I made my first batch based on NCHooch's Carolina bourbon recipe from the Tried and True Recipe forum section. I used 8lb cracked corn, 4lb 2-row, and 1lb malted rye. I'm from a beer brewing background, so I used a false-bottomed mash tun to separate grains from wash after mashing and did a post-mash boil to reduce volume and for sanitization purposes. I realize this may not be typical for whiskey/bourbon, but hey, it's my first batch
Efficiency was not good and the corn was a giant PITA. After reading a bit on here, I found that this is typical and the lack of efficiency was likely due to my not getting sufficient gelatinization of the cracked corn starch. I ended up with 6gal of wash at 1.052 SG (66% efficiency according to Beersmith with cracked corn set as 1.037 potential SG, matching what they have for flaked corn).
I also had some kind of problem with fermentability. Perhaps my mash temperature got too high, I'm not really sure. But I used a good pitch of Safale US-05, which lagged abnormally long, and only fermented down to 1.020 before it quit.
I did a stripping run and a spirit run, and ended up with about 1.5 quarts of distillate after the spirit run, collected in half pint fractions. After cuts, I had a little more than half a quart.
After aging for about 2 months with toasted, charred white oak sticks, it's pretty decent. The taste has a nice oaky front-end and a typical burn on the back end. However, it has this apple smell and flavor. That smell is more apparent before aging. I'm not sure if the oak is covering it up or if maybe the oak sticks absorbed some of this flavor or if it evaporated away. Does anyone else know the smell I'm talking about? Is it a normal thing that is aged away normally? While the "bourbon" is pretty decent, this is the main difference I detect when comparing smell and flavor to commercial bourbon, so I'd like to figure out if it's something wrong with the process I used, or if it's just something that you get with young bourbon.
The apple smell is heads. High proof too. It's a headache maker. Unfortunately, it doesn't age much better, but oak does help a little as you've noted. The speed of takeoff may have pushed the heads deeper into your sweet hearts. Maybe slowing the heat for a bit when you come online might help to compress them a bit more.
All in all, not bad effort. But you need to practice cuts. It would help you.
ss
Boiling your wash post mash denatured your enzymes is why you didn't get good conversion. For a corn wash/mash it is probably better to ferment on the grain and strain after fermentation. If ou do this you will get some residual conversion of the starches during fermentation. I use almost the same recipe as you only I use 10 ls. corn 3 lbs 2 row, and 2 lbs. malted rye, and I usually get around 7% potential ABV.
If you are not living on the "Edge", then you are taking up too much space!!!
@OBX Phantom - I believe I converted the starch that was there to sugar (iodine test), but I got poor starch extraction from the corn. I've been able to greatly improve the efficiency in later mashes.
@woodshed - some changes in equipment recently have led to me overshooting temps during mash at times. I'm still adjusting to a new brewstand with some big burners that can really pump a lot of heat into the keggles, have to watch it and do shorter bursts on lower output to adjust temp during mash than what I've been used to. Also, burn may have been a bad description. I get the same kind of warming and spice from commercial bourbon if I drink it straight as I do from this batch. Some bad stuff has a "kick you in the face" kind of heat, that's not what I'm talking about. On the yeast lagging, I used dry US-05 and it took somewhere between 1 to 2 days to get to full krausen, which happens to me pretty much all the time with 1st gen US-05 with beer. If I harvest, make a starter, and repitch, I don't have those lag times, things will get going in less than 1 day. Before you ask, I am rehydrating the dry yeast properly, and I am aerating wort, though with this bourbon batch my aeration stone was really clogged up, and I had to give up on aerating for this batch and order a new stone, so that probably contributed to a less optimal ferment quite a bit. I also use a plate chiller to get down to ~70f and then use the chest freezer I use as a temp-controller fermentation chamber to get further down to my fermentation temp before pitching yeast. I had no idea that unfermented sugar would cause a bigger heads cut.
@still_stirring - Thanks, that's exactly what I needed to know. A little familiarity with what heads and tails smell and taste like will go a long way. I'll also make sure I use less heat coming up to distillation temperature next time.
