Experiment notes · Rum
Building Funk – A Four-Step Jamaican Rum Experiment
A staged fermentation project that moved from simple molasses rum toward biological inheritance, aromatic complexity, and the idea that the most interesting ingredient might eventually be time itself.
My first experiments with rum taught me something important:
Molasses alone was not the answer.
It could make good rum. Dark, heavy and recognisable.
But the Jamaican rums I was chasing had something else.
Overripe fruit. Banana. Pineapple. Esters. Strange solvent-like notes that somehow belonged in the glass instead of ruining it.
The beet molasses experiment had already pointed me towards fermentation rather than distillation.
So the next project became considerably more ambitious.
Instead of making one batch of molasses wash, I decided to build the fermentation in stages.
Not because three fermentations must automatically be better than one.
But because I wanted each stage to leave something behind for the next.
The project eventually became:
Step 0 → Step 1 → Step 2 → Step 3
And somewhere along the way, what began as an attempt to make funky rum turned into an experiment in biological inheritance.
Step 0 – Building the environment
Step 0 was not really intended to make alcohol.
Its job was to make conditions.
I wanted acids, microorganisms, yeast activity and biological breakdown products that could later influence the real rum fermentations.
This was where the project began to look slightly less like brewing and somewhat more like something that should have been removed from the kitchen.
A small biological culture was built and kept warm.
It changed.
It smelled different from day to day.
Sometimes promising.
Sometimes suspicious.
And occasionally both at once.
I deliberately won't publish the complete composition here. That part of the experiment belongs in The No Rule Distiller – Book 2.
The important point was the idea:
Instead of asking only what ingredients should go into the rum, I started asking:
What biological environment should the rum be born into?
That was Step 0.
Step 1 – The baseline
Then came the control.
Molasses.
Water.
Yeast.
No biological history inherited from an earlier fermentation.
No experimental ecosystem.
This was important because without a relatively simple baseline, everything that followed would just become one enormous uncontrolled mess.
And I am perfectly capable of creating an enormous uncontrolled mess without calling it an experiment.
Step 1 fermented well.
It gave me exactly what I needed:
A reference point.
A rum fermentation against which the later stages could be compared.
When I eventually sampled the spirit, it was unmistakably rum.
But it was also the polite version.
Good.
Recognisable.
And not yet what I was looking for.
Step 2 – Introducing history
Step 2 used the same basic raw material, but now the system was no longer starting from zero.
Material from the earlier fermentation returned.
And Step 0 entered the process.
This changed the fermentation noticeably.
Not just the numbers.
The smell.
The behaviour.
The whole personality of the vessel.
The fermentation developed a deeper, stranger aroma. At one point I described it as something surprisingly close to a milk stout.
That is not normally the first tasting note you expect from a rum wash.
Which made it interesting.
When the spirit later began to emerge, the difference became even clearer.
There were red-fruit notes.
There was considerably more aromatic complexity.
And some characteristics began appearing much earlier in the run than I had expected.
The project was moving.
Step 3 – Letting the system accumulate
Step 3 was where I stopped pretending this was simply another molasses fermentation.
Now the new batch inherited even more from what had come before.
Backset from Step 2 became part of the next fermentation.
The biological and chemical history of the project was beginning to accumulate.
Step 3 smelled heavier and sweeter than Step 2 during fermentation.
At this stage I had no guarantee that more complexity would produce better rum.
That distinction matters.
More bacteria is not automatically better.
More acids are not automatically better.
More funk is certainly not automatically better.
There is a point where complexity becomes fault.
The interesting part is finding out where that line is.
And Step 3 was my attempt to move closer to it without crossing it completely.
When I finally sampled the heart of the resulting spirit, my notes became considerably less scientific:
Rum. No doubt.
That was the moment the entire experiment started making sense.
Three generations
I now had three separate spirit runs representing three increasingly complex fermentations.
Step 1 had begun almost clean.
Step 2 inherited biology and history.
Step 3 inherited even more.
The obvious thing would have been to blend everything together.
Eventually, that is where the project was heading.
But doing that immediately would have destroyed the most interesting part of the experiment.
I had accidentally created three generations of the same idea.
So before blending anything, they had to be evaluated separately.
How had the aroma changed?
Where did the fruit appear?
What happened to the heavier notes?
Did increasing biological complexity actually create increasing rum character?
Or was I simply becoming better at convincing myself that it did?
From recipe to lineage
The biggest change in this project was not the rum itself.
It was how I had started thinking about fermentation.
In Step 1, the fermentation was a batch.
By Step 3, it had become a lineage.
One fermentation left something behind for the next.
Acids remained.
Yeast biomass remained.
Backset remained.
Microbial activity had consequences that reached beyond the vessel in which it originally occurred.
Instead of resetting the process every time, I had started allowing it to remember.
That eventually led to another idea.
Rather than throwing the biological history away when the experiment was finished, why not keep it alive?
A living archive of the rum project.
Something that could move from:
2026 → 2027 → 2028 → 2029…
I call it Mother 2026.
And if it survives, perhaps one da