Inka's Backset Diary
Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2015 11:41 pm
We all know that a good dunder is literally a gold mine of precious flavours and scents, and thus a very valuable asset in rum-making. What if we age backset? As I ferment and strip my AGs on grain, I accumulated a nice stash of backset, made from a very wide range of different grains and malts. Through the winter, I collected my strained backset in glass jars while they were still hot and stored them airtight. Some of them - especially those that had a good amount of rye in the grain-bill - developed a flowery-honey scent.
Parallel to this I made half-dozen of lacto-jars (yeasty sludge collected from the bottom of my fermenting tank mixed with freshly cooked corn-grist), inoculated with different artisan dairy products that had living lactobacillus in them. One showed appealing olfactory properties, a creamy sour scent, yet most of them had more of a cheesy, bitter and/or strange smell I rather not incorporate in my future spirits.
Now that there is no fear from freezing temperatures outside at night I poured those backsets together in a barrel with the aforementioned lactic starter, under a pear tree. First few days it only had an oily layer on top of the otherwise crystal clear mirrory surface, today it started webbing. Web has a shiny, metallic surface. It's alive!
Flower-yeast? Bacteries? I do not know exactly, and as far as I know it's not a huge concern as long as it does not start to sporulate and convert the nearby cities' population to brain-eating zombies, which I see less than a little chance.
Anyway, I decided to start a diary which I plan to update weekly with a photo and a smell-test.
Here we are at Week 1, smells like rye-bread, no acridity or bitterness detected, a bit on the sweet side:
Parallel to this I made half-dozen of lacto-jars (yeasty sludge collected from the bottom of my fermenting tank mixed with freshly cooked corn-grist), inoculated with different artisan dairy products that had living lactobacillus in them. One showed appealing olfactory properties, a creamy sour scent, yet most of them had more of a cheesy, bitter and/or strange smell I rather not incorporate in my future spirits.
Now that there is no fear from freezing temperatures outside at night I poured those backsets together in a barrel with the aforementioned lactic starter, under a pear tree. First few days it only had an oily layer on top of the otherwise crystal clear mirrory surface, today it started webbing. Web has a shiny, metallic surface. It's alive!
Flower-yeast? Bacteries? I do not know exactly, and as far as I know it's not a huge concern as long as it does not start to sporulate and convert the nearby cities' population to brain-eating zombies, which I see less than a little chance.
Anyway, I decided to start a diary which I plan to update weekly with a photo and a smell-test.
Here we are at Week 1, smells like rye-bread, no acridity or bitterness detected, a bit on the sweet side: