Home Distiller

This is a little sugar wash I came up with a while back that seems to ferment pretty darn well and reasonably quickly, 6-8 days depending on conditions. I use 4 gallon fermenters so the recipe is scaled for that size.


-start by dissolving 6 pounds of sugar into about 6 liters of hot water.
-next prepare the grape nuts nutrient broth: heat up 3 liters of water until it's too hot to touch (not boiling) and cut the heat. While it's still hot put in 2 cups grape nuts (or cheerios), 1 tsp yeast and four tbsp lemon juice. Stir it until the grape nuts are mush and the solution is milky looking. Filter out the grape nuts in a sifter or such to get just the extracted broth.
-add the grape nuts broth to the sugar solution and then top it off with cold water to bring it to 4 gallons.
-allow it time to cool off enough to add your yeast.
-once it's cool add 7 tsp bakers yeast and put the air lock on the fermenter.

Couple comments/observations:
The lemon juice I've been using is the store bought variety, it contains potassium metabisufite. The preservative doesn't appear to affect things significantly though it may be worth trying fresh squeezed to see if it'll go faster.
I double distill this on a pot still, the second run employing a novel copper packed reflux apparatus that stands between a "boiling ball" and a reflux column proper. It's affect on the run is a whole other subject but the end product I'm getting, after dilution to drinking strength could best be described as a hybrid child of whisky and vodka. Actually not bad drunk straight (maybe oak it some first) though I often flavor my spirits with steam distilled hydrosols.....
Just a little something from my lab.

+1 cooked yeast and cereal makes a fine yeast bomb

Sounds good. Always liked cereal washes. Good strong ferments. More so with your bomb I'd bet.

It has a nice flavor for a sugar wash. Being a whisky guy myself I have to say that this isn't a bad substitute. Maybe with aging on charred oak it'd make a good faux. Just gotta discipline myself enough to let it sit past a week heehee

See also, Rad's All Bran recipe in the Tried & True Recipe forum. It is similar and likewise uses store-bought breakfast cereal as a sugar wash nutrient. He uses the lemon juice (citric acid) to invert the sugar, creating glucose and fructose from sucrose. That inversion reduces the longer sugars into shorter, more fermentable sugars, hence the improved performance.

Here's the wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_sugar_syrup" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

I use the all bran recipe for making neutrals, as it is a clean fermenter. And it drives to completion quickly, as you've noted. Your similar recipe should perform and produce similar results as well.
ss

Thanks for the tip! I've thought about doing an inversion with it though I guess I just haven't done it. I set up a batch of it last night and I'm fixin to do another tonight, I'll try the inversion trick and then I'll let ya know how things went. I wouldn't mind knocking a day or two off the ferment time if such could be accomplished.

Oh, and as a side note:
I recently came into ten boxes of "Earth's Best" whole grain rice cereal due to a rather convenient misship at my place of employment. Looking at it I'd say it has a lot of ferment potential so I may try some of that in my prototype fermenter....

I am going to give this recipe a shot after my birdwatchers is done fermenting and stripping run is complete. What temperature do you maintain while fermenting? You are probably much warmer in New Mexico than my Midwest state. My last birdwatchers took almost 3 weeks to finish, then a week to settle for racking.

Well, I pitch at about 35-38 degrees Celsius which gets it off running like a doped race horse but I think my ambient temps are in the 24-27 degree Celsius range. I could probably have it go a lot faster if I kept it more in the 30's but my temp control is effectively the thermostat that keeps the whole house at a steady temp. I do keep my fermenters near a large window so the daytime temp may creep up a bit....

Now I have a question for any who might care to answer:
I make most of my flavors using hydrosols produced by steam distillation through my thumper. I'm considering throwing a few cups of grape nuts in the thumper with some water and pull off the flavor to add back to the final product. Has anyone ever tried doing this with a cereal wash/mash or something like it? Does that sound like a potentially good idea or does it sound like it might just be weird? Ideas?

I'm sure it will carry over as long as the water ratio isn't too high to grain.
I use my thumper as a steam pot to infuse fruit flavors into my sugar washes, works pretty good, not too strong but good enough you can taste it.

Go for it, or like you do for your bomb just cook the cereal and use the concentration of juice instead so it doesn't become too thick and clog up your down pipe.

Shine0n

So after running my two batches, one with invert sugar and one without, I've not noticed any distinction between them. Perhaps my taste buds or sense of smell are not as sensitive as some as I do smoke so perhaps I miss things that others might not...didn't notice any change in ferment time either. Inverting the sugar didn't add a lot more time to the overall process but unless I'm missing something I can't justify doing it in the future.

Were the 2 ferments the exact same minus the invert suger?
What were the sg and fg of the two?

Yes, the two ferments were identical, my measuring equipment is of the more precise sort. That being said, I don't mess with sg/fg readings. I've learned how to read the signs of things by other means and I always taste the finished wash before I run it. My proportions follow a structured set of rules I use with all fermentations and I keep notes so my results are usually pretty consistent. Both took the same amount of time to ferment to dryness, both gave identical amount of yield after stripping runs +/- 100 ml all told. No visible difference and no obvious flavor variance though as I pointed out I do smoke so if there was something subtle in terms of flavor I may well not be able to detect it.....unlike some palates I couldn't tell you the distinction between a ferment done with fructose, sucrose or maltose by taste.