Home Distiller

So, before I begin, I am aware of the adage "to get a good quality product start with good quality ingredients" and I usually do. I am a farmer, and I've been making a lot of fruit brandies from my own and my neighbors' trees. I've been working hard at this for the past few months and I'm almost through with the backlog from the 2018 harvest season. I've got the still running the last batch of pear brandy right now, and my large fermenter is full of plums bubbling away.

I'm planning to do an islay-style whisky for a buddy of mine in a month or so, but in the meantime I want to switch gears, do an experiment or two with some various whisk(e)ys, so that when I jump into the really good stuff I've got a couple of things figured out.

I inventoried my fermentables, and realized that I have a bunch of cornmeal, grits, canned sweet corn, whole corn for livestock feed, etc. I also have some leftover 2-row base malt from a couple of beers I made earlier this year. I figure I can use the diastatic power of the malt at 25% of the grain bill to convert the corn, ferment on the grain and use my mash tun to strain the resulting wash, let it settle, and then distill.

Basically I'm cleaning out a bunch of old stuff from the pantry to make way for new stuff. Yeah, cheap I know, but I'm a poor dirt farmer so it's what I gotta do.

My plan is to gelatinize the corn, cool to saccharification temperature, add the malt, let it rest and cool to pitching temperature. At what point would one add the canned sweet corn?

Anyhow I'm still working on the grain bill and looking forward to seeing if any of you can put in your two cents! Thanks in advance!

Changnoi wrote:So, before I begin...I'm planning to do an islay-style whisky for a buddy of mine in a month or so, but in the meantime I want to switch gears, do an experiment or two with some various whisk(e)ys.

I inventoried my fermentables, and realized that I have a bunch of cornmeal, grits, canned sweet corn, whole corn for livestock feed, etc. I also have some leftover 2-row base malt from a couple of beers I made earlier this year. I figure I can use the diastatic power of the malt at 25% of the grain bill to convert the corn, ferment on the grain and use my mash tun to strain the resulting wash, let it settle, and then distill.

My plan is to gelatinize the corn, cool to saccharification temperature, add the malt, let it rest and cool to pitching temperature. At what point would one add the canned sweet corn?

I wouldn't add canned corn at all. Instead, put that on the stove for supper.

But as far as finding a recipe for your first bourbon, I suggest reviewing the Tried & True Recipe forum. There's a couple of good recipes there that will help you learn the fundamentals of the mashing processes as well as the finishing and aging processes. If you stick with the T&T for your first venture(s), then when you need help along the way....and you WILL...we'll know the history of what you're doing and it will be easier to troubleshoot for you.

When you force through with your own (out of the hat) recipe, when things go wrong...you're left in the "figure it out yourself" dilemma. So, start with a T&T instead. There is a lot of wisdom in those archives.
ss

Thanks still_stirrin, headed to the T&T forum now!

After a quick read through a few of the bourbon recipes:

Already I can see that my proposed grain bill is almost identical (proportionally) to NChooch's Carolina Bourbon viewtopic.php?f=14&t=17750

I also noticed that Honey Bear viewtopic.php?f=14&t=67346 Uses 7lb cracked corn, and suggests if substituting corn meal, using only 5 pounds. I'm curious why that is? Both of those recipes use base malt(s) for their diastatic power, and both use 7lbs of cracked corn to 3 pounds of malt per batch. So if I stick with this ratio and procedure I should be able to turn out something which isn't too terrible.

The reason I was thinking to use sweet corn is because of distiller_dresden's thread on his Sweet Corn Shine viewtopic.php?f=11&t=72659&p=7544291 and because I have a TON of it, and I almost never eat it. Guess I could use it for fishing chum instead, or give it to the hogs!

Excellent advice as usual from still_stirrin. Can't beat Tried & True for success and support if trouble arises.

Did some research on canned corn addition and found cons:

• A can or two isn't going to do much
• In quantity, it's costly
• Canned corn's salt and preservatives are not friendly to yeast

That's just in case you wanted a "why not."

I've found the perhaps cheapest grain recipe is Booner's Corn for me.
Granted you have the added enzyme purchase, but they go a long away. I grind my $8/bushel corn into meal, what you say you have plenty of, and
Booner's makes a fine liquor. Just a tip.

