As some of you guys know, my wife, Hyacinth Bucket, has been extremely supportive in my new hobby this past year. From me spending money on equipment and my set up, to just giving me the time away from other things to accomplish what I have this year has been very appreciated. She reads a lot, and reads some really obscure stuff at that. So she came across a recipe for an oat whiskey in one of her books that she asked me to try out. It was called Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Whiskey and sounded like it had everything to work so I didn't even hesitate, I told her I would try it as soon as I had a couple of grain ferments under my belt. After successfully pulling off my second all corn run, I decided to give it a try. I wanted to get it at least to the stripping phase before posting about it. I would have still posted what happened, good or bad, but I like this outcome a lot better. (Hint: It was good!
)The recipe scaled like this for my fermenters:
50 lbs whole oat groats (ground to a course meal, original recipe called for rolled oats)
4 lbs of sun dried raisins
10 lbs malted barley (ground to a course meal)
10 lbs panela sugar (recipe calls for brown sugar, but we love that panela juice flavor so we substituted)
25 gallons of water
6 tbsp of yeast (I used YLAY to give myself the best chance of it converting and working off)
We used the steep method to cook the oats after we ground them. I did use some powdered amylase to get things moving at first because it turned into a thick paste as soon as we had all the oats in there. We added in the raisins at this point and re-hydrated the panela with some boiling water and poured it in. We put our mixer in place and let it do it's thing until the temp dropped to around 150°F and added in the malted barley. We let the mixer work for another hour, capped it, put the insulation in place and let it sit till the next afternoon. It smelled great, right off the bat, like grandma's kitchen on a cold morning. By about 4pm the next day, the temp had dropped to just below 90°F so I pitched the yeast and closed them up again. I had enough mash (wash since it has panela?) to also do a 5 gallon thumper charge in a fermenting bucket.
I pitched 3tbsp of YLAY in each 14 gallon fermenter and 1tbsp in the bucket. One of the fermenters foamed over that first night, it was a huge sticky mess. (Note to self, oats need a LOT of headroom in the fermenter.) I cleaned up, closed it back up and didn't touch them again for almost two weeks. When I did check it had formed what I thought was a cap, I just closed them back up and let it sit for another week. Checked again, cap was still in place. The really nice smell of a bowl of breakfast oatmeal had been replaced with a slightly pukey smell by week 3. I let it sit till this past Saturday, another week, cap was still in place, 4 weeks total, so I decided to see what was up.
The "cap" was 3" or so and almost like cured spray foam, there was almost no grain in it at all. It apparently foamed up and got thick and dry enough that it was just floating there on top of the cleared mash. We pulled out some of the liquid below, strained it and took a gravity reading. It had worked off and was dry. It still had the pukey smell, but tasted like some sort of fruit cider.
We ran the stripping run yesterday and the stuff turned out really good even on the first pass. We put about 13 gallons or so of the mash in the kettle and the contents of the 5 gallon bucket in the fermenter and touched her off (we ran it with steam, not direct heat). We strained off the remaining 6 or 8 gallons of mash and plan to charge the thumper with it and add any left overs to the low wines in the kettle for the spirit run this coming weekend. We ended up with 5 gallons of low wines. I pitched the first pint, but the range for the rest was 150 - 0 proof, once we hit just water we shut it off.
If the initial stripping run is any indication this stuff is going to be really good. At about 100 proof it was delicious right off the pipe. You can taste every ingredient in it, and the pukeyness is all gone and the smell is just sorta malted oatmeal. I can't wait to run it again and see what we end up with. I'm absolutely sure some of it is destined to end up on wood to age for a while.
I'm sure this is something that we'll make on a regular basis, my wife really liked it. I'm open to any and all critiques or process improvements anyone is will to offer up that they think might help.
Rusty
