Starting My Live Dunder Pit & Tasting Home Made Rum 

Years ago I had a chance to tour the Appelton distillery in Jamaica. Appleton makes some lovely flavorful rums. Their dark rums are good straight or over ice. Their light rums in Coke or a daiquiri are perfect. On the tour they absolutely would not say anything about the dunder pit other than "We age our ingredients." Touring the aging warehouse was heaven. the oak barrels gave an aroma that was intoxicating, literally. The pace of work at Appelton was definitely on Island Time, the air tropical and humid, with glorious scents of sugar and fermentation in the air. The tasting room had all of their varieties, plus a white dog only sold locally. Called "Overproof," the 80% unaged white dog was flavorful and aromatic, if punishingly strong. From what I saw on several visits to the island nation, I suspect that Overproof is popular with motorists on the island.

The closed caption for "brettanomyces" is "Britain oh my seas" Love it!

As a former baker this whole dunder business sounds very similar to how traditional sourdough bread is made. Traditionally sourdough is made from a starter which is just wild yeast and whatever other bugs it's picked up along the way, starters are usually first made from flour and water and then left in a warm place for a bit until the micro-organisms do their thing.

Cabbage leaf in the bottom for lacto. That last thing probably had fruit flies. It definitely had Kahm yeast. Cover your pit with a lint free cotton towel, like a bar towel or something. Tips from a kombucha brewer! Also, if you want a little acetobactor in there? Splash some apple cider vinegar in that has "the mother" listed on the label! In kombucha, lacto gives it a more mellow taste vs the tart acetobactor of vinegar.

I built my own still and am getting ready to distill my third run here soon and I owe A LOT to your channel. Keep putting out the great vids!

A easier way to hold the screen in place is to use the "O" ring inside the lid as a big rubber band. Works great.

Great video i really appreciate the research and time that goes into these videos. I look forward to each new upload. You present the information in a casual friendly way. I know myself if i was to stand in front of a camera there would be 15 mins of me saying ummmmm ahhhh. Keep on keeping on mate this channel has grown a lot and helped me venture out into different parts of this hobby. Cheers

Rum is where I would like to learn more. Love your rum videos my man!! Very informative on the yeast and bacteria strains as well! Keep it coming!!

Thanks jess - bumped into this recipe a few months back but never jumped into it - glad you ran this recipe and thx for all the work on the vids :)

Really excited to see how this works out. You're a brave man for tasting the horse blanket funky stuff:-)>

Jesse, if you taste burnt sugar it will be from using Black Strap molasses, which is derived from the 3rd and final boiling of sugar cane juice. During sugar production, as the water in sugar cane juice is boiled away, the molasses begins to scorch in the kettle, Black Strap is scorched/burned sugar cane juice. I suggest that next time you use non-sulfured molasses, or better still use reconstituted piloncillo, which has the highest sugar content. Brum

I know this is an older video but I've watched a lot of your stuff and this is one of my favorites

Love it!!! I've been playing with all sorts of microbes for the last 50+ years since I got my first microscope. If It can be fermented I've done it.... foods, wines and beers, lacto, aceto, various yeasts and molds such as aspergillus, penicillum, geotrichum, rhizopus, sachromyeces, and brett, and various wild stuff. I have kombucha going all the time as well as kefir. I even cultured botulinum once just out of sheer madness. Dunder should be my middle name ;-) Currently I'm getting ready to check out the results of an experiment so far off the beaten path that everybody seems to think I'm mad.....I won't describe it here ;-) Just completed my third still over that 50 year spell, this one my first reflux still. The last one I built for a friend who took it with him when he moved away. Gin is high on my list of projects, and will be double distilled, once as a pure spirit run, and the next time with botanicals in the column. Rum was not high on my list, though I intended to try some....... This discussion of live dunder has inspired me to delve into it......Thanks!! Note that I've achieved decent oaking using charred oak (or maple) slivers and modulating temperatures and pressures, getting raw spirits to develop more of a real whiskey character fairly rapidly.

I'm still waiting to hear you say why is all the rum gone?! 😂😂😂😂🍻

Very cool project man. I just started brewing some funky beers, I had no idea it was so similar to rum

Just fabulous understanding, l am going to double my contribution, man I love you.

Great video! I also have a dunder bucket haha. As a Cuban American I've been sticking to the Cuban/Spanish style of just aging a well blended product on oak. Though the dunder pit is a Jamaican thing so I guess it's a fusion. Just started playing with Bob's black style, more Jamaican style of adding molasses/dunder in and love it for spiced rums. Try the Cuban style tho comes out super smooth! I'm super interested in the sour yeast results! For my pit/bucket I use a kombucha mother. My friend gives it to me when she needs to get rid of it and gets rum in return lol. I imagine the kombucha gives a result similar to the lacto and sour yeast.

