I Made A Historic Pirate Rum At Home

this is my attempt at a historic pirate rum and this video is going to be all about explaining what on earth that even means how i made it and of course what the stuff tastes like how's it going chases i hope you're having a kick-ass week so rum's association with pirates has turned into this corny and i mean let's face it cheap marketing ploy within the rum world which is sad it's really sad because good run by itself it doesn't need anything it can tell its own story and it really is a category of spirits that's kind of it struggles sometimes to get the recognition that it really deserves but as a larger idea out there in the wild i think this connection between pirates and rum persists and is popular because the whole thing just gets romanticized the modern idea the modern aesthetic of a pirate is just cool and we all love that underdog outlaw story the whole thing is just kind of irresistible and the connection between that and rum is just it's easy it's seamless for the public mind but if you strip all of that away the point of this video is were pirates and rum actually a thing and if they were actually a thing how was that rum made what was it made from and what i really want to know can i make something similar here in my shed or is this whole thing just a hollywood story with a cool aesthetic speaking of cool aesthetics it's time to talk about today's sponsor clocks and colors they make a whole bunch of really cool rings bracelets and necklaces for guys and girls but if you're into their aesthetic that look that i was talking about earlier on you're going to want to check out their privateers collection it's pretty dope i have the tortuga and the north star the good news is that you can win a 500 gift card to spend on their website and all you need to do is comment on this video and sign up to their mailing list with the link in the description down below the even better news is that everyone that signs up gets a 40 gift card to spend and hopefully you're the one that ends up with the 500 bucks to get started on this project i think it would be smart to nail down a time and a place in history and the obvious choice for me is the golden age of piracy in the caribbean and the reason for that is that at least loosely i think this is what springs to people's mind when you mention the word pirate or piracy there seems to be some historic debate about exactly when the golden age of piracy began and exactly when it finished but what does seem clear is that say between 1660 and the very beginning of the 18th century piracy was at its peak in the caribbean so there were pirates in the caribbean in that time period what about rum luckily i talked to matt patrick recently and recorded a podcast with him he is a rum historian and i learned a bunch if you're interested in the history of navy rum check it out it's pretty cool uh but i did manage to learn a bunch of really interesting stuff that pertains specifically to this video the earliest reference we have to kane spirits comes from brazil back in the 1500s and interestingly cane itself the sugar cane came to the caribbean area in the 1500s but we don't see cane spirits popping up in the caribbean until something more like 1630 or 1640 where they showed up in martinique and barbados in 1655 the brits kicked the spaniards out and while it wasn't exactly clear whether or not the spanish were producing rum before they left as soon as the brits took over they definitely started production by 1687 the british royal navy was officially allowed to restock their supplies with rum while they were in the caribbean and by around 1700 the caribbean rum was starting to make its way back to europe via trade so yes there are 100 was definitely rum in the area at that time so i guess really the goal of this video was something like how to make a mid to late 17th century caribbean rum you got to have those clickable youtube titles though eh [Laughter] so let's start with ingredients and to do that i think we need to understand that the the main goal of sugarcane is not rum it's sugar especially at that time so if you take cane juice and you keep boiling it sugar precipitates out as the moisture level and the juice drops and if you keep doing it until you can't take any more sugar out you're left with molasses molasses is essentially a waste product a byproduct of producing sugar and by these mid 1600s the people of the caribbean had figured out how to upscale that waste stream into rum so for my pirate realm i decided to make it with black strap molasses and this is the molasses that's had the most sugar taken out of it it is the least desirable molasses in fact you know often it's used for animal feed and stuff like that but i may have made a slight mistake here the technology used to extract sugar from cane juice now is a lot better than it used to be so the amount of sugar that can be taken out of molasses is much higher blackstrap molasses might have something like 45 sugar back then it probably would have been something more like 60 to 75 so maybe maybe i should have chosen like a standard molasses not a black strap molasses i don't know i'm still undecided on that you guys tell me what you think but molasses is not the only thing that can provide fermentable sugars around a sugar plantation in fact very few if any of the rums made in that time would have been made with molasses only as the cane juice was boiled in the process of making sugar skimmings would be taken off the top you know so the scum would rise to the top and they'd skim it off this had a whole lot of fermentable sugar in it and that was often used in rum as well along with honestly anything else with fermented sugar in it maybe they had some semi-discarded cane juice laying around or whatever unfortunately unfortunately here in new zealand fresh cane is just not available and i even looked for you know like bottled cane juice or something like that to be able to imitate this kind of thing i just couldn't find it i thought about adding you know other cane products some sort of sugar back in i just didn't feel right about that so at the end i used just