Pineapple-Infused Rum - Alcohol Content?

Hi everyone!

One night a month and a half ago the missus and I hollowed out a couple of pineapples to make a few proper Pi-Yi cocktails. On a whim I put the removed pineapple in a large hermetically sealed jar, filled it up with Cruzan light rum, and then put it in the cupboard to do its work. We took a taste a couple of weeks back at the one month period but it was pretty rough, undoubtedly because it was pulled from near the top of the jar and not near the heart of the batch. Last night I finally strained and bottled it up. It filled an empty Plantation rum bottle I had lying about, and still had about a 1/5th left over. It is utterly delicious - very, very sippable and makes a fantastic daiquiri.

As we were drinking it we got to wondering about the alcohol content, as usually when you see a flavoured rum it's about 5% less alcohol content. Is that the case, or similar, when you do an infusion with fruit? I did my share of googling but was unable to come up with any specific info, so I'm very curious as to how much infusing can affect the alcohol content.

Cheers!

You probably won't know for sure until you put it in a hydrometer. I wonder if the ABV could even be affected by whatever chemical reactions happen between the rum and the fruit.

I have wondered something similar - when I infused my own pineapple rum using Plantation Dark, it was incredibly delicious, fresh, and dangerously drinkable. However I wonder how much of the alcohol was lost, soaked by the fruit itself. I drank a lot and wasn't plastered, though I'm sure if I had as much of Plantation Pineapple that I would have had a hangover.

Just a friendly suggestion btw, you shouldn't need to infuse the rum much longer than 48 hours as that seems to be the prime amount of time for the fruit to give its flavor.

Hahahaha - two DAYS?! Talk about running a marathon when it was just a sprint! That's hilarious.

I really had no idea what to expect or do. The couple of links I had perused when I first put it all in the jar had essentially said two to three weeks in a cool, dark place and then go by how much pineapple taste you prefer. With that taste test being rough with hardly any pineapple taste at all, we left it even longer.

I will say that I am pretty amazed at how it's transformed this Cruzan, though...and now I'm wondering how that rum-soaked pineapple would be if you turned it into a compote and used it over ice cream and some angel food cake...

Well for what it's worth I only went by the guide at http://inuakena.com/misc/diy-pineapple-rum/ though when I asked whether a month would suffice, I was given the response I gave you. When I strained my rum and had the leftover pineapple I thought I'd take a bite...woof! Big mistake - an extremely loaded pineapple! Good luck if you use the fruit in something but keep in mind it might be super potent.

I read that recipe and had a thought. Wouldn't also removing the outer green "husk" of the pineapple yield a better (more "focused") infusion result?

I'm thinking of trying this with a 1.75l bottle of Cruzan Dark since it costs only $16-$17 at my local big liquor store. If the flavor turns out pretty good, then I can bottle some of this and give it as gifts to my friends who don't also have shriveled livers.

I'm certain it'll be delicious. One note I'd make is that you don't need to add the simple sugar to the infusion as the rum and pineapple are both sweet as-is. A second note I"d make is that using the outer...rind?...of the pineapple is how Plantation does it - they do white rum with the rind and the fruit with the dark rum. See more here in this great video from Plantation/Maison Ferrand https://youtu.be/dYdei9uq6jo

Awesome video, thanks for sharing. Now to find that breed of pineapple...

Good note on NOT adding the sugar - it's supposed to be pineapple rum, not pineapple syrup. If added sweet is needed, you can do that when you mix the drink if necessary.

They include the "rind," huh? So that's what they WANT us all to believe.... Hahaha! I asked because in the case of a pineapple I do not associate the rind with any of the pineapple flavor. The rind could only detract from the true flavor of the inside of the fruit. Even more so since the fruit spent months out in the field, exposed to dust and dirt and the elements. There's no telling what's stuffed into all those little pineapple "belly buttons."

Don't anyone go and take my secret method and make this stuff without the rind!

:wink:

On 2016-01-21 12:36, AceExplorer wrote:

The rind could only detract from the true flavor of the inside of the fruit. Even more so since the fruit spent months out in the field, exposed to dust and dirt and the elements. There's no telling what's stuffed into all those little pineapple "belly buttons."

Good point. I'm curious to hear testimonials from people trying different methods (rind or not, adding sugar or not, using white rum or dark rum). I have a back up bottle of Stiggins but when I finish my current bottle, I'm going to make a batch of homemade and how good it turns out will determine how quickly I work my way through the rest of the real stuff.

Mike, sounds great, let us know how it goes. I've got a laundry list of liquor acquisitions, this one is kinda low on my list right now, although it might move higher cuz it would be a hoot to do on short notice.

Keith, thanks for that video, mate! And yeah, I'm one seriously alcohol-friendly fella but even I was scared to just take a bite of that pineapple...

