Inka's All-Flour
Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2015 11:56 pm
Dear Friends,
I would like to share the all-flour method I use with great success. It has been tried and works for a great many different flours, very adaptable technique. I have a 4.5 gal pot still that I use for cooking, stripping and distilling, so the amounts are centered around my tool. Feel free to scale up as you like.
- Warm up 9 liter (3 parts, 2.4 gal.) water to 50ºC (120F).
Higher strike temp will make it much harder to break up clumps.
- Mix 2 ml (½ tsp.) of alpha-enzyme in the water.
Alpha likes neutral pH. Without using alpha we should have to use 12 litre (4 part) water and more than ~3% malt-flour in our grain bill to prevent the epic thickening of the cooked out starches.
- Stir in 3 kg (1 part, 6.6 lb.) flour.
Any taste you like. I use two grainbill-base, one is bourbon- the other is scotch-style. My bourbon has two-third cornflour, rest is rye and oats, my scotch has two-third barleyflour, rest is different malts. This recipe is also good for rice, sorghum, triticale, wheat etc. flours.
- Heat your soup slowly while continously stirring to 80ºC (175F).
While barley and malt does not need that high temperature to release its starches, in my experience it is still useful to heat it up to this level as barley-mash is more inclined to infections than one made from corn. If your barley-flour is made from berries without husks then you can stop at lower temperature if you wish.
- Take it off the heat, pour in 3 liter (1 part, 0.8 gal.) cold backset.
I fill my backset-jars straight from the pot while the backset is still steaming hot, store them in a cold basement, and use it within a week, so it is less likely to contaminate the mash.
- At 60ºC (140F) set the pH to 4.5 and stir in 2 ml (½ tsp.) of gluco-amylase.
Gluco needs a low pH to work, and it works best just under it's destabilisation temperature, which is 65-70ºC. Keeping the mash at 50-60ºC with an insulated pot for two hours means a day or two less fermentation time, but do not attempt to leave it all night as it can be infected before yeasting.
- Cool down the mash below 30ºC as fast as possible.
Cool it from outside, by filling your bathtub with cold water and putting the pot in it, or from inside, by using a wort chiller or a DIY-chiller, which is a submersible double copper spiral with an aquarium pump that circulates a big bucket of water in it.
- Aerate the mash, then rehydrate and mix in the yeast.
Use your favorite yeast or in combination with some ale-yeast added as plus. If your distillers yeast has a high killer-factor it can and will kill the ale-yeast, however the ale-yeasts will still give out their characteristic flavour to the mash.
- Keep a constant temperature while fermenting.
Check your yeast's optimal fermenting temperature by searching out it's datasheet, even cold-tolerant yeasts can have a surprisingly high fermentation optimal. 25ºC (80F) seems to be a good temperature for most yeasts we use with AG. This way you will get a fast fermentation, 4-5 days and it is ready to cook.
I make three pots of this mash with the amounts written and ferment it out together in an 50L insulated and temperature-controlled fermentation barrel. The mash is ready when most of the floating particles are sank to the bottom, no bubbling or sizzling can be seen and the CO2 feels gone from the top. Still it is a good idea to check the clean liquid from the top with a beer hydrometer to see if it is really fermented out dry. This is when I tear down the insulation and pull out the heating tube, giving my fermented mash a day to settle.
When stripping time comes, I collect the liquid only from the top, leaving the sludge as undisturbed as possible. After about 2x 13 L (3.5 gal.) run I reach the creamy part. This is when I pour in 10 L (2.6 gal.) water and after mixing it well, I leave it for another day to settle. What happens is that the water dilutes the alcohol into itself instantly, and even if this last strip yields less alcohol it already pulled out >50% of alcohol from the sludge, and while doing this we also gave an oxygene shot to the yeast that we wish to use later in the next fermentation run.
Nonetheless, if someone wish to give the spent grains to farm animals (like backyard chickens), it is better to give it to them with low alcohol as a bad hangover stops hens' laying for a few days. I use to cup 4/5 of the sludge out, leaving the creamy liquid yeasts at place, and refreshing with a little shower-water to give them even more oxygen for budding. I fill the fermentor again with three pots of mash, then ferment and strip it out too.
As for stripping I put my previous feints in stripping runs, sometimes with aged "honey" backset that is not the same as the ones I use for acidifying the mash. (It is much like dunder, infected at cold with part of a backset that developed a deep honey-like sweetness. This "honey" backset is sterilized for an hour after it starts hissing in a pressure cooker before use.) I stop the stripping when the low wines start to come out at 15% abv.
When distilling 6x pot worth of the above mash - it equals around 12 liter of low wines diluted to 30% abv - I collect hearts from 72% to 62%. First 100 ml is used as bbq-fluid, then a liter of heads are collected in the feints jar, 3 liter of hearts is stored separately, rest is tails that I put into the feints jar too.
Try it, and tell me how you like it.
