it's also going to be a great learning experience to teach you more about these infusion baskets if you have a proom model we might run into a few things we might see some flooding in that basket so you know we'll be correcting that if we see that and showing you how to do that yourself furthermore it's also important to when you're infusing to use correct amounts of Botanical now these distillers these professional distillers you'll see them with a fully packed glass and that's because they have their recipe down okay we don't so a little bit's going to go a long way remember we can always put flavor back in we can't really take it out once it's there so we're going to be cautious of what we're doing and it's a great size for a test batch we could definitely experiment with a few different Botanical I think the cameraman and I are in accordance that uh we're just going to play it safe here Trident true cinnamon and orange peel these things work aside from that I also have some star and a few other things and we could potentially be bringing that in at a later point but I think we really want to redeem R ourselves with this rum and make it extraordinary I think we're just going to stick with what we know Works what I have already is going to be water to my element line already in my boiler and then I'm just going to be dumping these faints and actually all of our rum that we did last week in here and uh and then we'll redistill it so let's go ahead and dump in all of our spirit you can see we made a nice golden rum we were experimenting with that and then the rest is all silver or white rum so we are going to start filling our Botanical inside of our Pro notice I did take out our reflex chamber this strips flavor and I want flavor so we take this out there is a screened gasket that's going to go below this site glass included with the unit that's going to help everything you put in here stay there now this was a demo unit that was sitting right outside our front door and I grabbed it for this video video without even thinking if it had all the components available so we didn't have our screen gasket when we first got here what we did is took a little bit of our copper packing that we're we've already stuffed into our Tower we cut it into a square size screen just a little bit bigger than the diameter of this we put a gasket still underneath it so that this could actually seal but basically this is going to act as a net above our gasket and everything seems to be working fine we only have one cinnamon stick in there right now we're going to add a little bit more weight and it should hold though now remember that with cinnamon a little bit goes a long way so we're going to start small remember we can always put that flavor back in can't really take it out once it's there another thing we're doing is breaking our cinnamon sticks in two this is just going to get you better surface area H gives you more of that flavor all throughout the finer your material that goes in here is the more flavor you'll get from that certain Botanical so let's go ahead and put the rest of our cinnamon sticks in and then I think we're going to fill about half full of our chamber with these so this is all an experimental batch guys all right we are going to see just how well this works and once we've finished with our Botanical our head's going to go on now this is a 3 gallon boiler and if you've seen the past videos we've done here you know Austin has a really good controller 220 volt 50 500 watt so I'm going to put a timer up on the video screen here and we're going to see we're going to time just how fast this boiler three gallon boiler heats up with this controller uh that happened fast that was 10 minutes 13 seconds in fact probably a little bit under 10 minutes because uh it was steaming for a little bit before I uh turned my controller down to make it not steam so so welcome to the Run guys so our first class is filling up and remember with this rum we did we did make cuts when we did the initial rum process the only thing is is we threw everything we did all the cuts back in this boiler so we're going to have to make them again something small not really that big of a deal but this is going to be our four shots I will say in the the taste test I did already my four shots just to see that initial flavor and what this glass is doing I'm really liking things we've got a good balance going on so far between our cinnamon and our Orange it's got a little bit of sweetness this is cassia cinnamon we're using this is a species of cinnamon that's primarily grown in Asia usually in China um this is more of a spicy cinnamon there's three different types there's more of like a floral sweet cinnamon we're using one that has a little more spice to it so we'll see if that comes over a little bit more um so far our chamber doesn't seem to be over flooding it shouldn't this early in the Run anyways so we're doing good there and we're just going to continue to pull our our four shots how much because this is such a small unit is probably going to be well we could be safe and get about 500 milliliters out that'd be our four shots plus into our heads which we're not looking to collect anyway um we will see we'll keep playing with our flavors seeing what's happened when this fills about maybe 300 M full we'll do another taste test and see what we want to do from there Moment of Truth fellas let's see what we've got going on so they're four shots so our scale is already really low of what we should be expecting we're not going to get a lot of our flavor out obviously in this it's going to be harsh we're just using this as is a base to see what flavors are coming over the smell of cinnamon is all around me in the air uh which is great as far as what I'm tasting I'm not getting a lot of that over I'm getting the spiciness of it but as far as the cinnamon flavor goes I'm not seeing a whole lot I'm getting a little bit of orange I think only time will tell I think it's too soon to really tell we're going to let this go a little bit longer and and see if that flavor changes for now I'm going to keep on filling this jar up I don't think I like anything that we're having right now no harm in just filling that jar