White Oak Acorn mash???

Production methods from starch to sugars.

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HolyBear
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by HolyBear »

Spent all day cracking and peeling the acorns. Man, I thought purple hull pees were bad. Not much progress, not quite a half of a 5gal bucket full for all my effort... still more ta go. They are getting the tannins soaked out now...

Several had worms in them, those will be fed to the pigs. I'm sure they won't mind. I noticed that some of them that had gone bad/turned black, had a mustard like smell. Mustard whisky don't sound too good ta me. "I like mustard on my biscuit"... not in my whisky...
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by junkyard dawg »

Cool thread...

Tuning in...
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by HolyBear »

To anyone who was watching this thread,.. it was a failure.

But, more work is needed to be conclusive...

Malting the acorns was easy, no problem. It was the pealing that effected my efforts. I work allot and was pealing them as I got time, (mostly between changing jars). I had some pealed and added to it each time I made a run. Well, the process of cleaning them is very tedious/ time consuming. I noticed after a few attempts to fill a 5gal bucket, that they had a fungus growing all.over them. Fungus Threads filled the bucket... so I dumped them into the hog trough...

Next fall I'll try again, quick processing will be important...
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by favnesbane »

Working on an acorn mash right now. I found that the mashing was much more complicated than expected. I use european oak, Quercus robur, and it contains a huge lot of tannins, these inhibit the amylase convertion severely. Am now working with methodes to get rid of these tannins before mashing. Experementing with both boiling and cold water leech, and I am happy for every good advise. I am using concentrated alfa-beta amylase from aspergillus. Maybe it would be better using barley for convertion in this case?
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by MDH »

the only solution is to use more alpha amylase than average. Tannins work by denaturing small amounts of amylase, doing a google scholar search will yield many documents about this in humans. If you use extra enzymes and give it time (in an airtight place) you may still be able to do this

good luck.
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by HolyBear »

Favnesbane, thankyou for continueing the effort...
Tanic acid may be the problem, lime may be the solution...

Cows love to eat acorns. Too many acorns can kill a cow. Farmers around here will feed lime this time a year to counteract the acidic effects of acorns... Too high PH...

I should be working on it like i said i would, but time has me blocked right now...p
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by Tater »

remember old fokes talking about makin acorn bread . they put shelled acorns in weighted sack and placed in creek to leech them.
I use a pot still.Sometimes with a thumper
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by ga flatwoods »

Do you think it would concentrate enough for a good deer likker? Like get em hooked on the stuff and move in just before 5:00 pm for the big boy to come belly up!
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by MDH »

Tater wrote:remember old fokes talking about makin acorn bread . they put shelled acorns in weighted sack and placed in creek to leech them.
Yeah, even the native people here in the northwest made flour out of Garry Oak acorns. I sometimes wonder why such a widely used food staple is now mostly unknown to people.
The still is not a liar. Mash and ferment quality is 99.9% of your performance.
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by favnesbane »

Thanks for tips!

At my first attempt I used at least ten times as much amylase as normally needed and still no coversion. I found an article testing tannin effect on amylase shoving that if the tannin level is above a certain level the enzyme converion is zero (depending on the type of tannin), and I guess that was the case in my first attempt. I tried boiling out the tannins by boiling whole acorns and change the water 8 times. I blended them to porridge and used lime to put the ph down to around 5, and after ca. 2 hours of mashing I managed to convert enough starch to give potentially around 5 % alc. in the mash.

I am afraid that the boiling also takes away all the taste of the acorns, so now I am trying cold leech by running the acorns in the blender and putting the blended mash in cold water, changing the water once in a while for a few days. It looks promising already, wondering if I can use some kind of protein powder in the mash to make the rest of the tannins bind to those proteins before I put in the amylase. Anyone know if protein addition can have some unwanted effects on the mash?