black strap molasses seven and a half kilos of the stuff in fact next up water molasses is so thick and so concentrated that you're not going to be able to ferment it unless you dilute it back down with something but water was let's just say not exactly as easy to get hold of as it is for most of us nowadays the caribbean distillers had worked out that they could take some of the stuff that was left in the still from the last distillation combine that with water and use it to dilute the molasses down saving themselves a little bit of water this dunder also affected the ph of the mash making it more acidic which wasn't actually a bad thing that acidity helps to stave off some of the nastier microbes that could take over in the wash and it can actually add improved flavor over time as well luckily i had bottled up some dunder from my last rum distillation so i used five liters of boiling water my dunder had gone cold already to help dissolve the molasses added 5 liters of dunder or backseat from the last rum distillation and topped the whole thing up to 25 liters in total aiming for right around 30 degrees celsius for temperature now keep in mind guys that this is what some people would now call back set not dunder it doesn't have anything growing in it it's not muck you could assume that wild yeast was just making its way into these washes that's totally plausible perhaps on the other hand they were using something kind of like a scandinavian magic stick to be honest i couldn't find much evidence one way or the other but what is abundantly clear is there would have been a huge variation of different yeasts fermenting rum so i could have used a baker's yeast propagated on molasses and in terms of just making something tasty that probably actually wouldn't have been a bad option but instead i decided to go with distiller max rm i did so because it was specifically selected to ferment rum agricola more importantly it was taken from the tropics does that mean anything no probably not but it makes me feel a little bit better i'm just not going to be able to get the same yeast they had then interestingly enough there are reports from some other home distillers out there that this distillermax rm stuff ends up tasting like poop literally the odor of human [ __ ] can show up when using distillermax rm did you know that there is evidence to show that at least sometimes sometimes human excrement was added into the rum washes to stop the slaves from consuming it before it could be distilled stop and think about that for a second that is messed up on so many different levels and this is going to be messed up too sorry guys i i couldn't go i stage friday you try pooping on camera and then tell me what it's like i couldn't do it so sorry this isn't going to be overly realistic but oh also spoiler alert my distillermax rm didn't end up smelling like poop no [ __ ] smell i don't know why i don't know the difference between my results and their results but there you have it what i did do however was ferment this without an airlock exposed the environment and i let it go for another 10 days past the end of primary fermentation just to let the wild stuff that was in there take off just a little bit south things up just a little bit and obviously no it's not going to be the same stuff that was available in the caribbean in 1673 or whatever but you get the idea right it's finally finally time to distill this stuff uh but what sort of stills techniques technology would they have used this is actually pretty easy simply because the column still the retort still the double rethought still all of these things hadn't been invented yet so it's good old-fashioned double pot stilling baby their stills would have been made almost exclusively from copper perhaps some parts made from wood my stills have a whole lot of stainless steel going on but i have added a lot more copper to the vapor path to try and more closely imitate what those early stills would have done to the spirit it's also probably important for me to point out that there's still yes it is just running as a pot still i know some of these parts look like a column or bubble paint plate parts but the all the internals have been taken out of them they're just literally acting as a pipe and holding some of that copper mesh i did the first distillation or the stripping run on my 50 litre pot still at this point in time i'm not really worried about exactly how i'm controlling the still too much i'm not worried about the flavors that are coming off and no cuts performed at this point in time we're just cutting volume down and raising the abv ready for the spirit run or the second distillation generally generally what would happen is you would do this step multiple times to collect up enough low winds from stripping runs to put back into the still and perform the spirit run or what you can do is use a smaller spirit still than stripping steel or wash still which is what i decided to do i used my little relatively mini claw hammer pot still during the second distillation power input is monitored a little bit more closely which reminds me guys uh back in the 1600s you didn't have a little dial to adjust the amount of power you're putting or energy you're putting into the still that shit's done with fire and that is that's tricky you got to give respect to that because molasses based washes are notorious for being unruly and puking this is what happened to me during my first run i managed to catch it in time and knock the power down quickly enough to avert making a big old mess and ruining my day but uh imagine having to do that with fire now matt assured me that the distillers in this period would have understood at least at some level the idea of making cuts exactly how tight or why they were making those cuts that's really not obvious to me and this is this is probably bias and pride speaking but i would like to think that i'm a little bit more picky than they were i mean i live in a world where spirits are a luxury i do this purely for enjoyment i'm not trying to make a profit off it i don't have to worry about volume i also live in a world that is full of reviewers and