Leuconostoc cremoris is a bacteria used for sauerkraut and sour cream fermentation for its buttery flavors. Might be something to look in to for a dunder bucket

right on I feel ya I got some strawberry black berry wine ...two months old one sour one way sweet... sweet been out by the salty sea air...about ready to consume...

well this is a great use for some of my sour dough starter

Next episode: he buys some rum and tastes it to make sure he’s actually made rum

Hey Jesse, great channel, its helped immensely in my distilling journey. Just wondering how your dunder pit is doing, as I'm just starting one here in lock-down Auckland! Cheers fella

I just started my own dunder bucket. leaving it outdoors uncovered. I threw in potato peels, tomato, sugar Caine leaves and a piece of stalk. not sure if I wish to put in dead animals. LOL

Awesome work dude!!

I do also reuse the leftovers (dunder?) from my previous distillation batches and keep track of it. You have to make sure the mix is around 40 dunder and 60 percent fresh water. Otherwise, the yeast will take forever to kickoff or not start at all since it does not have enough oxygen. Flavor is even more sweeter and with roasted nuts notes. Some higher volume distillers storage it for months before the dunder is reused again.

cool way to get wild yeast, real old school..yeast have been our buddys for a very long time,with out them and the others little friends no fun drinks with chezzz..

At time point 12:13 it is possible the cheese smell you are getting came in part from the aerotolerant anaerobe Clostridium perfringens (non toxin producing), commonly used in making a old time classic of Salt Bread. Salt bread starter has a funky cheese smell, similar to a aged hard cheese.

Love this video. I've used wild yeast in a sour mash before but never made a dunder pit. I am betting you will have some great success with this, eventually. And by that I mean that you may have a learning curve before you really hit your stride. This is complex.

My first few runs years back all tasted like you describe this one, kind of like air freshener or as my partner noted, sunscreen. It goes.... that particular flavour actually disappears as you do more and more rums. Im not sure how many runs you are through now, but if you go taste Puser's British Navy Rum (Blue Label) I promise you it will be the closest taste to what you are making, because Pusers is an old school recipe. All these "rums" we see in the shop now are almost liqueurs, like Kraken and the huge amount of spiced varieties now. Great job and thanks for the video.

After watching through all your other videos, and going hey I wonder if he will use brett, finally my prayers have been answered. I suppose a dunder pit for beers would be like a coolship or repitching on yeast cake. Sadily here in France you can homebrew but you can't legally distill, you can pay a pro to distill your wash for you though so I might have a look into that. Cheers keep up the awesome videos.

Hello guys. Really interesting videos! Would mold ontop of the dunder be a problem? Could it produce poisonous ingrediens? My experimental dunderpit is very moldy.

I need to come over to taste test it ;) I can't believe on RU-vid with you now! :D

This is how REAL pure corn whiskey is done...at least in my family. Corn, malted corn, and water. That's it. No sugar. No yeast. It just sat outside in a barrel with a piece of tin roof covering it to keep critters out. Whatever wild business out there would just get in and do the deal. Not controllable, exactly, but a lot of the traditional process isn't controllable. I guess that's why each run had it's own name and dates on the jugs, just like they do with fine, French wine.

So i aged my whiskey and its a nice dark color, but now i have liiiittle speks of wood floating around. Do you recommend filtering it off through something like a coffee filter or does it not matter?

For the live Dunder/ muck I would suggest various brettanomyces that are available from many different beer labs. Brett Trois Vrai (WLP648 - white labs) kicks out a load of pineapple aromas that I think would be very desirable. Also these wild Brett strains have no issue fermenting anything you throw at them to super high attenuation in combination with a saison or belgian yeast ( that would kick out banana and clove flavors). With these funky yeast you dont have to worry about food safety or mold either. Also the yeast at the bottom of lambic beer bottles is a great source of wild yeast that is cheap and available.

You should have named this episode Dirty Deeds and the Dunder Chief. Your welcome, you will never hear that song the right way again.

I do hope you have a future!

Nice work! Grab a bottle of foursquare rum, pretty much all of their releases are good, and quite affordable. They're a good rum to compare your creations to, as you've obviously never tasted quality rum ;) I'd suggest a Doorly's XO if you can find them in NZ. Keep on experimenting, I like your views on distilling

For almost 10 years, due to a mishearing of a conversation, I thought that a dunder pit was similar to a longdrop shitter, dunny or honeybucket. I misheard it as "thunder pit" and assumed people were putting decomposed sewage (similar to the way natural fertilizer is made) into their rum to add flavour. It wasn't helped by the fact that I knew that molasses residue from rum production is used as a fertilizer, which in my mind would offset the lost human-derived fertilizer. So, no rum for me for the first decades of my life. Then along came the internet - I felt so bloody stupid :)

I am also experimenting on extracting the yeast from the leaves of sugarcane. I'm hoping it works better with the molasses

Coke, rum and a twist of lime was called a cubalibrae, that was my drink when young but coke had to change so it was bear for a long time till now, I hope Im not telling my age. Most bartenders dont know that drink now.

How did you get the color into the clear spirit you tasted at the end? Did you add some fresh "Dunder" from the boiler ? I think you said that but it got a bit confusing.

Dunder from down under!

What percentage of dunder from the pit would you use on a fermentation?

I have a keg distill. Sometimes it takes forever to make a run. Do you know if you shut it down then continue the next day mess everything up? Thanks

Have you ever open-fermented anything you were planning on distilling?

