I'm planning to make my own Bay Rum, and I have a question before I get to work gathering the ingredients: is there a difference in scent between whole allspice berries, cracked allspice, and pre-ground allspice? ditto the question for cloves. if so, which of these should I use for those spices?
Hmmmm...not sure I noticed much difference in the allspice. I've used it a few times making bay rum scented aftershave/cologne. Cloves on the other hand....I definitely prefer cracked or ground. Seems to give a stronger scent more quickly, which I guess just makes sense lol. It also seems to me to be easier to control the clove aspect more accurately. I'm no expert by any means, but I love my home made bay rum concoctions. I make and use them pretty regularly. I don't think I've ever made it the same way twice lol. Just added things until I liked the way it smelled at the time. It's lots of fun.
Thanks for the info! I’m also planning on making this mix stronger, more like an edt or edp. To go about such a thing, do I add extra dashes of ingredients, or just let it sit longer? Would forgoing the vodka and using only Wray and Nephew as the alcohol have an effect on this?
Sitting longer certainly helps the scent strength from what I've noticed. All of the of etc have time to be infused etc. I made a lime Bay rum last and even added lime essential oil to it to boost the scent. It turned out very well, lasts a good while and gets noticed.. in a positive way lol. I've used sandalwood, vanilla and now lime essential oils now. I even found a bay rum oil on the bay that gave a nice boost to one batch I made. It was actually already bay rum scented, not just bay. The bulk of the mixture was still the home made stuff of course. Cloves are the most controversial ingredient. Ppl either love it or hate it in bay rums. Im a fan lol. Original bay rum recipes used them often if they were available. I've snuck I'm dashes of Pinauds Virgin Island bay rum aftershave and other bay rum scented aftershave as well. Always fun just experimenting until it's the way I like it.
I was actually thinking of adding a pinch of my grandfather’s pipe tobacco to it. Back to my previous question, would it be a bad thing to use only rum for alcohol? I see a lot of recipes that are just 2 spoons of rum cut with 1/2 cup of vodka and it just seems odd to water down the rum like that when that’s part of the namesake.
I do see what you mean. I suppose in the interest of being a purist you might want to stay with only a Jamaican rum. I've done it different ways, dependant on what I had at the time. Any alcohol will extract the oils from the dry ingredients however. I'm sure the original rums used to extract the oils was of pretty shady quality lol. Though the rums fragrance isn't necessarily strong, the sugary nature of rum probably does enhance the scent overall. It's the combination of all the ingredients, of course, that defines its nature. I guess that would be your choice. Rum was originally used because that's what sailors probably mostly had, though any alcohol would work. I'm doubting that it much mattered to the original makers. I'm sure that when St. John's was founded and the scent became more popular throughout other countries it was found that rum gave the mixture as a whole a richer, sweeter sensibility.
Gotcha, thanks for the tips and trivia! I’ll come back to this thread when I get everything in place to put this plan into action!
Yes. Get yourself a microplane. You don't want to get into the pith. You just want the oils from the rind.
One more question: why strain through several coffee filters/cheesecloths? My understanding is that those would end up filtering out a bunch of the oils themselves along with the spice pieces, since that’s what I’ve noticed in comparing drip coffee to percolated coffee. Couldn’t I just put a sprouting lid on the mason jar and use that to pour it out?
You want to filter out any organic material, otherwise it will eventually rot and contaminate your bay rum. You can use dry ice to separate the organic components from the rest of your stuff. I'd recommend creating an account over at the Basenotes forum. The DIY perfumers over there can probably give you much better advice than a bunch of wet shaving enthusiasts.
I forgot about this thread, but I'm back with an update. It came out sweeter than I expected, but I like it. I decanted it into a vintage Avon bottle (Aftershave On Tap), and use it as a cologne. It seems that everyone around me picks up different parts of the composition, my father picks up the orange right away, while my mother picks up the clove (she's the only one who didn't like it, and for that reason), my uncle even said it reminded him of the smell of root beer! for reference: I used 5 oz Wray & Nephew, 3 bay rum leaves, 1/4 tsp allspice, 1/4 tsp clove, 1 cinnamon quill broken up, orange peel, lime peel, and a pinch of pipe tobacco. I do like how this turned out, but if I were to do it again I would maybe want to tone down the sweetness a little bit. Any suggestions for that, or is bay rum really meant to be more gourmand than spicy?
