I ended up with some different types of grain based flours in my pantry (mostly from my wife's baking experiments). After a bunch of research, I decided to try and make a no-cook flour based mash and see what would happen- just for the hell of it. I started with
5# of finely ground Corn Meal (finer than polenta, not as fine as pure flour)
1.5# Rye flour
1.5# Oat flour
1.5# Potato flour
and
2.5# of cracked 6-row Barley malt (for enzymes)
This came out to 12lbs in total.
I mixed all of this in a plastic fermenter with 2.5 gallons of cold water. I started with a long ladle, but eventually I had to get in there with my bare hands and mash this stuff between my fingers to get ALL the lumps out. Kind of gooey and gross, but what the hell. I then brought another 2.5 gallons of water to near boiling on my stove and then threw this all in together and mixed it up well. Covered it and left it over night. The hydrometer read about 1,075.
In the morning, I threw in a high quality liquid (White Labs I think) vial of ale yeast and the powdered contents of 4 gel caps of Beano. Mixed it up, put on the lid and shook it up again inside the carboy. After 24 hours it was bubbling away and finished after about a week. I removed the lid once and the wash had a lovely baking bread aroma to it, though ended with a weird looking white powdery film on top . The final reading was 1,020- so should be about 7-8% alcohol, not bad!
Again, I have not distilled this yet. I'll be doing a stripping run tomorrow and then back mashing for 4-5 runs. I'll post how it actually tastes (could be crap?). Who knows. White dog, I guess it might be defined as a Potcheen (oats and potatoes boyo!). If I age it on medium toast oak, I think it'll make a nice sippin' whiskey. See how it goes
