Rum and Cachaca Flashcards
What is rum?
Rum is any distilled spirit created from sugarcane. The vast majority of rums are produced from molasses, the by-product of refining sugarcane into raw sugar.
What is cachaça?
The minority, principally Brazilian cachaça and French rhum agricole, are produced from the juice of sugarcane after it’s pressed.
What produces rum variables?
The variables that can differentiate one style from another include such obvious matters as the time in oak and the type of oak (or other woods, in the case of Brazilian cachaça), whether pot stills or continuous stills are employed, whether flavors or spices are added, and perhaps less obviously, whether molasses, cane syrup or the freshly extracted juice of the cane is used to create a fermentation.
Where is rum made?
Rum is made anywhere sugarcane is grown and in many other countries besides. You don’t need to grow cane to make rum. Two hundred and fifty years ago, rum was widely produced in both England and New England, all from molasses imported from the Caribbean. Even today, much of the molasses that Caribbean and other countries utilize for rum production is supplied by Brazil.
Where did rum/sugar cane originate?
The sugarcane plant doesn’t originate in the Caribbean, as most believe, but hails from somewhere in the Far East, perhaps Indonesia. A distilled spirit from sugarcane may have been the basis for what is the earliest known large- scale distilling; it took place in what is now modern-day Pakistan over 2,500 years ago.
What is Cachaça?
Cachaça is made from sugarcane juice and comes only from Brazil, the world’s largest sugarcane producer. It is bottled from between 38 percent to 51 percent alcohol and is produced by as many as 30,000 small distillers
What are the three classifications of cachaca?
Cachaça comes in a trio of classifications: unaged (1 year in wood), aged (2 to 12 years in wood), and yellow (immature spirits that have caramel or wood extracts added so they can appear older).
