I’m watching a show on sugar, and they mention that rum came about when, in the 16th Century, some wild yeast got into some molassas. The molassas fermented and became a beer that, the show claims, was enjoyed by the locals until people started distilling it into rum.
But what about that beer? (Note that distilling spirits ‘at home’ is illegal in the U.S., but beer-making isn’t.) I did come across one recipe online that suggests adding raisins and ginger to the beer. But have any of you Doper brewers made plain molassas beer with just molassas, water and yeast? Is it as carbonated as regular beer? How did it taste?
(I’m not a homebrewer. Just curious.)
Well, I’ve never done it with molasses, so this applies only to the carbonated section of your question - carbonation is generally a result of “priming” where a small amount of sugar is added to the new beer (or whatever) right before bottling. The original sugars should have turned to alcohol by this time so if bottled without priming there will be little to no carbonation, regardless of what was fermented.
Just about any fermented beverage can be carbonated to whatever degree you wish, as long as the alcohol content isn’t so high as to kill off the yeasties.
Homebrewing is fun.
I’ve added molassas to beer I was brewing many years ago. Probably 20% molassas and the rest regular malt. The taste was ok but certainly didn’t improve the beer any.
couple things determine what fermentables beer is made out of including 1. what you have locally and 2. what is cheapest (hence the widespread use of rice malt in the US) 3. taste of the final product.
It’s used in the brewing of olde englishe ales and has an effect on the flavor and mouthfeel of the beer. Compare an old english to a brown ale to get a bit of an idea; I’ve only made one brew that used molasses.
For the most part, any time you use something that amounts to “just plain sugar” like, well, sugar, or molasses or honey, it’s done to raise the alcohol content without changing the texture or the density (specific gravity) of the beer: if you get more fermentable sugar into the mix by using more malt, you end up with a heaver, thicker, chewier beer, but if you add pure sugar, you just get more alcohol. Homebrew kits used to make “american” beers (Budweiser clones… why???) use some rice syrup rather than all malt syrup because, along with the malt, it adds alcohol while leaving the final product very light and texture-free.
The show mentioned that the molassas beer – which I gathered was just molassas, water and yeast – was about 12% alcohol.
I think that “molasses beer” in this case is a misnomer. Molasses, water, and yeast sounds more akin to mead (fermented honey) than beer.
Really, I think that this is just one more in an almost endless array of alcoholic beverages that exist in the world. Basically, anything that contains sugar (or, as in the case of barley, contains starches that can be broken down into sugar) can be used as food for yeast, creating alcohol and carbon dioxide as byproducts. Fermented molasses with carbonation would not be “beer”, it would be something like weak fizzy rum.
IMO, the program should have used the word “liquor” instead of “beer”, and avoided confusion. “Beer” has always been used to describe a brew made from fermented grain (usually barley, but sometime other cereal grains), and has been around for at least 6,000 years. The word has a specific connotation, which does not describe the drink in question here. “Liquor”, being a more generic term, would have been more correct.