Molasses

EU law defines rum as distilled exclusively from the fermented product of molasses or syrup from cane-sugar manufacture, or of cane juice. Brazil's 2025 decree likewise defines rum as made from a molasses distillate or a mix of molasses and cane-juice distillates. In seventeenth-century Barbados the spirit was made from the "skimmings" of the sugar coppers; in Martinique, the AOC specification says, rum was long a cheap by-product of fermented molasses.

In the eighteenth century molasses was shipped from the Caribbean to New England to be distilled. The British Molasses Act of 1733 taxed molasses from foreign colonies at six pence a gallon. The AOC rules for Martinique forbid adding molasses or syrup to cane juice.