up um one thing too if you had watched the last video we did on this rum we talked about doing some Dunder with our with our boil here what Dunder is well there's what traditional Dunder is is bacteria basically goat heads chicken bones all that is fermented and created into making a rum our d D another form of Dunder is we took our spent wash from our rum that's the what's left over in the boiler after the run finished and we were planning to let that sit for a little bit and then bring it in here redistill it with the rest of our room fun fact about five minutes after the video stopped shooting for that uh I spilled it literally everywhere in my car all over the floor of this Distillery and there was a trail leading from my car to to The Distillery so I got about 50 lashes from Austin over at Walmer Peak the owner called me stupid said no I won't amount to anything they're all right I just had a really bad day so Dunder is no longer on the table obviously that's all a joke uh they were they were I was the only one beating myself up so as we fill up our first jar of heads got to run the math and sort of see how much heads we're looking to expect it's a little hard for me because this was an already distilled alcohol I think we had about four jars worth of heads that went in to this boiler and a lot of those are going to be cleaned up so you have to run some sort of scientific calculations on that that's why smell and taste is easier because as far as flavor goes this is great I'm liking what's coming out when I taste it it's not really methanol but it's very very harsh it burns that's a good indication for me that heads are in here which they should be we just pulled our four shots we'll have to do a little bit more of that for this second jar and and see where we're at for that so far I'm a little bit worried that we didn't put enough of those Botanical in we can stop the run at some point and fill this chamber up more and we can also infused directly through this jar we can put cinnamon sticks and orange peel in a bag in a jar like this and try to get more of that out but I think it's still too soon to tell we're in our heads things aren't there all the way okay guys and we have prematurely taking off this jar because our flavor changed it's fairly safe to assume that we are now in our hearts so it's about 18 Oz worth of heads and let's see what we're at in terms of proof this was 130 initially and now we're sitting a little bit above 150 152 maybe there's probably a little bit of a temperature variable playing we've managed to increase 20 proof by redistilling obviously this will be tapered down to a drinkable level probably about 80 and in that flavor change we're getting more of that cinnamon over still not much on the orange which is surprising I would say 90% of how this is filled up is orange but it goes to show you cinnamon goes a long way orange is a little bit harder to bring over so gives you a good idea of the of the recipe when you're when you're playing with a chamber so as our first CH of Hearts is collected and we run into our second that flavor is coming through a lot more we're getting that spiciness from the cinnamon orange not really noticeable we're going to have to figure out a solution for that probably one thing that I really expected to run into and I'm glad we're not is our chamber isn't filling up what can happen is this chamber gets too full or maybe you're running too fast and this chamber will start to flood when that happens it's just a matter of dialing things back and uh decreasing the amount of water going into your still and your heat going into your still and pushing Vapors up and in turn this will start to limit itself some infusion Chambers will have valves sitting on the bottom of them that will allow you to basically dump all that excess liquid that you're seeing in there and that can be a really nice additive to your spirit you can take that oil every and protein everything in this chamber and get it out as an extract and actually fill your jars with that Downs slope distilling is a wonderful Distillery here in Englewood Colorado that's what they do for their gin that's why their gin's kind of a unique tint to it they're taking the oils from when they do their gin run and infusing with that so it's not always a bad thing so it's time for some experimentation folks we want that orange flavor to come over a little bit more we're going to try a method known as soaking to try to get that over more usually I'd put this in a bag it just be a bag packed with orange peel or whatever you're trying to infuse it would sit in the jar and then over time it meates and you get that flavor out I don't have a something to do that with here at this location right now so we're just going to sit them in their loose and then we'll just filter them out a little bit later through a cheesecloth something real simple but we're going to see at the end of this run if this orange pulls over more in this jar than the others on top of that we also have some Oak sitting in this jar so we're going to be infusing some Oak flavor into this one it's probably not going to be too prominent during this part of the Run we'll come back in a few weeks and it should make more of a difference but again we're just experimenting and we're going to see my favorite rum here at Balmer Peak is the spice rum and I'm not sure of the process I'm not sure what they do if the color they get is from their extract from the Botanical they use and spices they use or if they do put it on Oak I'm guessing the ladder I think they do put it on Oak but that is just a phenomenal well-rounded rum so I I think Oak can really maybe bring this to a certain level as well as we head into what should be jar number five of our hearts well jar number five of past the heads we're going to try to using basic math determine kind of where our tail should be I think we're starting to head into them we were at 150 in our initial heart jar and as we headed right into here in our third we started seeing a drop 140 now for this fourth jar I'm getting a reading of about 138 so it seems like we are dropping and because I haven't changed my flow I think we're probably in our Tails we're running a small three