Reading your mash protocol, it's obviously, you had much unfermentable sugars. It's a frequently thing, that a brewer wants to make whisky and he thinks it's the same but without hops. It isn't.
All answers to you are correct. You could study here NChooch's Carolina Bourbon again and try it again with longer gelatinization and no boiling after conversion.
The fruity flavours are in the heads and they will change while aging. Perhaps you noticed already while fermenting, that it smells less than a beer and more fruity like a wine? When you brew beer, you boil the beer at the and not only for the hops but also to fall out the proteins. In the trub are many fruit/wine flavours. Two times I boiled (it was malt whisky not bourbon) and fell out the trub, just for sure while cooling down I added enzymes to replace the enzymes I killed while boiling, it smelled much more like a beer while fermenting. And after distilling it had almost nothing of the fruit flavours.
In this way, imperialism brings catastrophe as a mode of existence back from the periphery of capitalist development to its point of departure.- Rosa Luxemburg
To Der Wo - mashing for whiskey and mashing for beer are more the same than different. The big difference is that in making beer, we usually are not dealing with cracked corn. If corn is used at all in beer brewing, it is always flaked maize, which is pre-gelatinized, and it is not usually more than 10% - 20% of the grist. Otherwise, conversion of starch to sugar is the same in either case.
To Joemama - read the Booner's Casual All Corn in T&T to get a handle on how to mash the corn, and run, don't walk, to get some OptiMash. I toyed with using flaked maize, but at $2 per lb as opposed to 22 cents a lb for feed store cracked corn, it was an easy choice. You do need to add the cracked corn to boiling water to get gelatinization. The last time I ground it a little more finely than the way it comes out of the bag, and I think that helped extraction. I do one more step, which is to bring the corn back up to the boil stirring constantly with my big brew spoon so it doesn't scorch before cutting the heat. You now have a thick cornstarch soup. Then pick up with the Booner's method, let the temperature drop to 180 dF and add your OptiMash enzyme. The cornstarch soup begins to thin out right before youre eyes, try it and you will become a believer. Let it drop to 145 dF and stir in the OptiFerm for all corn or your malted barley and rye for bourbon. Continue to hold in the mash tun until you get full conversion. Booner (Woodshed) kind of stops his directions there and say to follow your normal protocol from there.
I also use a mash tun with a false bottom, and have used it for a couple of batches of all corn and one batch of bourbon. Boiling after runoff is not a usual procedure, but OBX Phantom is mistaken that boiling "denatured" enzymes if, as you say, you had a negative iodine test for starch before the boil. In fact, based on a lot of posts here about conversion continuing to occur during fermentation, I suspect a lot of people do not do iodine tests and are trying to ferment a lot of unconverted starch. Boiling the wort after runoff to concentrate and increase SG, as is done with beer, does not seem to me to be a bad procedure. The big question is sparging. Most people here seem to be "squeezers" or "ass pressers" but I can't comment on that. There is a lot of liquid left in the spent grain, which I know I am losing. If you sparge too much though, you are just diluting the wort. I have a 7 gallon mash tun, and so boil 6 gallons water to cook the corn. Woodshed recommends 1.8 lb corn per gallon, I have been using 2 lbs per gallon (i.e., 12 lbs of corn in 6 gallons), and that fills my mash tun to the top. I have been "sparging" by adding 1 gallon of 170 dF water to the mash tun and stirring after most of the wort has been run off. I collect about 4 gallons without squeezing or pressing somewhere around 1.040 - 1.045.
Now the heresy (so shoot me). I use a wine chaptalization chart to boost the 1.040 - 1.045 to 1.070 with sugarfor fermentation. I add the recommended amount of Brewhaus Distiller's Nutrients (probably not necessary), aerate with an air stone and aquarium pump (aeration in some form is absolutely necessary, as you probably know, to get the yeast going properly), and pitch rehydrated DADY. My fermenters are in a room just south of 80 dF. Fermentation takes off right away and ferments continuously down to 1.000 or lower. I suppose SC will chime in about "sugar burn" or some such, but make your own conclusions. Fruit wines are always chaptalized, usually to around 1.090, and get distilled to fruit brandies, where I don't hear anybody talking about "sugar burn." Whatever, I think SC and I just will have to agree to disagree.