Ace, I was in a similar spot - I had just picked up a 1.75L of Cruzan light at BevMo for dirt cheap as bar back stock to refill my normal Cruzan bottle when it ran out, hence my willingness to do it on a whim when I had all that fresh pineapple.

I was struck by David Wondrich's comment about "it doesn't taste like pineapple - it tastes like rum" in Keith's video cos mine certainly tastes like pineapple.

After more sips of mine, watching that video, and reading everyone's thoughts, I am really curious to do another batch using the rinds as well. The one I have now has a light sweetness to where I am wondering if it may have been balanced out a bit by the rinds. One would think there are essential oils in the rind / skin that, while not necessarily sweet, would have a "pineapple-y-ness" it could impart. Of course, it may simply be an elegant solution of tweaking the ratios of pineapple to rum that might balance it out that much better.

Well I'd keep in mind at Plantation has the means to strain and filter the infused rum at the professional level. At our poor man's version of infusing, we're using already sweetened and finished rum that's gone through the process, so ours will indeed taste more pineappley - basically our step is "stick pineapple in rum" while they can really hone down as to how much pineapple goes in, for how long, and determine how long all of that is stewed in the stills.

Homemade infused pineapple rum will taste like a pineappley rum, while Planation's Stiggin's Fancy tastes like rum with pineapple notes.

Good points, Keith. And we can never tell if they are supplementing flavors by adding esters. We have a huge factory here in my city which makes esters for flavoring all sorts of stuff, including for the world's highest volume selling rum. Cleverly, they are considered "natural flavors," but they still come from someone's test tube or beaker in a lab, lol!

One more thing I just thought of -- a flavor chemist at my local rum factory told me that consistency is EXTREMELY important to any major manufacturer. So they have a list of criteria, and they test batch vs. batch and adjust as needed to ensure consistency.

Us home folks get a lot more variation due to varying sugar content and acidity of the fruit. Since nobody posted pineapple acidity and sugar content ("ripeness") with the recipe for this elixir, we're each going to get a different result. But I think that's what Vic Bergeron and Donn Beach also had to live with, right? There is a certain amount of seat-of-the-pants and down-home variation in what we do in our homes, but not in commercial quality assurance labs. That's fun -- today your batch is better than mine. Tomorrow my batch may be better than yours.

So has anyone experimented with this lately? I'd love to hear people's techniques and results. I just finished one of my two bottles of Stiggins so it's time to make a homemade batch to see how it compares before I start plowing my way through my last 25 ounces.

Game on!

Followed the instructions from the link on the previous page for making pineapple infused rum a la Stiggins. I'm not quite sure why the recipe calls for two whole bottles of Plantation dark. I just wanna get a taste first to make sure I like the stuff before I potentially toss two whole bottles of good booze down the drain. So I cut the recipe by about 1/4th and poured 12.5 ounces (half a bottle) of Plantation dark and just under half a pineapple into a glass container (see above), let it sit 24 hours, shook it up, let it sit another 24 hours, double strained, poured into an old Stiggins bottle and put it to the test.

The first thing of note was the color difference. The homemade brew was much lighter and kinda cloudy. It smelled vaguely of rotten pineapple, like the fruit had turned during those 48 hours, which was a little unpleasant. It kinda tasted that way too but not in a completely off putting way. As Keith eluded to earlier in this thread...

On 2016-01-22 12:41, kkocka wrote:

Homemade infused pineapple rum will taste like a pineappley rum, while Planation's Stiggin's Fancy tastes like rum with pineapple notes.

That pretty much nails it. I feel like less time infusing would have been better. It's entirely possible that since I only did a fraction of what the recipe called for, my rum to pineapple ratio was slightly off resulting in a different outcome. At any rate, the product I got I wouldn't sit and sip like I would Stiggins but figured I'd try it in a daiquiri to see how it compared...

Surprisingly tasty. The sour/rotten notes from sipping it neat were blanketed by the sugar and it was nice and smooth. Not nearly as dynamic as Stiggins though. I'll serve some of these to friends and see what they think and then try another small batch with less time infusing.

Real curious to hear results from others. C'mon people, get to it!

Oh yeah, pertaining to the original question of this thread... alcohol content. Having tasted a shot of Stigging and "Not" Stiggins back to back, then having two ounces of "Not" Stiggins in a daiquiri all in a matter of minutes, I can say I've got a little buzz. So the stuff's not totally sterile. Whether it lost 5% alcohol content or not, couldn't say.

I think the directions to use 2 bottles of rum is just to make a large batch. I used just one bottle and half a pineapple. Never added the sugar myself and now that I know that Plantation adds more sugar than any other rum out there, I definitely won't in the future. I never had a "rotten" smell to the rum, but I must have searched 5 stores to find the ripest and yellowist pineapple possible, being very careful not to find one that looks yellow and borderline gray. My luck wasn't great as most of them were green and rather firm, some would show signs of yellowing, and others like I said were almost graying and sorta too soft upon a squeeze. Unfortunately once a pineapple is picked that's it - it's not gonna get any riper like lots of fruits.

