Types of Corn?
Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2018 12:30 am
Hi guys - bit of a longwinded question, please bear with me. I have been trying my hand at making different types of UJSSM type whiskeys for the past year. So far I have mostly been using corn meal as a base, and the results have yielded a sweet tasting spirit. In SA corn meal is the staple food, so its cheap and easy to get anywhere. Its also pre-cooked mostly, so its quick to gelatinize (similar to 'flaked corn'? - which we don't get here)
Anyway - with my last ferment I decided to use crushed corn as the recipe says - chicken feed from the pet store. It was yellow and roughly 3 cracks per kernel. The result was a much less sweet, and smoother strip run. Very little heads or tails. As a matter of fact the strip is so clean I am strongly considering not doing a spirit run, or at least aging some of the strip as an experiment, for fear of losing too much task
So this got me thinking - the corn meal we get here is white, and yellow cornmeal (similar to 'grits'?), while available, is scarce and a bit of a novelty.
White maize is not eaten on the cob here often, but yellow corn-on-the-cob is known as 'sweetcorn' and is popular with butter and salt. (This seems counter intuitive since we have lots of white corn meal, but eat yellow corn off the cob)
My question is this - is there a specific type of corn recommended for making moonshine or whiskey (since the term 'cracked corn' now seems a bit non-specific) Is American cracked corn white or yellow? (I suspect yellow?) Sweetcorn? Something else? Has anyone tried using white cracked corn?
Anyway - with my last ferment I decided to use crushed corn as the recipe says - chicken feed from the pet store. It was yellow and roughly 3 cracks per kernel. The result was a much less sweet, and smoother strip run. Very little heads or tails. As a matter of fact the strip is so clean I am strongly considering not doing a spirit run, or at least aging some of the strip as an experiment, for fear of losing too much task
So this got me thinking - the corn meal we get here is white, and yellow cornmeal (similar to 'grits'?), while available, is scarce and a bit of a novelty.
White maize is not eaten on the cob here often, but yellow corn-on-the-cob is known as 'sweetcorn' and is popular with butter and salt. (This seems counter intuitive since we have lots of white corn meal, but eat yellow corn off the cob)
My question is this - is there a specific type of corn recommended for making moonshine or whiskey (since the term 'cracked corn' now seems a bit non-specific) Is American cracked corn white or yellow? (I suspect yellow?) Sweetcorn? Something else? Has anyone tried using white cracked corn?