If you can source sugarcane or sugar beets, which may not be terribly difficult depending where you live (if they’re producing sugar they’re making it from one of these most likely, usually the former if it’s cane sugar) you can just make it

It’s pretty simple to do albeit a bit time consuming

For beets: Clean and slice them somewhat thin, doesn’t have to be perfect, ~4kg beets per 2c molasses Boil till tender in 2c water Strain, reserve water, discard beets Bring water to boil and simmer until it hits the right consistency. This can a bit but is significantly faster than the next method (although the next method is more traditional and arguably better)

For sugarcane: Mill the sugarcane. If you have a powerful blender you can blitz it that way and filter the pulp through a very fine sieve as you likely don’t have a mill but you will greatly reduce the yield. If you have time you can hand grate it with a microplane or box grater and press the gratings to extract the juice and you can actually get quite a bit this way depending on how hard you press them and your collection setup. If you have a powerful juicer it may be up to the task and will increase yield quite a bit (I use an omega juicer, just cut it into smaller pieces). Alternatively, you may be able to source sugarcane juice from the vendor that sells sugarcane. Either way you need about 4 liters

Strain the juice through cheesecloth in a sieve to catch any solids (if you bought it this may not be necessary)

Cook on low heat for a looong time, stirring regularly. 6ish hours. A green scum layer may form and you should skim that off. You want to avoid the sugar burning to the bottom of the pot so frequently scrape against the bottom, especially as it thickens/darkens

It’ll change color to yellow and thicken up considerably (to what you’d expect for light molasses) when it’s done. It won’t be the color you’re used to because at this point it’s light molasses. You can use this, or cool it, and boil again. It’ll darken considerably and this is the dark molasses one typically buys. You can cool it again and repeat again for blackstrap molasses.

Cool a bit, like 5 minutes, and bottle kind of hot. Just let it get down from lava temps. If you let it cool too much it’s an absolute nightmare to bottle. It’s also not a bad idea to reserve some at each stage. I do a small jar of light and blackstrap and a large jar of dark molasses. About 1c dark and half cup of the others. Also clean everything asap or you’ll regret it

It’s a bit of a pain to make but I like to do it every once a while because I think it genuinely tastes better than the store bought molasses. It’s something that takes a few hours that I can do one day while I’m making bread or pasta or something because it doesn’t need to be constantly attended to and once it’s made it lasts ages, at least 12-18mo if stored properly.