Due to my small mash tun (it is an orange Gott water cooler, the round one, fitted with a Phil's Phalse Bottom, but I have a Schmidline EasyMasher coming in the mail soon), I am toying with the idea of mashing the corn and the malted barley separately, and combining the runoffs for fermentation. That way I could mash my 12 lbs of corn with the two enzyme method as for all corn and then mash, say, 10 lbs of malted barley by a traditional one temp infusion at 145 dF in 3 gallons of water with no sparge. Just thinking out loud of course.
I may have to investigate squeezing or ass pressing because I sure would like to recover the liquid left behind in the spent grain. This however seems like a major PITA, so I am really not sure about that.
Nice post Baxtersdad.
I would have to agree that a boil after shouldn't do any harm if all of the available starches are already converted, but with that being said I also don't find it necessary.
As for the crappy conversion with the cracked corn I have switched to corn meal and will probably not go back to cracked corn. I have had much better conversions.
Hey if you do have a batch that doesn't get to the gravity and you add a little sugar to get the gravity up then so be it. I would say most grain is still better than a sugar head.
I ferment in 6 gallon ale pales so at the end of fermentation I set up two 5 gallon buckets one on top of the other. On the bottom bucket I place a lid with a bunch of holes drilled in it. On top of that I sit my second bucket. It has holes drilled in the bottom. We have just made a big strainer. I put a paint strainer bag in the top bucket and pour my grains in.It drains from the top bucket to the bottom bucket.
After most of the liquid has drained I fold the strainer bag in on top of the grain and press the rest out by hand against the bottom of the top bucket.
Hope this makes sense
Interesting! Do you think removing the protein from solution via hot break during the boil has any negative effect on the wash or ferment for whiskey? I agree that denaturing enzymes shouldn't be a problem with a proper conversation and iodine test to confirm, but maybe there are other things that change by doing a post mash boil.
joemama wrote:Interesting! Do you think removing the protein from solution via hot break during the boil has any negative effect on the wash or ferment for whiskey? I agree that denaturing enzymes shouldn't be a problem with a proper conversation and iodine test to confirm, but maybe there are other things that change by doing a post mash boil.
No I wouldn't think so. I have some theories on that but no real beer mashing experience to really back up my thoughts.
I tried using backset from this batch in the next and it totally smelled like puke. I wonder if that was due to unfermented sugar as well. Does backset normally smell like puke?
BaxtersDad wrote:To Der Wo - mashing for whiskey and mashing for beer are more the same than different.
I did say, that a whiskey-mash is not the same like a beer-mash without hops.
Are the differences enough to say it is more the same or more different? Yes or no? I don't think, a voting about that leads to a promising discussion.
joemama wrote:Do you think removing the protein from solution via hot break during the boil has any negative effect on the wash or ferment for whiskey? I agree that denaturing enzymes shouldn't be a problem with a proper conversation and iodine test to confirm, but maybe there are other things that change by doing a post mash boil.
If you mash whiskey you have always to ensure, you don't kill the enzymes. It's much more challenging for them, to convert everything in fermentable sugars than in a beer-style mix of fermentables and non-fermentables. And normally you try to use much less malt/dp than for beer. That sums up, that in practice a hot break will have the negative effects of a high FG. Mostly I have an positive iodine test after mashing, but always a negative after fermenting and always a low FG around 1.000. With low malt content in my expierience you must not stop the enzymes while mashing.
And btw, with corn I would try on the grain fermenting and distilling.
joemama wrote:I tried using backset from this batch in the next and it totally smelled like puke. I wonder if that was due to unfermented sugar as well. Does backset normally smell like puke?
Yes, backset smells. But after distilling, the taste (and a bit the yield, because there are always some sugars in it) will benefit of it. In my experience, if you want to mash with backset, you have to add the most of it after mashing because of pH-issues. So you have to mash with less water. To buffer with calciumcarbonate helps little, perhaps you have experience with stronger pH-risers, I don't have.
In this way, imperialism brings catastrophe as a mode of existence back from the periphery of capitalist development to its point of departure.- Rosa Luxemburg
