Hydrometer Tests

Many of you may be familiar with the work of Johnny Drejer (Drecon.dk). For those that aren’t please visit his site and familiarise yourselves with his Hydrometer method.

Like Johnny I offer no guarantee that my readings are 100% accurate and I can only use already published results as a baseline for mine. Also, like Mr Drejer I am not doing these experiments in order to call out “bad” or “good” rum or individual rum companies. I am doing this to inform and also to improve my own reviews.

The added sugar/additives in rum debate has been rumbling on for a few years now and still many companies openly deny the practice. Others have been more open and some steadfastly refuse to add anything to their rum.

There is a Master List of over 700 (and counting) tested rums at Capn Jimbo’s Rum Project. Rums tested by ALKO (Finnish Government Body), The Swedish Government, Johnny Drejer, Capn Jimbo, Cyril from DuRhum website and Dave Russell are all included.

For the purposes of my site these are only my findings. I am using 3 hydrometers with a range of 0-40, 40-70 and 70-100%ABV. These are not expensive items. Neither is my digital thermometer which measures temperature. Rum is measured in 50ml or 100ml glass measuring cylinders.

If you would like a rum tested then please contact me via the Contact Us form on the site.

NB Following feedback (both on this pages comments thread and in private correspondence) I will clarify what the Hydrometer Tests do NOT categorically show that sugar is added to the rum. What they show is a difference between the reported ABV on the bottle and the ABV measured. Added sugar is known to produce such results. Again Johnny Drejer at Drecon.dk ran such tests to verify his methods. However other additives may produce such results as well. So in the grand scheme of “Does this rum have additives?” the answer is still very likely to be yes if the ABV differs.

So here are the results so far. To create a truly alphabetical table – click on the up/down arrows to the right the “Rum” category in the table. It will sort them in ascending or descending order. It will do this with the other columns in the table as well so you can sort by g/L etc