Hard Truth White Rum

Unaged molasses-based rum is generic for “new make” or “straight-from-the-still” rum distilled from fermented molasses. Almost all molasses-based rum is barrel aged, and much of that aged rum is then aggressively filtered to strip out color (and some flavor) before bottling to produce a “silver” or “white” rum product. However, this rum hasn’t seen the inside of a wooden barrel, or only has done so only barely. Unaged molasses-based rum isn’t typically bottled commercially, whereas rhum agricole blanc (distilled from fermented sugar cane syrup) is relatively common. Perhaps the only relatively common straight-from-the-still molasses-based rum is Wray & Nephew Overproof Jamaican rum, but that’s both significantly overproof and specifically Jamaiacan. The recent rise of microdistilleries has yielded some regional examples.