critics and all of that sort of stuff that just wasn't true back then it was very very different it's also true that a lot of very old rums perhaps not quite this old have survived and people that have enough money to be able to taste them can taste them and they seem to think that they were pretty good so short story long i basically decided to make cuts similar to what i would normally do in this situation but i squeezed them out just a smidge i went a little bit wider i let a little bit more heads through and a little bit more tails through than i normally would so now we have a distilled spirit and i've got to decide what proof to to set this at which is which is kind of tricky because honestly rum was used in a lot of different ways back then remember that that clean drinking water wasn't just flowing from taps freely so it was often mixed with water uh to to make dubious water stretch a little bit further if that makes sense in the end i decided to go with storing it at proof british proof so 57.5 percent uh or an american contemporary what's that 115 proof the idea being that that was a concept of the time um and i have to assume that it would make more sense to to store it at a higher abv more concentrated a smaller volume and then dull it out and proof it down to what you wanted on the spot that's what i decided to do but but but what about wood what about wood aging so while storing spirits in wooden vessels was totally a thing it wasn't a concept of maceration or barrel aging it was just a it was a means to an end we need to put the stuff somewhere we put it in the barrel to transport it or hold it until we need it we pull it out we drink it that's about all it was so it was in the barrel for as long as it was in the barrel for and on top of that the the same barrels would have been used over and over and over again they weren't choosing barrels based on the flavor it was going to impart they just didn't want to spend money on new barrels so every time the barrel was filled and emptied it would have a little bit less impact on the next spirit that went into it so i'm not going to macerate this on ager what i am going to do however is put a little bit of a x red wine barrel into this bottle with the idea being that if i drink it quickly then um it's going to have very very little effect on the spirit if it ends up sitting and being forgotten for a while like perhaps some barrels were back then then maybe it's going to have a little bit more influence and when i inevitably make this again and refill the bottle it'll be the same same wood doing the work on the spirit over and over again that just kind of seems fitting to me but i'm guessing uh we're at the point now where you guys want to know what this stuff actually tastes like so let's get stuck in oh by the way these chase the craft glen key and glasses available at chasethecraft.com if you're interested but before we do that i need to say a huge huge thank you a huge thank you to the patreons thank you so much guys for being the ones that are the core crew that really really meaningfully support the channel i i can't say a big enough thank you to you i really do appreciate it the first thing that is notable is that i still have a a a bit of a cold sorry guys family's all been sick so um i'll do what i can all joking aside the first thing that jumps out is just molasses it it still smells like molasses it has that heady rum thing going on to it that sweetness that sweetness mixed with a darker deeper fuller grungier flavor it's not funk coffee chocolate toffee caramel all the way through to like borderline marmite or soy sauce almost there but not quite less less of the kind of tropical uh fruit notes that i've had in a lot of other rums okay so this is cut wider than i would normally cut and it served at 57 and it's straight off the still uh yesterday so it is gonna slap you around a little bit that's for sure all of the flavor descriptors that i gave before are there present and accountable on the palette as well along with a interesting kind of vegetal note almost past palin esque you know the long thin pieces of grass that stereotypically you see silly photos of farmers with in their mouths for some reason like if you actually do that and chewing it kind of tastes like that i think that that will disappear over the next week or two if it's sitting in the bottle that's just my experience with those sorts of flavors who knows though the question arises what is the conclusion to all of this video yes there were pirates and rum in the same location at the same time did pirates drink rum i mean i'm sure they did they had access to it i get the feeling they were an unruly bunch and they would have had no problem drinking large amounts of rum uh did they specifically like rum more than other stuff i'm sure that all pirates had their own personal preferences was i able to make a rum in my shed that actually accurately represents rum from that time ah i'd say i gave it a good old college try it is what it is i think i gave it a pretty good nudge with what i had available to me but you guys let me know tell me in the comments down below what you think i'm sure during the course of this video i've managed to piss off a rummy expert and a historian if you are one of those people by all means if i've made a mistake put a comment in the comment section down below this has been a whole lot of fun i hope you enjoyed it as well i certainly did i'm going to enjoy having the spirit around the house if you enjoyed the video too do the youtubey things drop a comment in the comment section down below that really helps me out hit the like button make sure you sub up and hit the notification bell too so you don't miss out next time i put something like this out on the interwebs i'll catch you next time guys keep on chasing the craft see ya

Channel: Still It

Views: 1,073,520

Keywords: pirate, rum, pirates rum, historic rum, 1600's, 1700's, 17th century, 18th century, sugar production, sugar plantation, still it, jesse, chase the craft, distilling

Id: 7I_Vx2p2cjQ

Length: 18min 56sec (1136 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 25 2021