Cheers,
Paulinka
I would like to share the all-flour method I use with great success. It has been tried and works for a great many different flours, very adaptable technique. I have a 4.5 gal pot still that I use for cooking, stripping and distilling, so the amounts are centered around my tool. Feel free to scale up as you like.
- Warm up 9 liter (3 parts, 2.4 gal.) water to 50ºC (120F).
Higher strike temp will make it much harder to break up clumps.
- Mix 2 ml (½ tsp.) of alpha-enzyme in the water.
Alpha likes neutral pH. Without using alpha we should have to use 12 litre (4 part) water and more than ~3% malt-flour in our grain bill to prevent the epic thickening of the cooked out starches.
- Stir in 3 kg (1 part, 6.6 lb.) flour.
Any taste you like. I use two grainbill-base, one is bourbon- the other is scotch-style. My bourbon has two-third cornflour, rest is rye and oats, my scotch has two-third barleyflour, rest is different malts. This recipe is also good for rice, sorghum, triticale, wheat etc. flours.
- Heat your soup slowly while continously stirring to 80ºC (175F).
While barley and malt does not need that high temperature to release its starches, in my experience it is still useful to heat it up to this level as barley-mash is more inclined to infections than one made from corn. If your barley-flour is made from berries without husks then you can stop at lower temperature if you wish.
- Take it off the heat, pour in 3 liter (1 part, 0.8 gal.) cold backset.
I fill my backset-jars straight from the pot while the backset is still steaming hot, store them in a cold basement, and use it within a week, so it is less likely to contaminate the mash.
- At 60ºC (140F) set the pH to 4.5 and stir in 2 ml (½ tsp.) of gluco-amylase.
Gluco needs a low pH to work, and it works best just under it's destabilisation temperature, which is 65-70ºC. Keeping the mash at 50-60ºC with an insulated pot for two hours means a day or two less fermentation time, but do not attempt to leave it all night as it can be infected before yeasting.
- Cool down the mash below 30ºC as fast as possible.
Cool it from outside, by filling your bathtub with cold water and putting the pot in it, or from inside, by using a wort chiller or a DIY-chiller, which is a submersible double copper spiral with an aquarium pump that circulates a big bucket of water in it.
- Aerate the mash, then rehydrate and mix in the yeast.
Use your favorite yeast or in combination with some ale-yeast added as plus. If your distillers yeast has a high killer-factor it can and will kill the ale-yeast, however the ale-yeasts will still give out their characteristic flavour to the mash.
- Keep a constant temperature while fermenting.
Check your yeast's optimal fermenting temperature by searching out it's datasheet, even cold-tolerant yeasts can have a surprisingly high fermentation optimal. 25ºC (80F) seems to be a good temperature for most yeasts we use with AG. This way you will get a fast fermentation, 4-5 days and it is ready to cook.
I make three pots of this mash with the amounts written and ferment it out together in an 50L insulated and temperature-controlled fermentation barrel. The mash is ready when most of the floating particles are sank to the bottom, no bubbling or sizzling can be seen and the CO2 feels gone from the top. Still it is a good idea to check the clean liquid from the top with a beer hydrometer to see if it is really fermented out dry. This is when I tear down the insulation and pull out the heating tube, giving my fermented mash a day to settle.
When stripping time comes, I collect the liquid only from the top, leaving the sludge as undisturbed as possible. After about 2x 13 L (3.5 gal.) run I reach the creamy part. This is when I pour in 10 L (2.6 gal.) water and after mixing it well, I leave it for another day to settle. What happens is that the water dilutes the alcohol into itself instantly, and even if this last strip yields less alcohol it already pulled out >50% of alcohol from the sludge, and while doing this we also gave an oxygene shot to the yeast that we wish to use later in the next fermentation run.
Nonetheless, if someone wish to give the spent grains to farm animals (like backyard chickens), it is better to give it to them with low alcohol as a bad hangover stops hens' laying for a few days. I use to cup 4/5 of the sludge out, leaving the creamy liquid yeasts at place, and refreshing with a little shower-water to give them even more oxygen for budding. I fill the fermentor again with three pots of mash, then ferment and strip it out too.
As for stripping I put my previous feints in stripping runs, sometimes with aged "honey" backset that is not the same as the ones I use for acidifying the mash. (It is much like dunder, infected at cold with part of a backset that developed a deep honey-like sweetness. This "honey" backset is sterilized for an hour after it starts hissing in a pressure cooker before use.) I stop the stripping when the low wines start to come out at 15% abv.
When distilling 6x pot worth of the above mash - it equals around 12 liter of low wines diluted to 30% abv - I collect hearts from 72% to 62%. First 100 ml is used as bbq-fluid, then a liter of heads are collected in the feints jar, 3 liter of hearts is stored separately, rest is tails that I put into the feints jar too.
Try it, and tell me how you like it.
Cheers,
Paulinka