Good source of enzymes. (Need both)
...or these. (Need Alpha and Gluco)

Thanks again for your help and advice, fizzix! I have a sweet hookup with a food kitchen. They get food from a bunch of different sources (grocery stores, institutions, etc) and feed the homeless out of a huge church's kitchen. When stuff expires, they give it to me. I am figuratively swimming in "expired" and dented cans of sweet corn. I was thinking for a small batch to use half a dozen cans or something. But it's really not necessary, and of course KISS principle says "stick with one or two fermentables until you've done it a couple times". Also, I hadn't thought about the preservatives; I guess I'll have to look over the labels. Meanwhile I got a half dozen bacon seeds and their parents out in the pasture; hogs LOVE corn. hahahahahaha

I read through Booner's Corn a bit, and I would like to try something like that in the future. Meanwhile I have this malt burning a hole in my pocket, and I don't have any Alpha amylase on hand, only gluco. There's a feed store less than 2 miles away, and they carry whole, rolled, and crimped corn, as well as wet and dry COB, all kinds of sweet feeds, etc.

Speaking of which, I have just vacated a bunch of fermentation vessels (4x 5gal, 2x 6gal, 1x 60gal) and I have 12# of malt. At the other recipe ratios, that's enough to do 4 batches. So I could try some different ones and see what happens. I also just found a sack of barley and another sack of wheat (which might actually be triticale, not sure) out in the feed bin. My goal with the Islay-whisky is to use malted barley (enough to convert the whole batch) and rolled barley, some of it cold smoked with peat. So I might just do a double batch of bourbon with the corn I have on hand, and an all-barley whiskey at the same time. Why not?

Thanks for the links to enzymes, I had started to dig into that but got sidetracked by other stuff. Cheers!

Hell, you've got nothing to lose trying it out then.
Home Distiller doesn't have much regarding canned corn beyond what I presented,
so maybe you can pave the way for a good post on your adventure --good or bad.
I'll be following you on this, so don't hold back any details.

Alright, I'm almost ready for this. I'm going to do a double batch of bourbon based on NChooch's Carolina Bourbon viewtopic.php?f=14&t=17750

11 pounds cornmeal
6 gallons water I might need to add some but I have a 10 gallon boiler for this so we'll see.

gelatinize, cool, transfer to mash cooler

6 pounds of 2-row barley base malt

mash at 145-150 for 2-3 hours

transfer to 2ea 5gal fermenters, top up with good water, and pitch yeast.

When fermentation is done, rack the clear off both fermenters and do a stripping run while straining the grainbed from both for the next stripping run. Combine the results, then do a spirit run!

Once this batch is in the fermenters I'll be using the remaining 6 pounds of 2-row to start a double batch of scotch, but I gotta smoke some barley first.

Hi there / just few words about my mash of yesterday...

- slowly cooked 3 parts of crushed corn / let it chill
- added 2 parts of rye malt (fine as flour) at 65C degrees
- warmed up back to the maltose break (and kept 62C-66C for 1 hour only)
- no further temp. breaks / heating etc.
- chilled by the centuries-proved put_into_some_huge_bank_of_snow method ))) down to 35C degrees
- pitched no-name wine yeast
- my kasha is actively bubbling now! (and I hope the saccharification is still going on in the mash)

I'll do my stripping run in a day or two / the corn fermentation runs so fast...

You make it sound so easy, Vlagavulvin! Let us know how this one turns out please.

Alright, finally got all the fruit out of the way to make room for the bourbon experiment. So I did this yesterday:
11 pounds of cornmeal added to 6 gallons of boiling water, kept on low heat, blended thoroughly. After about an hour it was pretty stiff. Let it cool down a bit and put into a cooler. There was a thin layer of caramelized cornmeal on the bottom of the pan, which I scraped and added to the cooler. Thought it might give some additional flavors to the finished product. Adding 6 pounds of 2-row pale base malt. It's like stirring polenta! Ugh

After a few stirs I let it sit overnight in the cooler wrapped in blankets. When I went to transfer it this morning, it smelled like it's already fermenting. Must be something wild on the barley. Oh well, it'll be unique for sure. Topped up with cold water to bring the temp below 80 degrees. Added yeast nutrient and used my handy paint mixer to aerate it, and pitched a strong hydrated DADY (hey, it's what I had on hand, other than Nottingham and RC-212) Both fermenters are bubbling away pretty strongly, not quite like high krausen would be on an ale but pretty close. Lets see how fast this ferment finishes then on to the good parts!