It also looks like acorn starch need quite a lot of boiling to gelatinize, at least more than most grains and potatoes.
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by MDH »

If push comes to shove, I would just add inverted sugar to 7% alcohol potential and just pretend you have converted the starch. Oy vey.
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by favnesbane »

This is most of all an experiment I want to find out both a good method and the true taste of acorn spirit, Im not gonna make huge amounts of this and I just cant pretend. Now I have figured out that Im gonna buy a pressure cooker. Then I can cook the acorns at higher temperature, and that will probably help both the tannin removal and the galatinization. Ill come back with the results in a while.
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by favnesbane »

I have finally made a small batch of acorn spirit. In order to leech them I boiled the whole acorns whith the shells on, changing the water about five times, it was maybe around 3 hours of total boiling. This process also gelatinized them. Then I mashed them in a meat grinder into porridge. When the temperature was 65 C, I added amylase. I used a lot of amylase adding it several times. After processing this way for about one and a half hour, the mash was sweet enough even thoug the iodine showed that starch was still present. I used ca 5 kg acorns and added ca 2 liters of water. It fermented well whith distillers yeast, and I guess some conversion kept going on because the fermentation kept going for two weeks. I got ca. 1,5 liter 50 % spirit out of it. Distilling in a bain marie. The taste is great, acornish and different, but some test tasters did not like it. Closer to a grain spirit than potatoe, but the oils and flavor from the acorns give a bitter and nutty taste as well. I also tried an acorn fake mash, just boiling the acorns in the pressure boiler for an hour to gelatinize, and added spraymalt to reach 7 %. The taste of this was similar, but not as rich and complex as the proper one.

Next step I am going to try is to make a kind of acorn sake-mash. Aspergillus fungus that provides the amylase for starch conversion in sake, will also make tannase if tannine is present when the mold is growing. Tannase is an enzyme that brakes down tannine. I have bought koji spores to make kome-koji and have made a first try of ordinary sake of rice with great success. Im going to make a koji whith a mix of rice and acorn, and use this for a slow low-temperature conversion going on together whith the fermentatoin, in the same way as sake is made. I will update whith the results of further experiments.
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by BDF »

Very interesting thread...
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by ElCubanazo »

favnesbane wrote:I have finally made a small batch of acorn spirit. In order to leech them I boiled the whole acorns whith the shells on, changing the water about five times, it was maybe around 3 hours of total boiling. This process also gelatinized them. Then I mashed them in a meat grinder into porridge. When the temperature was 65 C, I added amylase. I used a lot of amylase adding it several times. After processing this way for about one and a half hour, the mash was sweet enough even thoug the iodine showed that starch was still present. I used ca 5 kg acorns and added ca 2 liters of water. It fermented well whith distillers yeast, and I guess some conversion kept going on because the fermentation kept going for two weeks. I got ca. 1,5 liter 50 % spirit out of it. Distilling in a bain marie. The taste is great, acornish and different, but some test tasters did not like it. Closer to a grain spirit than potatoe, but the oils and flavor from the acorns give a bitter and nutty taste as well. I also tried an acorn fake mash, just boiling the acorns in the pressure boiler for an hour to gelatinize, and added spraymalt to reach 7 %. The taste of this was similar, but not as rich and complex as the proper one.

Next step I am going to try is to make a kind of acorn sake-mash. Aspergillus fungus that provides the amylase for starch conversion in sake, will also make tannase if tannine is present when the mold is growing. Tannase is an enzyme that brakes down tannine. I have bought koji spores to make kome-koji and have made a first try of ordinary sake of rice with great success. Im going to make a koji whith a mix of rice and acorn, and use this for a slow low-temperature conversion going on together whith the fermentatoin, in the same way as sake is made. I will update whith the results of further experiments.
I hate to revive a dead thread but would love an update on how well this works and what the process is like. This is super interesting!
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Re: White Oak Acorn mash???

Post by nathar »

Just make sure you really know your oak trees. White oak acorns taste good. Red oak acorns are horribly bitter.
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