gallon unit I wasn't expecting a lot of yeld to begin with and as you guys know who watch the channel I love the Tails I love the flavors that come over so I'm going to take the chance to take a shot here and hope this is amazing if you guys have a shot near you go grab one if you don't and take one with me wanted to thank you guys so much for watching the videos please be sure to like And subscribe if you're liking what we're doing we we love doing this for y'all I hope it's informative I hope it gives you different methods of distilling that you weren't aware of I hope you learn something from all of our videos and even if you don't thank you guys for watching I hope they're at least enjoyable take a shot with me y'all cheers to you and that's exactly why I love the tails that is what I wanted we've got a good mix of cinnamon and sweet from the Sweet Orange Peel I'm loving it so far tiny bit of spice sweet I'm I'm happy with it what we'll do from here is I'm going to continue to experiment as you can see experimentation is already gone and had an effect we have a completely orange almost looks like a pumpkin spice perfect for the season this one I just distilled this was the last JW I had under here even though it's not in line correctly and we're already starting to get a little bit of tint there this is our oaking one we did and so far nothing there but I had already used this wood once to be honest with y'all so the Tenon is already a little bit uh absorbed so this will probably take a little longer to age remember in Tails tasting is very important Tails go from a nice enhancement on the flavor to Bitter and sour pretty fast so we're going to have to keep a close eye and to be honest with you I haven't really run a three gallon before I know where my cuts kind of ly in an eight gallon and a 16 but a three not really sure I don't know how much we're expecting out you don't cut your tails off at a certain proof level it's really just about Flavor so regardless of what proof we're at this could go bitter and sour at even as high as 120 proof we might experiment a little more as we're here distilling is all about experimentation it's that's the funnest part to me have fun while you're doing this this is how recipes are developed every professional distiller you know they didn't start by knowing their exact recipe for their infusion base they didn't start with knowing exactly what to put in and ferment to create the the wonderful Spirits they make they had to experiment so do yourself some J Justice experiment have fun in this craft anything that's ruined can be fixed as we're seeing our initial batch of this rum was not bad but it wasn't great either and now we've made it into something that's better surprise we're almost done with the Ron the magic of editing so in this time we've collected a lot more jars and we have some great info to share again I've explained in past videos I love working with artists distillers like Austin over at balber Peak they just have such experience in the craft and such knowledge and wisdom so this one's common sense it's really something we should have thought of before but Austin shared when you're trying to infuse those flavors and we're doing the method we're doing now stripping runs and then coming back for a spirit run which we're doing now you really don't want your heads in there those heads are going to take away from a lot of the essence and flavor of these botanical and it's all being pitched so you really want to try to make your head cut and not include it in the spirit run you really just want your your hearts and your tails in this Spirit Run when you're trying to infuse that flavor we have a few jars that are our heads that have that flavor intact that could have been put into our hearts and our Tails as we were talking about earlier on in this video there's always ways to remedy the situation and this is what we've decided with our infusion methods okay we didn't like that flavor coming over we didn't get a lot and that's because a lot of it went into our heads so we remedied by infusing and putting our flavoring right into our jar so that's one way to remedy another thing we could do is just recharge this basket we could shut the still off cold crash it let it get down cool so we're not losing any vapor and then repack this column with fresh Botanical if we had discovered this a little earlier on in the Run maybe halfway through our hearts that's something we would have done I think we've already reached our jars that we're going to be able to consume and have it be palatable and really this is just the the faints the end of our taals that we're going to collect anyway so it's still good alcohol and we can rerun it at some point in the future but lesson learned hindsights 2020 we'll come back and uh remember this next time we do an infusion because this won't be the last let's go ahead and take a taste test just to make sure I'm not blowing smoke on what we've got the flavor is still there and this could potentially be a Topper a blender for some of our spirits but it's D and there's definitely a bitterness to it it leaves kind of a a bad taste in your mouth and I think it's pretty safe to assume we've collected all we really can we'll do a tiny bit of a taste test for each maybe they need a little something and maybe this will provide our solution maybe this will give it a little extra balance of that of that character okay we're definitely starting to create that spent wash we'll still continue to collect and probably to around 40 proof 20 proof we still have some flavor in there and that flavor is good for a future batch another thing we can look at doing is we had the cinnamon flavor in this jar would we rerun it a second time there's a potential we can lose a lot of that flavor from this jar so because this is still good alcohol and it's lower and proof than some of our hearts we have to lute these Jars of Hearts anyway right we got to bring it down to 150 proof down to 80 why don't we use this still good alcohol that has a ton of cinnamon flavor and use it as a Topper we'll get that cinnamon flavor out it's still going to decrease our proof a little bit because it's a lower strength alcohol and we're getting