Now I really wanna drink me some Stiggins Fancy...I think I'll take that up tonight.

I'm wondering if using such a large container for such a small batch was where i went wrong. Lots of extra air in there.

On 2016-02-16 16:50, mikehooker wrote:
I'm wondering if using such a large container for such a small batch was where i went wrong. Lots of extra air in there.

That was my first thought when I saw your post: that the air may have affected your pineapple. When I did mine, I threw all my pineapple in my jar and then filled it up with rum, leaving about an inch of air at the top.

I am about two daiquiris away from doing my next batch!

Unless you have access to a commercial still, you'll likely have a very hard time duplicating the flavor of Stiggins. They macerate the rinds separately in white rum, then re-distill it before adding it to the dark rum that has been infused with the inner fruit of the pineapple. They're also quite selective with the kind of pineapple they use. If you watch the video, you'll see that they are small (which usually means sweeter) and appear to be quite ripe with almost no green on the outside. They spent a week tasting various pineapples before settling on the kind they wanted to use. How many of us have access to that many different species of pineapple?

You might very well make a perfectly drinkable pineapple-infused rum, but I think comparing your homemade concoction to Stiggins is doing yourself a disservice. Make what tastes good to you, but know you won't really get Stiggins' flavor unless you're drinking Stiggins.

:drink:

On 2016-02-17 08:51, JenTiki wrote:

You might very well make a perfectly drinkable pineapple-infused rum, but I think comparing your homemade concoction to Stiggins is doing yourself a disservice. Make what tastes good to you, but know you won't really get Stiggins' flavor unless you're drinking Stiggins.

:drink:

Oh I'm 100% in agreement with you. I didn't for a second believe I would make an exact replica of Stiggins with this method. My hope was to create something passable so I won't feel the need to hoard my remaining Stiggins like I've been doing with Lemon Hart since it's completely unavailable around me. Unfortunately this first test didn't get me quite the results I was hoping for so I will try again. This first batch is still better than any Malibu or artificially flavored product on the market but I'm sure I can do better.

On 2016-01-20 10:49, HopeChest wrote:
Hi everyone!

One night a month and a half ago the missus and I hollowed out a couple of pineapples to make a few proper Pi-Yi cocktails. On a whim I put the removed pineapple in a large hermetically sealed jar, filled it up with Cruzan light rum, and then put it in the cupboard to do its work. We took a taste a couple of weeks back at the one month period but it was pretty rough, undoubtedly because it was pulled from near the top of the jar and not near the heart of the batch. Last night I finally strained and bottled it up. It filled an empty Plantation rum bottle I had lying about, and still had about a 1/5th left over. It is utterly delicious - very, very sippable and makes a fantastic daiquiri.

As we were drinking it we got to wondering about the alcohol content, as usually when you see a flavoured rum it's about 5% less alcohol content. Is that the case, or similar, when you do an infusion with fruit? I did my share of googling but was unable to come up with any specific info, so I'm very curious as to how much infusing can affect the alcohol content.

Cheers!

I have an answer for you! The question of the factors effecting proof readings came up recently at a secret meeting of Smuggler's Cove's Rumbustion Society. I was reminded of this thread and asked Martin Cate your question. What I learned is that the rum will remain at the same proof at which it was bottled ... however, the residual sugars from the pineapple will throw off the reading on a hydrometer. So although an 80 proof rum will still be 80 proof after it is infused with pineapple, a hydrometer reading will likely show a lower proof due to the residual sugars that have been added. Now if you're actually adding a measurable amount of liquid, then the volume changes, and thereby the ABV % will change, and therefore so will the proof. But just an infusion does not change the original proof of the rum. Other fruit infusions may not change the hydrometer reading as much as pineapple will, since pineapple is super sweet and juicy. Fruits with a lower sugar content will not effect the reading as much. Hope this helps.

Baller, thanks!

JenTiki, you are the bee's knees. If we're ever at SC at the same time, a daiquiri is on me.

On 2016-03-15 18:36, HopeChest wrote:
JenTiki, you are the bee's knees. If we're ever at SC at the same time, a daiquiri is on me.

I appreciate that. Sadly I now live on the other side of the country so I'm only in the Bay Area a couple times a year. I'll be back the weekend of September 10th for a few days.

Modern Tiki posted their version of pineapple infused rum using light rum and the fruit of a pineapple (no rinds), steeped in a fridge for 7-10 days.

http://www.moderntiki.com/how-to-make-diy-pineapple-rum/

Stiggins is now readily available in my area so I only ever made the one batch noted above. Still curious if others have experimented with this and the results.

I really like it in drinks that already call for pineapple. I think it adds a little extra pop.I have done side by sides ( myself and with others)
I don’t particularly care for it as a sipper though.
Cheers