Yeah I milled the barley at the home brew supply store, I believe their roller mill is on .041 and it gives a pretty good beer grist. I usually get about 75% brewhouse efficiency with this particular malt, milled this coarse. It's got a diastatic power of about 140 so I could have made it as low as 25% of the grain bill and theoretically done a full conversion. I have some glucoamylase on hand in case I need to throw a bit in there.

The enzyme action seemed pretty robust, it went from polenta to chowder in a couple hours, and became extremely sweet. I should have run a starch test this morning but then the pigs got out and I got busy out in the mud hahahahah

I'll probably scoop some out and do a starch test later.

That crush on the barley (to me) seems not fine enough. I'm sure you had plenty of enzymes to convert the corn, but I suspect you left some of the barley behind, given the thickness of the mash. Hopefully fermenting on the grain will give it time for the remaining enzymes to fully convert and add some more malt flavor to your bourbon. 'Course, I could be wrong; it's just a little picture. What was your gravity at when you filled the fermenters?
In my experience, a really fine crush/grind will bump up your fermentables, and since you aren't lautering, it would not complicate things much.

It might be hard to see, but even the grains that look whole and intact are totally crushed inside. I just pulled a handful of the same grist out of the bag, and I can't find a single intact piece larger than 1/3rd the size of a barley grain. This grind has worked for me with beers, getting nearly maximum theoretical yield with mashes of only about an hour. I'm not too worried about it. It was leftover malt from several previous batches of beer (I usually buy it by the 55# bag and crush it at the homebrew store). I don't have any way besides a food processor to make it finer grind, and I don't think it really matters all that much considering how well it works. As far as the thickness of the mash, I usually do my first saccharization rest at about 1.25-1.3 qt/lb. This mash was 24qts/17lbs which is 1.4 qt/lb so it's actually a little thinner than I'm used to will all barley malt mashes. Just the polenta stage at the beginning makes it look super stiff, it only took an hour to thin out to an uncooked cornbread, and in the morning it was a thin watery gruel and still 120F.

I didn't take a gravity reading before pitching since the bulk of the grist was so fine that It would have taken a lot of straining to get an accurate sample. Maybe someone should invent a perforated cylinder that you stick down in your mash and float a hydrometer in it? hahahahahaha

I'll be using the same barley malt to convert some whole unmalted barley I have floating around; I'm gonna have to do a long slow gelatinization on that stuff because it's whole and I have no way of crushing it. That'll be sometime this week after I build a smoker and get some peat.

Changnoi wrote:You make it sound so easy, Vlagavulvin! Let us know how this one turns out please.

Say, I was wrong with my "in a day or two" forecast as my mash is too thick and it looks like the saccharification is still going on just inside there...

bilgriss wrote:That crush on the barley (to me) seems not fine enough.

That was the first thing my eye stopped at, too. May I advise kinda "starter" or "malted milk" here... just add some water in your cracked barley malt and keep it warm at 105F-115F for 15 minutes or about. Then drop it into your polenta (that is still as hot as maltose break temp or even a bit hotter)... and the chowder will not keep you waiting

Changnoi wrote:This grind has worked for me with beers, getting nearly maximum theoretical yield with mashes of only about an hour.

Yes, it has worked well (just as a self-saccharifier). In beers, we eager to get more dextrins and not only maltose, don't we? But working with grain or corn, it's worth to get all the efficient enzymes out of the malt. To kick the "sugars" out of the starch.

But that's the theory. In fact, my kasha is bubbling still so, my permanent sadness is insufficient saccharification when the yeast is starved... maybe, your water, your yeast type and other mashing&fermentation parameters let you get rid of the problems like mine.

Vlagavulvin you speak truth and I appreciate it. Most of time I've been brewing full mash I have been focusing on maximum fermentability because I like light, strong beers. Your advice brings me further along that path toward the best whisk(e)y!

