If you were right I would agree with you
..., Sugar is Sugar is Sugar... except
...
Not sure if you were being flippant or not
, but that's definitely the not case.
Pretty much all the other types of sugar that one could list are substantially different.
That's why discovering that refined cane sugar and beet sugar are both 99.95% sucrose (i forgot the extra 0.05% in the earlier post).
From all of what i've read, the other sources of sugar are not remotely close to 99.95% sucrose; whereas both beet and cane refine down to that level of sucrose purity. Hence, the others are not chemically similar at all. And within the forms of Beet and Cane sugar, only the "white" versions are virtually the same (kinda stating the obvious!). Raw cane sugar is 98.5% sucrose, and the purity drops off steadily from there with colour. I can't find the data on less refined beet sugar so i'm not sure about it's composition; but i've not come across any use of less refined beet sugar - the few manufacturers I've been able to find info on seemed to use refined beet sugar.
FWIW, of the ~0.05% impurities in the beet & cane sugars there
would be substantial difference. It's basically all of the extra compounds from the different plants. As an example, the main amino acids in the beet sugar seem to be serine, glutamine, asparagine, glutamic & aspartic; whereas cane is the same but almost devoid of serine. Serine is noted for producing fruity, sweet, & "pleasant" flavour/aroma characteristics from maillard reactions with glucose.
I'd be inclined to think 0.05% of impurities (of which something as little as 4% might be serine in the beet sugar) are likely to produce pretty minimal differences. However, it's not entirely implausible that even such a tiny %-age could produce subtle differences that our tongues/noses could detect.
So basically i'm saying, in the grand scheme of sugar out there, the beet & cane sugars are surprisingly pretty damn close to chemically identical. So by & large, they should be producing almost identical results. However, the tiny tiny difference
might be enough to produce some subtle differences.
OTOH, i'd still believe by far the biggest hurdle of making the syrup is the actual manufacturing process itself. As mentioned in my earlier post, some of the info i've come across indicated the Belgians go through complex multiple heat cycles over 2-3 days. There appears to be at least a few main temperature points they target and hold them for up to several hours. It simply seems to be a much greater variable and play a more critical role in the chemistry required to make the syrup..
Mark, just out of interest, are you sure the Euro rum distillers are choosing cane sugar solely for taste characteristics and not for economics? I'm under the impression beet sugar is not very economical for large scale use compared to cane sugar from the colonies.