Marrow rum that is like nail varnish remover

[Potter's Farm]

My hubby made marrow rum last september, following a recipe from this forum. We have left it for a year and were disappointed to find it had turned into nail varnish remover.

Any ideas why??

He produces all sorts of wonderful homebrew but this just didn't work out.

[MKG]

Sorry to hear of your disappointment, PF. The reason (and I do have to keep harping on about this) that your marrow rum didn't turn out well is because you used the recipe for marrow rum (not merely the one on this forum, but ANY recipe for marrow rum). It's a recipe for disaster - despite many, many protestations to the contrary (I have yet to see genuine results rather than protestations), it will not and cannot work. Not, that is, unless you like minimally alcoholic demerara cordial which is an open invitation to any passing microbe.

Put it down to experience and down the drain. What you actually have is an infection of a strain of Acetobacter which has produced ethyl acetate from any alcohol which managed to form - giving you that very recognisable smell. You can kill the bacteria, but you can't get rid of the ethyl acetate.

There are many far more productive (and real) ways of making a pleasant (and real) drink.

Mike

[gregorach]

I'd never heard of marrow rum before, so I went off to look it up... What a bizarre idea! What on earth is the marrow supposed to provide?

There really are some funny ideas out there in homebrew land, aren't there?

[MKG]

You're absolutely right, Dunc - it's bizarre. Here's my theory ...

It's an old farmhouse recipe made by the ladies of the household because it was (apparently) another way to get rid of a marrow. Wines then were made sweet anyway to disguise the off-flavours that were inevitably produced, so sweet was normal. So they were happy to produce a sweet, brown liquid (in fact, a saturated solution of demerara sugar) which looked like rum and had a taste vaguely reminiscent of rum. The fact that yeast couldn't operate efficiently in that environment was irrelevant - they'd get some activity on the surface of the liquid and so could tell themselves that it was a fermentation. And who was going to drink it? Not the blokes, who'd go off to the local hostelry, but the ladies themselves, who'd probably never tasted much of the real stuff anyway.

If it became infected (highly likely) it was no big deal - chuck it out and start another one. Sometimes it would appear to have worked, and they got a sickly-sweet brown rummish liquid with a tiny amount of alcohol in it. Red Bull, basically, and drinking it would certainly have given them a big sugar boost. They convinced themselves that they really had produced a rum, and were very happy about that. Well, good for them, and I hope they got a lot of pleasure from it.

What puzzles me, though, is how people can still convince themselves that they can make anything anywhere near a rum using such methods - anywhere near an alcoholic drink, really. But people are people and therefore illogical and strange. But they have no excuses nowadays - we know how yeast works (and doesn't in a high osmotic pressure environment) and we know about micro-organisms. They still do it, though. Homebrew land, as you say.

Mike

[oldjerry]

C'mon lets face it Mike ,half the population go down their local and convince themselves that Fosters\Carling\Stella etc is real beer......

[Potter's Farm]

Thanks for the information, i have decided to start painting my nails so i can put the rum nail varnish remover to good use!!!