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When a 'legal' description for a particular spirit says 'must be made from at least 51% corn' or 'made from a mixture of at least 35% rye, 20% corn, 25% malted barley' (I'm making these numbers up), what constitutes the percentages? For instance if it says 51% corn, does that mean 51% corn, 49% water? or 51% corn, 49% sugar/other ingredients? How would the percentage be measured? By weight or volume? In other words, if we're making 100 gallons of mash, that's a volume measurement, so how would the percentage of ingredients be measured? Would it be like 51lbs of corn, 49lbs of sugar, or 51cups of corn, 49cups sugar, etc?

I hope this post makes sense. For the legal references I'm talking about, refer to the wikipedia's entry on American Whiskey.

Thanks for the help!

Jeremy

Whiskey doesn't contain sugar. It's all grain.

As for percentages, they pertain to the grain bill. If say a bourbon has to have a minimum of 51% corn, it would need to have at least 51 pounds of corn in it for every 100 pounds of grain the maker would use (with the other 49% and 49 pounds being made up of barley, rye, wheat, or some other grain).

Bottom line: the percentages go by weight of the grains being used.

Hope that helps.

Okay that makes more sense... but then how do you know how many pounds of grain to use per gallon of water?

Now your getting into all grain calculation territory. And you need to research AG recipe development. And that is a lot of information. Here is a good place to start.
http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

If you are asking about a sugarhead? It couldn't be legally called a whiskey anyway. But you would go by like the UJSSM. And use the amount of grain recommended for that recipe.