Twisted Brick wrote:
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You may have seen this when I posted it somewhere else, but ADI Forum: Bourbon Mash Question is an approach I have adopted.
Read down to Shane's (Silk City Distillery) protocol. I just love reading through this because it reminds me there's easy controls in our processes that can make our end product 'artisanal'.
Actually, believe TB mis-typed and meant to refer to Shane at Wilderness Trail Distillery. His response about differing temps was not only on point for the discussion about Sweetfeed, I thought it answered questions a lot of HD'ers have when getting into AllGrain.
It was posted as a response about temperatures for "smaller" grains compared to corn
Instead of just posting it to the discussion on Sweetfeed , I thought it best to create a separate thread.
(And I bumped the font up a little because it got really blurry with these old eyes) Thanks TB!
Under a given set of conditions, there is an optimum cooking temperature and time to obtain the best quality of distillate and the best alcohol yield. I believe the question you have is about cooking small grains at high temperatures. There are a lot of ways to prepare grains for fermentation, but the simple goal of cooking is to gelatinize the starch granules, to make them available for hydrolysis by enzymes to convert to fermentable sugars but the complicated goal is to efficiently obtain proper gelatinization of starch, properly free up amino acids the yeast require, convert to fermentable sugars, reduce contamination and obtain a flavor extraction from the grains.
The infusion mashing process we use, (simply cooking small grains at lower & proper temperatures), here at Wilderness Trail is designed around maximizing flavor first, energy second and time third.
You do not have to boil your grains up to 210F and you certainly do not want to cook any of your small grains (wheat, rye, barley, malted barley, etc) in that range, again you can but it will not be the highest quality distillate you can obtain in the end if you do that. You can cook corn to 210F and it doesn't do much more than waste energy cooking it that high, part of the high heat is to sterilize the grains of bacteria and you take care of that around 190F and you only need to cook corn around 190F-185F for proper gelatinization, we cook our corn at 190F, it saves energy from going higher, we convert all of the available sugars and sterilize our grains, that is why you do it. For wheat the actual gelatinization range is 136F-146F but we start adding our wheat around 155-160F. For Rye the actual range is 135F-158F and we add and cook our Rye no higher than 160F for good reasons. Our Malted barley never goes in higher than 145F to preserve the enzymatic activity and to keep the grains intact. Think of it this way, gelatinization is like popping popcorn under water, its a dramatic change in the grains composition.. and throw in some smaller ductile grains like wheat or rye and you blow them apart under the same conditions as well as a lot of protein you don't want to break down.
The reasons you do not cook grains beyond their proper gelatinization range is more about flavor than yield because if it is too rigorous, thermal decomposition of grain components will cause objectionable popcorn phenolic odors, yield is more impacted by poor grains, under cooking, poor conversion and yeast conditions. By using the infusion mashing process for small grains, you keep the branched chain amino acids and proteins in place with the grains that the yeast will use to properly make a flavorful result. If you boil your small grains, you are creating unbranched chain amino acids, degrading proteins and frankly blowing apart the flavor you are trying to extract. Small grains also get scorched very easy and there are Maillard effects that create all kinds of new chemicals from the high heat of small grains you don't want, plus why would you, the process doesn't require it. The yeast take these unbranched chain and Maillard effect's and turns them into higher alcohols (fusels) and other chemicals that alter the flavor and result of the beer & distillate.
In short summary for our whiskeys, we cook our corn to 190F and hold that for 40 minutes, we cool to 160F by adding some water additions of the overall mashbill and add our wheat or Rye and hold that for 30 minutes, we add more water additions to get to 145F which is when we add our Malted Barley which rest for 30 minutes. We add the rest of our water additions for our ferm set and the chiller takes it down to 90F. We send that to our fermenters, which are set to hold at 85F for three day beer and 78F for 4-5 day beer. By shortening the initial cook of the total water, your initial cook is thicker, for us that is around 18 beer gallons and that allows you to use less energy to heat up the initial cook and reserve the rest of the water for cooling capacity as well as when you add your grains you are also using that to help cool your mash down. For example I mentioned we add our wheat at 160F but after the grains are added the temperature drops to around 150F+ and rest out to a little above 145F.
We primarily make a wheated Bourbon but we also make a Rye Whiskey, which again even though the Rye will be the majority of grains, we still cook our smaller amount of Corn up to 190F and then cool it down to 160F before adding the majority of the mashbill of Rye. Infusion mashing is scientifically proven to offer a more flavorful distillate and smoother distillate, mainly for the reasons listed above.
Interesting to see a pro's take on the corn cook at 190°F for only 40 minutes when so much else I've read is 90 minutes.
Hey that oughta cut some time off of cook day if I can break my ol' 90-minute habit.
Every once in a while I'd cook my small grains (where DP=0) with the corn, too, but I won't be doing THAT anymore after reading this.
Hey thanks for learning me something goodly today, TDick!
I have not cooked a lot of corn but 40 minutes to an hour seems to work, I have mashed a lot of grain in the 148 range and it usually needs an hour to fully convert in my experience, rye might need 90 minutes but he may be shooting for a particular flavor or starting gravity and that gets it but if he shooting for gravity he may be wasting a lot of grain
When the student is ready the teacher will emerge.
