structured rum

I've been sitting on this rum wash for a few months and finally decided to run it.  Not so much because I needed rum or because I wanted to try out a new column but more like I wanted the fast fermenter for other projects and this stuff had to be dealt with.  Procrastination is one thing but sloth is a whole nuther level of ugly inefficiency and I ran out of excuses for not doing the distill.  That, and I wanted more rum to play with.

I'm glad I did because it turned out to be the best rum I ever made, demoting Captain Morgan to cabin boy.

I ran this batch in the usual way with a short column and thumper.  Past experience told me after the first 100ml, that I threw out, came a pint of high potency stuff with little flavor, which I set aside.  I used a gallon jar for collecting the hearts with close monitoring after the third quart.  When the tails started to make it's ugly appearance, I collected that in a separate jar, effectively segregating it from the primo stuff.  The result was short of a gallon of 150 proof rum with a clean taste and smell that's perfect for working with.

I started with a half pint and reduced the proof to 80 with reverse osmosis, magnetized vortex, structured water.  I tried samples using just the reverse osmosis water as well as well water and the difference was clear.  Where the spring water and reverse osmosis water gave the rum a decent taste, it was the structured water that gave the rum a clean, refreshing flavor without a bit of harshness.  The spring water has a total dissolved solids of 38 but the other two are chemically identical.  There should be no difference between the structured water and the unstructured... but there is.

The naturalist Viktor Schauberger called water a living organism, insisting that in its various forms, as blood, sap or biological water, it is the basis of all life.
In order to maintain its quality, water needs to behave like it does in a natural stream, dancing and cavorting in spirals and vortices, or in the ground, constantly moving sinuously in capillaries or circulating within its storage chambers. In a youthful stream, water is most active, producing vortices down the stream length, which act like the river’s immune system.

The system I used for making the structured water is similar to the vortices below the surface of any stream or river.  The only difference is the placement of four rare earth magnets where the vortex reaches the narrowest point.  I can only assume the pure, dead water structured in this way turns it into what the old moonshiners called branch water, natural stream water from the boonies, where they used to set up their operations.  I read somewhere that moonshiners insisted on branch water over any other water, including the stuff from a well, no matter how clean it was.  They knew it was the difference between so so corn liker and the real good stuff you save for company.  Now I know why.

Not terribly satisfied with making only real good rum, I decided to try some flavor to fill in the gap and make something truly dynamic.
I added orange and lime zest to a pint of rum and let it sit for a couple days and then added some almond extract.  Holy crap!  This shit is damn good but it's missing something I couldn't quite put my finger on.

As I sat on the patio in a state of rum contemplation, the Sound of Music ran through my memory banks in the form of "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down."  That's it!  I put a teaspoon of white sugar in my mason jar of spiced rum and shook it til it dissolved and took a taste.  This is it!  A perfect balance of flavor on a pallet of deliciousness.  The orange and lime merged beautifully with the almond that complemented the delicate rum background with just enough sweet to bring it all together.

That night my neighbor came by to visit and the two of us drained a fifth, neat, one small glass at a time.  No shot shooting, no mixing with Coke.  Just sipping with the conversation revolving around how wonderful this stuff is.

To be sure, I'll be repeating this experiment in future distillations.  Do you think structured water will have a positive effect on plants or coffee?  I intend to find out.