Could you use a lambic blend? It has some bugs in it

would you attempt a Woods Navy style Rum?

I have home made saurkraut full of natural lacto. How much would a little salt hurt the mix?

Hey Jesse. I kept about 20L of dunder from my first blackstrap rum run (was what was left over in the still after the run) and has been open to the air for about a month now but doesn't seem to be changing at all (no funk or odd smell). Should I be adding sugar to it or some probiotics to it?

Australian lemonade? Because that stuff is kind of odd. 😉

Hi mate, love all the videos you make. I've just sent the Mrs out to pick up 30L of molasses for me today to get started on my rum adventures. Just wondering if you or anyone you know of has deliberately infected a rum wash? Like a kettle sour or something along those lines?? Cheers mate keep up the good work.

So how the hell did you get that colour spirit? Its not in your previous, its not in this and everything your collecting is clear.

Would it be fine if i made a dunder pit by just adding backset from the first run through the still, then just cover it with cheese cloth?

I'm rather new to distilling but have done a few blackstrap rum washes and was thoroughly disappointed each time. If I'm going to spend $$ on molasses,I'd like for it to taste like rum,but all I taste is flavorless ethanol

Appleton estate is the best rum in the world give it a try sometime

When you did your you jssm did you add more Alpha amylase or six row to your mash

I would have probably done a commercial strain of brett and lacto that is known to produce tropical esters for a rum. Things like pineapple and mango and passionfruit (those strains exist ;) ) And personally I'd have capped the bucket and thrown an airlock on it and set it in a corner. The reason being is I've had issues with fungus gnats infecting my brews. On first glance I would have expected an acetobacter vinegar producing infection but instead I got a bacterial infection that threw a bunch of isobuteric acid (baby vomit) It smells and tastes like the buteric acid which is absolutely undesirable. Just random thinking though.

There's a very foremost fermenter in the US that makes is dunder pit basically the same as you did but he throws and rotten fruit and a cheese culture. He found a way to do it without goat heads and dead bats

The first time I went to fiji and tried fiji rum, that was the opening of my rum door. I don't think fiji rum is held that highly but I do go back to it often just for shits and gigs.

Try Zacapa, you'll never go back to anything else and then you'll try to emulate it.

Good luck with the live dunder I can't wait to see how it turns out! How can I get your address? I'd like to send you some bourbon barrel staves I picked up in kentucky if you're interested

After distilling, do you top off the live dunder pits with the sterile dunder from the boiler? (Once cooled of course)

Do not mock the herby liquors of which jagermeister is the mass-consumer version of. Many of us like them :D and it would be a challenge of itself to brew and distill and spice one. Honestly not sure where to start on that one :D

Alcohol tolerant penicillin in the making haha. I still say your barmy, please don't change. :D

Do you come from a land down dunder?

I know how it works with multiple strains of yeast but adding the brett in there could go either way. When you mix yeast strains and reuse the cake for many generations around about generation 6 you will start to notice one yeast pulling ahead in the flavor profile (in my experience it's been the Belgian strains) Around about generation 10 it's almost entirely a single flavor profile that doesn't change much after that. IMO it was actually around generations 3-5 that you get the most interesting and complex flavors. If you ever find yourself in San Diego for a few months you can drop in on this annual experiment whitelabs.com/frankenstout (even just one trip to their tasting room will open your eyes to the wonderful and varied world of yeast). My unscientific guess is that the brett will take over in a matter of a few months.

Just starting down the dundery road ! I’m wondering,, could you add actual pro-biotic tablets ??

Embrace the funk! Cheese bacteria is a good one to use. Apparently ethyl butyrate (the "baby spew" ester - i imagine you are quite familiar with it thanks to the twins) is an awesome one to have. It reeks in the dunder, but comes through the other side of the wash ferment as pineapples. A lot of the horrid, rotten, disgusting smells end up awesome after the yeast finishes with them in the ferment.

So I guess this is where the term "dunder head" came from? I can see it being the polite way to say "s**thead"...but meaning the same thing basically.

Okay did I miss something here. If you haven't put any wood in it yet where did the color come from.

Your video doesn't address the biggest confusion about dunder. Does it come from the fermented dregs or the boiled dregs after the pot has taken out all of the alcohol? I am of the opinion that it must not be exposed to heat, and it is like sourdough starter or sour mash...

Rum is not my favorite but its will get you drunk!

Translation required: - What is a Tiki Drink?

No goat heads??? WTF

Dunder.... A.. aahhhh... aahhhh... aahhhh... ahhhh... Dunder... ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-e4Ao-iNPPUc.html Had to do it Jessie.. ;)

KUMBUCHA

ive either missed the episode but would be good to see this being dragged out and used.

I guess if you really want to learn about dunder a trip to Jamaica would be in order. Jamaican rum is superior to any of the other stuff.

Try not doing the dunder. Use a straight came sugar wash and don't sour it.

If cannabis is legal where you are why not a infused liquors made whit that or if you can make a ki d of booze whit weed for base

Ad some chilli into your rum

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