I'd rather cook less, and use a little more corn. At a hobbyist scale, the added cost is minimal. I just don't have the patience to keep stirring! But I'd think the pros are looking to minimize material costs, so this is interesting to see a shorter time specified.
i think a lot of that is good info. the problem i have with not cooking thoroughly is infection and the resulting stall.
my rye recipe has morphed to 100% malt rye, mixed continuously: sebflo at 110* on the way up, add htl at 165 cook to 170* and hold for 30 minutes, add water back to 150* add GL and mix for 90 minutes, cool to 105* and pitch, let it cool naturally. when it hits room temp the ferment is done.
there is a definite Mailliard effect on the rye, the mash goes from creamy and green to smooth, shiny and medium brown. i use the enzymes mostly because i'm gong out of nature's comfort zone and i want full conversion and extraction. this method nets a 10% beer at 250g/L malt to final volume that usually finishes at 1.01 and will sometimes go dry.
if i cook less to less than 170 for 30, i almost invariably will stall from 1.05 to 1.03
TDick wrote:This is from a discussion started on the thread Mashing AG Sweetfeed
In that thread:
Twisted Brick wrote:
...
You may have seen this when I posted it somewhere else, but ADI Forum: Bourbon Mash Question is an approach I have adopted.
Read down to Shane's (Silk City Distillery) protocol. I just love reading through this because it reminds me there's easy controls in our processes that can make our end product 'artisanal'.
Actually, believe TB mis-typed and meant to refer to Shane at Wilderness Trail Distillery. His response about differing temps was not only on point for the discussion about Sweetfeed, I thought it answered questions a lot of HD'ers have when getting into AllGrain.
My apologies.
fizzix wrote:Interesting to see a pro's take on the corn cook at 190°F for only 40 minutes when so much else I've read is 90 minutes.
Hey that oughta cut some time off of cook day if I can break my ol' 90-minute habit.
Every once in a while I'd cook my small grains (where DP=0) with the corn, too, but I won't be doing THAT anymore after reading this.
Hey thanks for learning me something goodly today, TDick!
I'm stuck on the 90+min minimum too, even though my corn is ground down to meal. I'm guessing since Shane appears to test EVERYTHING, he has his crush optimized for his time and temps, especially given the skin in the game he has. Knock on wood: I haven't gotten an infection yet and usually ferment out dry.
HDNB wrote:i think a lot of that is good info. the problem i have with not cooking thoroughly is infection and the resulting stall.
my rye recipe has morphed to 100% malt rye, mixed continuously: sebflo at 110* on the way up, add htl at 165 cook to 170* and hold for 30 minutes, add water back to 150* add GL and mix for 90 minutes, cool to 105* and pitch, let it cool naturally. when it hits room temp the ferment is done.
there is a definite Mailliard effect on the rye, the mash goes from creamy and green to smooth, shiny and medium brown. i use the enzymes mostly because i'm gong out of nature's comfort zone and i want full conversion and extraction. this method nets a 10% beer at 250g/L malt to final volume that usually finishes at 1.01 and will sometimes go dry.
if i cook less to less than 170 for 30, i almost invariably will stall from 1.05 to 1.03
That's good to know, HDNB. I think I'm gonna copy your process for 100% rye as it looks like you have your time/temps dialed in.
Any ideas why the sub-170F rest results in a stall?
“Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite, and furthermore, always carry a small snake.”
I have not seen this correlation, but if it's repeatable for you, I have no reason to doubt it. Could be a difference in water and pH buffers and residual proteins, but I'm not sure how that would work.
i have not had it tested by a lab, so i'm assuming a bacterial problem. the PH will crash to low 3's and adding a ph up will not restart. in fact nothing i have tried, including re-cooking to pasteurization temp will restart (it will however cook off a lot of what little booze there was) i don;t use oyster shell anymore, since i'm pumping the mash with and they are hard on the flexible impeller. (distill on grain)
one thing that does mitigate the stall problem is adjusting PH down to 5.5 at saccrification stage. the whole thing goes smoother. perhaps this holds the bacteria in check while the yeast gets going.
the rye comes out tasting pretty good with the method so just keep doing it the same way.
For AG, we use a nearly identical process as described by Shane (WTD) but on a much smaller scale using a dedicated 20 gal SSBrewtech InfuSsion Mash Tun (it holds temps really, really well) in conjunction with a dedicate 20 gal strike water kettle. We call that process 'TempTiering', although I'm sure others have different names for it. We originally used it for Beer making in order to add different flavors via 'exotic grains' into our homebrew.
Starting with the higher temp cooking grains we step down through the temperature zones adding grains and water as/where appropriate - adhering to specific gelatinization cook times/temps all the while testing BRIX to drive highest efficiencies and desired flavor profile. I've honestly not done research on power usage. Perhaps that goal should be set as well...
I discussed the process with Kent Fleischmann (Dry Fly Distilling) while up at Distillery University several years ago. They were cooking individual grain batches and then mixing beer at that time in order to achieve conversion efficiencies WELL above what most home distillers I know were getting. As I recall, he liked the idea but didn't think it was applicable to production distilling (again, at that time); perhaps Shane would take umbrage with that position today.
Again, TempTiering is what we use - and we absolutely love the end product.
Terminal Gravity: After tasting each and every cut, the speed at which the newly drunken distiller falls from his chair and strikes the floor...
CleanRun wrote:
I discussed the process with Kent Fleischmann (Dry Fly Distilling) while up at Distillery University several years ago. They were cooking individual grain batches and then mixing beer at that time in order to achieve conversion efficiencies WELL above what most home distillers I know were getting.
Thanks for your input. I have always considered mashing smaller grains simultaneously with my main mashes but never acted on it. Now, in addition to the time savings, if one can achieve a higher efficiency, I'm down to giving it a try.
“Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite, and furthermore, always carry a small snake.”
