For the Love of Grain

[MichiganCornhusker]

I'd like to jump in and thank kiwi Bruce for suggesting a separate sub-forum for Whiskey, and thanks to Tater for making it happen!
I started my distilling adventure with AG bourbon style grain bills, and whiskey continues to be my primary quest.
For all of y'all out there who share my love of grain whiskey, welcome, join us here, it feels like home.

[Single Malt Yinzer]

Yay! Kinda obvious I love whisky and whiskey. Thanks Tater!

[ShineonCrazyDiamond]

Here here. You know I love it here. I'll mosey around

[Pesty]

Sweet.. i just back into things and whiskey is this years journey. I started a corn and rye mash this morning. BOP resting in the garage now after a day long cook with the new steamer wand.

[corene1]

I want to get back to making some whiskies as well. My hand is almost healed up so I can get busy on building a nice mash tun with the ability to sparge grains and do all the cooking in one pot instead of having to cook 2 mashes to fill one fermenter. Definitely a little rusty. I spent the last year doing rum with my cousin. Also modifying my boiler setup. Think I will go back to pot stilling with a thumper and compare it to the results of running a plated column. Plus it is more relaxing listening to the thump.

[rubelstrudel]

-- Making peated smokey whisky
My latest project was a rather large batch (for me at least) of scotch style whisky. I had purchased 30kg of peated barley malt and set up 6 fermenters to ferment on the grain. I used 7.5kg of malt per 25l bucket, and that gave me such a thick porridge that I couldn't really measure the OG. I added the grain, and water at 71C and left the buckets over night for conversion. Even added some glucoamylase to be on the safe side.

-- Looking fine, BUT...
It all looked very fine when I pitched my yeast the next day. The ferment went off like it normally does, but then more or less stopped after 4 days at SG 1025. pH was fine, nutrients were fine, yeast was alive and plentiful (tried a test batch with some table sugar) - so I assume that I didn't really get proper conversion and there was no more simple sugars for the yeast to work with.

"#¤!"¤#!¤%%!!&!¤#!¤#

-- Losing faith
I squeezed off the half-fermented beer and left it to clear. About 80l of still pretty high gravity grain-juice separated out quite nicely, although still sweet and almost sticky. At this point I am pretty pissed that it didn't do what I wanted it to do, so I threw it in the boiler for a spirit run with 10l of feints from my previous pretty successful smokey bourbon experiment. Then did a spirit run with the resulting 20l of low wines.

-- Getting pissed
There was so much oils and stuff coming over that as soon as the ABV went below 40% in my distillate it go this pearly misty colour. But at this point I am close to giving up totally. But with the sunk cost fallacy driving me, I just couldn't dump it down the drain either.


-- Resigning to the long haul
So Now I have a carboy filled with 18l of 53% ABV bastard whisky that has a whiff of heads to it, sitting on charred oak sticks. Unless something amazing happens over the next year I have just made some of the most expensive fire starter I have ever touched. That was 130USD worth of malt plust all the labour.

[Swedish Pride]

mmmmm, grains