Why your home made rum tastes thin, and where body comes from
When the flavour is right but it still feels like water
There's a particular kind of disappointment where you've mixed up a rum, the flavour is more or less what you were after, and yet it goes across the tongue like water and vanishes. That isn't a flavour fault, it's a mouthfeel fault, and the reason so many people fail to fix it is that they keep adding more flavouring to a problem that flavouring was never going to solve.
What body actually is
Body is the weight and texture of a drink rather than its taste, and in a commercial dark rum it comes from a few things you haven't got in a bottle of neutral spirit. Residual sugars from the molasses, compounds picked up over years in a barrel, a small amount of added sweetening in plenty of cases, and a bottling strength somebody chose on purpose. A home flavoured spirit starts from a base that has been stripped as clean as possible, so there's genuinely nothing in there to give it weight until you put something in.
Start with the strength, because a weak spirit always feels thin
Before you add anything, check what strength you have actually ended up at. A neutral watered down further than you intended, or a batch where you were generous with the volume and mean with the essence, will feel thin no matter what else you do. Most flavourings such as Still Spirits Top Shelf Jamaican Dark Rum are built for 2.25 litres at about 40%, and landing below that mark is the commonest single cause of a watery result.
The things that genuinely add weight
Glycerine is what most home blenders reach for, and a very small amount of it changes the texture noticeably without making the drink sweet. Still Spirits Distillers Caramel does a similar job from a different direction, since it brings colour and a little richness with it. Oak is the third route, and Still Spirits Oak Cask gives you some of what a barrel would have given you, over days rather than years.
Where the law actually sits
Worth saying plainly, because it gets muddled constantly. Owning a still is legal in Australia and we're allowed to sell you one. Distilling spirits at home is the part that needs an excise manufacturer licence from the ATO. That's a real licence with real conditions attached, not a formality anybody gets to skip. Flavouring a base spirit you have bought is a different activity altogether and needs no licence at all, so that's the road most people end up taking.
Go small, and only change one thing at a time
All three of those work in very small quantities and all three are easy to overdo, so change one thing, leave it overnight, and taste it before you change anything else. If you add glycerine and caramel and oak on the same evening and the result is wrong, you'll have no idea which of them did it, and you'll have to start the whole batch again to find out.
Shop related products
- Still Spirits Top Shelf Jamaican Dark Rum Essence 50ml. The dark, molasses heavy rum profile.
- Still Spirits Top Shelf Distillers Caramel 50ml. Colour and a little richness, used sparingly.
- Still Spirits Oak Cask 50ml. Oak character in days rather than years.
- Still Spirits Spiced Rum Essence 50ml. Spice carries its own weight, so it reads fuller in the mouth.
Did you know we also keep glycerine in a 125ml bottle and in a 1 litre bulk size, PET bottle cartons, plastic seal packs and the two scale hydrometer in the shop. The glycerine in particular isn't on the website, so ring us on (08) 8536 4333 to check the shelf.
The rest of the range is in our homebrew collection.
Our homebrew adviser Brewhilder will talk you through your own setup if you would rather work it out that way.
Read next
- Still Spirits Cherry Bourbon essence, how to use it
- Still Spirits Fruity Esters Profile, what it does
- Still Spirits whisky profiles, what they do and the law
Changing one thing at a time is excellent advice that I give often and follow about half the time.
Cheers,
Candeece
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