by John Power » Tue Jan 22, 2013 4:36 pm
Hi, this is a bit late for this thread, but. I spent over 10 years running sugar mills and Blackstrap molasses as everyone refers to it is the molasses produced from a raw sugar mill, this is used for many things including stock feed and is what you get from most feed suppliers in Australia, it is produced when the sugar mill can no longer crystalise any further sugar from the liquor. Liquor is the concentrated syrup which is collected from the sugar cane juice. This molasses is around 50% fermentable sugars, sucrose, fructose and glucose, balance is a small amount of water and all of the insoluble things from the sugar cane juice including minerals.
Food grade molasses in Australia is only produced at White sugar refineries, there are only four of these left in Australia. One is in Mackay, one in Bundaberg, one in Harwood and one in Melbourne. At a refinery the raw sugar, that is produced by a sugar mill, is melted and refined sugar (read hot filtered through activated carbon) and via crystalisation in large vacuum pans and white sugar is produced, this leaves the small amount of molasses, which was in the raw sugar as a coating on the outside of raw sugar and it is quite concentrated in its final form. It generally has a lower level of actual sucrose (white sugar) and most of the sugar is fructose and glucose.
I hope this does not confuse everyone too much, but this is where they both come from.