Changnoi, It's my pleasure to know be saying proper things from time to time.
(well, wasn't that grammar structure too Irish or Runglish or Chinglish??)
OK: I am pleased to learn that sometimes I say the right things )))

BTW, what's your supposed way of stripping run for polentas? I have neither "external" steam generator nor any wish to filter my kasha before running. So, I will heat it slowly-slowly-slowly, safe and easy. Maybe, 5 hours before the 1st headsy drop hits the jar. Otherwise it will get deadly burnt.

I guess I'll have to cross that bridge when I come to it! I'm hoping that a lot of the grain settles, and I can rack the liquid off, then put the polenta into a grain filter bag or the mash tun. If I don't get every last drop that's ok, maybe the pigs will enjoy getting a little drunk.

Guess it's pretty good to use smth. like this... if the one grants it free of charge to you )))

A mop squeezer bucket and a 5-gallon paint strainer bad are a popular way of squeezing everything out of the corn around here.

I don’t think anyone answered you corn meal vs cracked corn question? It’s just a lot easier to get the starches out of a finer grind.

VLAGAVULVIN wrote:Guess it's pretty good to use smth. like this... if the one grants it free of charge to you )))

Thanks what a lernt frum that viseo wus ifin it burns blue its good to drunk. Please keep that utube bull... off this site

be safe
OVZ

Oldvine Zin wrote:Please keep that utube bull... off this site

C'mon, I wasn't asking anyone to listen to that selling guy's banal nonsence
There was a rather good but expensive equipment in the vid - just as an illustration of its abilities "not only for beer"... for the one who's got it once...

raketemensch wrote:A mop squeezer bucket and a 5-gallon paint strainer bad are a popular way of squeezing everything out of the corn around here.

Did you mean any of them? In what way exactly, man? If you weren't kiddin at all...

raketemensch wrote:I don’t think anyone answered you corn meal vs cracked corn question? It’s just a lot easier to get the starches out of a finer grind.

The easier you get the starches = the harder to effect the separation before stripping...

The mop wringer is no joke. I used one for a long time as have many on this site.
Not 100% sure but it might have been Corene who originally introduced it. It can get a little messy but works great.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=67269

raketemensch and Windy City: the mop bucket wringer is a great idea!I think we used to have one around the shop but I can't find it, so we probably don't. I'm gonna just have to go with the messier option of twisting and squeezing the polenta in a grain bag!

It's still blipping away but it's slowed way down since last night, so I might take a peek later today.

Yeah I don't think I would ever use one that I had used around my shop
I purchased one just for this hobby and my family knows that it is hands off for anything else
Not a very large investment for as great as it works

Windy City hahahahahha excellent point. We never actually used it around the shop, it was just hanging out there. But now it's not, so I think it's a moot point.

I have to bootstrap everything and I'm a poor dirt farmer, so affording something like that is going to take me a while. Winter is the worst. I don't have any saleable crops and the poultry are still on vacation (but still eating hahahahaha) so I was actually just scraping together change so I could buy some seeds for the market garden. Cough it up, couch cushions, daddy needs to sell some chilis in 7 months.

So I think, at least with this batch, it's going to be ye olde hande wringer

Get a comfortable stool or chair, and let the games begin. If it helps, I found for me that less in the bag is better than more. Something I could squeeze between my hands without the bulk of it bulging out the side. I was able to get more juice out, and in the end it seemed like less work.

Stuff squirts everywhere, so dress accordingly.

Otis

Hahahaha OtisT you speak truth once again. I have a place outside and a full rainsuit, plus I'm used to wearing the juice as I'm usually the one running the press when we do our annual apple juice party.

I'll set up the tripod and get some pics if I can. Probably sometime in the next few days.

OtisT wrote:Something I could squeeze between my hands without the bulk of it bulging out the side. I was able to get more juice out, and in the end it seemed like less work.

Stuff squirts everywhere, so dress accordingly.
Otis

The way we met our noontime with my wife once upon a time... got started at around 9 a.m. She would easily kill me for that... but after all that hardship, our buckwheat whiskey turns out smashing

Windy City wrote:The mop wringer is no joke. I used one for a long time as have many on this site.
Not 100% sure but it might have been Corene who originally introduced it. It can get a little messy but works great.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=67269

Thanks for the link!