all the flavor out so good idea to use it as a Topper as opposed to rerunning it I would start if you do go this route start small little bits at a time remember you can always bring flavor in can't really take it out once it's there I wanted to touch base real quick on the infusion method through these jars you're seeing now obviously this is a great way to impart flavor at the cost of your jar getting a little bit of color this is very orange you guys might enjoy that that might be something you're looking for if you're trying to keep your jar clear but still impart that flavor I wouldn't recommend using this infusion method there's no way to prevent that color from coming over you could filter it out and remove that color but at the cost of your flavor of ding another thing to touch base on is regarding when you are experimenting with a batch we were pretty much going by eye I don't think the correct way to do this is say oh for this jar I put a quarter of a jar worth of orange in here I don't think that's proper you really want to go by weight so when you're experimenting try different weights when you find the weight that works try to keep it and that'll make you more consistent in your batch size okay guys we're here at the end and we took a a pretty big cut to really taste what we have here so we have our four shots and heads which we can disregard they're not important they're being rerun or pitched anyway we have our Tails our spit wash like the end of our tails and spent wash here and we're going to disregard those as well might be used as Toppers but it's kind of irrelevant right now we're focused on these seven spirits that you see in front of you we're trying to finalize a recipe we're trying to get things going and each of these have a different characteristic that we're bringing in to the process so we have the owner of my high distilling and the cameraman Noah sitting behind the camera we have me and we have Austin Master distiller and owner of balber peak Distillery and we've tasted each of these Spirits we have some important notes and we're going to see what we got here our first jar that we tasted was our very first Jar of Hearts this is is a white rum not infused with anything other than what's in the Botanical basket right here as far as ratings go pretty across the board but a little below average what we had was in terms of notes it's got a molasses flavor but it's pretty light on everything else so I don't think it's anything we should consider formulating into our recipe but nonetheless I would say an o K Spirit to drink number two was pretty much across the board we had some floral and some orange notes it's a little sweet this was the flavor that we imparted with the orange in the infusion soaking method so we have about a quarter of the jar filled with oranges in here we'll translate that into a certain weight at a future point but as far as things go I think it's probably missing some masses flavor and some character istics of the rum itself but it's got some sweetness to it brings in some sweetness brings in some floral citrusy orange flavors as to be expected jar number three was treated a little better it's your same white rum but we have some infusion spirals in here now we've only been infusing with Oak spirals for less than an hour this will only get better over time we're talking about some bold rum flavors in this jar and we have a medium spice level so I think it's still missing some floral characteristics and some citrus from some orange could be a good note to bring this in later on and jar number four was one of the winners this got a pretty high rating between us all this has a strong spice to it we've got some peppery but we also have some fruit so this has done a pretty good job of keeping all the notes we want in our rum in this jar what we did here for this one is we had our same orange that was in jar number two we decreased that amount it's probably an eighth of a jar and we also added another cinnamon stick into this jar jar number five was probably our worst out of everything we tasted this was supposed to be the white rum and then we just added some cinnamon so all we did was add some cinnamon and it by far got the worst rating that goes to show you a little bit goes a long way we already had the cinnamon intact it was just a matter of changing the orange amount and Oak amount and different things like that but adding more cinnamon was not the way to go jar number five will drink it you know I will but not really the best jar number six actually took the lead this is by far the best jar that all of us encountered in fact we got from a scale of 1 to 10 all of us rated eight so what this is is a little bit of that orange that we saw saw in this jar we also have one more cinnamon stick but I think the oak was really the thing we added a little bit of Oak and I think that balanced everything all together so a little bit of each in this jar jar number seven was the same as jar number one Noah and I treated it a little bit above average but Austin who remember makes three types of rums and completely knows what he's doing way better than no one I would rated this a four so I don't think this is quite it I I don't think white rum is the way to go you're really getting the the basis of a rum a rum is nothing extraordinary inherently I think you can add Oak and different spices into a rum to really bring it above the level you want it at but a white rum it can be done right Balmer Peak is truth to that I don't think we reached it with our rum and that's okay we can in fuse this jar I'm happy with what we created today and I'm looking forward to a future video where we may improve this rum but for now I hope you enjoyed the video thank you guys so much for watching I mentioned this earlier on but if you like this video please like subscribe look at Balmer Peak Distillery they are a wonderful Distillery here in the heart of Lakewood if you're local check them out and thank you guys for watching take care into the next video down

Channel: Mile Hi Distilling

Views: 4,051

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Id: dT6-aLPSa2k

Length: 28min 42sec (1722 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2023