Molasses Dilution

[hagar681]

I am just getting ready to make my first attempt at rum and was wondering if somebody could give me a ballpark range for the ration of water to molasses. I'm planning on shooting for about a 10% wash.

[mcsology]

Depending on the kind of molasses you are using, you may have to add your molasses in stages to get to 10%

You usually will want to not go higher than 24 ish brix to start. Since molasses can be 40-50% fermentable sugar (or even lower!) you will get a mash of 6-7% abv if you let a 24ish brix wash go terminal, so when the gravity drops to about 8-10 brix, you can add the remaining thinned molasses to the fermenter and get to your target.

Homedistiller.org has some pretty decent info about sugar washes, molasses and some very useful calculators.

You could use a %age molasses and a %age other sugars to get to 10% in one go. Knowing the sugar content of your molasses will be necessary to calculate specifics.

Hope this helps!

Edit------------

P.S.: If you are trying to turn around your rum in less than a year, avoid feedstock molasses. There's so much sulfur in that shit, it'll take at least 6 months in barrel and likely longer for the sulfur to migrate out of the spirit (at least in my experience).

[ebstauffer]

Your molasses should come with a cut sheet indicating what percentage of weight is fermentable. Take the weight of molasses x % and know that sugar provides 46 ppg and you can calculate out how much molasses is needed per unit of water to get to between 1075 and 1080 (which I think is too high and will take much too long to ferment).

[hagar681]

Thanks guys. Appreciate the help!

[eganter]

Honestly, 2 pounds per gallon of water is a good place to start.

[captnKB]

depends on you molasses, blackstrap has considerably less sugar than light molasses. the setup I've run is to use 220 gallons of water to one 55gallon drum of first run high sugar molasses.