Home Distiller

I read the foxfire books and it says to use hocomb profilic corn in your mash. But I can not find any seeds for this on the web so I can grow my own corn. does anyone know any stores were they sell this corn online? if I cannot grow it can I use the corn that you get at the feed stores in bulk? and can I use turbo yeast instead of malted corn our will it effect the flavor?

p.s. I will be using a five gallon version of the still in the foxfire books with a thumper barrel.

You can use corn from the feed store but it either has to be malted ( sprouted hole kernel) or add malt or enzymes.or do UJSM style I'M not familiar
with what recipe you are trying. turbos is a yeast and will not replace malt/enzymes.

I edited this post and made it go away... It was a good example of posting after too much sampling...

What variety are the big distillers using? what about the fuel plants? I'm gonna go google for a while...

I haven't found any holcomb prolific either. From what I gather it was white corn, very much like Hickory King, but made ears at each leaf axil right to the ground. A friend of mine raised a different "prolific" type that would get down badly. Entirely too much weight for the stalk to support.

Hickory King is an old favorite. Still commony available at garden seed stores in the south. A white dent corn with a large flat grain. Not uncommon for a single grain to be the size of your thumbnail. It has only 8 rows of kernels around the cob. One look at those seed, and you realize why it was a favorite of the "makers". Alot more starch and less "heart" than any other corn grain I've seen. It will also make more than one ear per stalk, but rarely more than two. The yeild per acre is really low compared to other dent corns, mainly due to the low row count per ear.

I have never understood why/how it makes its way into gardens with so many fans. I do not like to eat it as a "roasting ear", nor cut off the cob and creamed. It does make the finest homemade hominy known to man! Reports here is that its liquor making quality that made it a staple on small acreages and its table uses maintained it as a nostalgic favorite to this present day.

Lucky for us, huh!

i been thinking on this one yellow "merrit" and silver queen "white" is what is grown here for sweet corn for the table.....if a table corn has higher sugar content would it convert out at a higher/better rate then so called feed corn? or are they the wrong kinda sugars.....hmmmm

I thank the sugar in sweet corn just has not bin converted to starch yet if you let it mature like field corn then it whould be starch.
some corn has more starch than others . I believe that feed corn is "bread" for high protein and not as good for our use but good for stock
they have some corn that there breading for starch but i do not know if it is available to the public

The only real difference between sweet and dent-type corn is how long it keeps its sugar free before polymerizing into starch. There is a window of about 2-3 days where field corn is just like sweet corn, but it turns straight into starch in minutes after you pick it. When I was a kid, we used field corn as a vegetable, but it would have to be blanched in minutes after being picked. I had to pick a few ears as fast as I could, husk 'em in the field, and run them back to the house where they'd go straight into a pot of boiling water.

Yes, they are developing higher starch varieties of field corn for ethanol plants, but they're mostly in the development stage and aren't available to many.

Thank you BW--I've been telling people for years that there was a certain time of the growing season that if you picked field corn and boiled it right away it made decent table fare similiar to sweet corn. I remeber that as a kid. Nobody would believe me.

can I use the deer corn that they sell at walmart? I looked on the bag and it said that it had an expiration date and did not say anything about preservatives so I guess it would be alright to use. by the way I have changed my mind and decided not to go with the old fashioned still as described in the fox fire book but to use the stainless steal essential extractor pro series II - complete from brewhaus with a 1100 Watt hot plate Is this still a good still? the reason I want to know all this is because I want to cut the cost on the first few experimental runs that I make.
Thanks-

I remember picking field corn and husking it and throwing it right into a pot of water that either grandma or mom had boiling. That corn was such a treat I still remember it today. Never have been able to replicate it... now I know why...

Any corn will do for making alcohol. However if one intends to malt the corn an "open pollinated" corn variety must be used. This is because many hybrids have a "termination gene" that either completely prevents or results in a crappy germination if someone attempts to replant the seed.

Open pollinated varieties can be easily found thru several suppliers on the net.

Corn question from a newbie... My wife buys 50# sacks of "fine cracked corn" and "cracked corn" (a bit coarser) at the feed store for the quail and deer. Can I use this type of corn and if so can you give me a method to use to make the wash? I'd guess it'd need to be "cooked" with water, sugar added then pitch the yeast at the right temp. Can you give some volumes to use for a 5 gallon batch? Also which yeast would work best for this type of wash? Turbo or other?

Just some of many questuions...

Left Coast wrote:Corn question from a newbie... My wife buys 50# sacks of "fine cracked corn" and "cracked corn" (a bit coarser) at the feed store for the quail and deer. Can I use this type of corn and if so can you give me a method to use to make the wash? I'd guess it'd need to be "cooked" with water, sugar added then pitch the yeast at the right temp. Can you give some volumes to use for a 5 gallon batch? Also which yeast would work best for this type of wash? Turbo or other?

Just some of many questuions...

Yes you can use cracked corn from the feedstore.

What your talking about doing is basically an UJSM.

But remember that if you cook and gelatinize corn, you still need to convert the starch to sugar if you want to use it for more than flavor (UJSM is a flavored sugar wash. Very little starch is converted). One common way is to use malted barley, as is done for corn whiskey (including bourbon).

Thanks, and now I need to ask what UJSM is? I am guessing the SM is Sour Mash but the UJ has me stumped.

If I use some plain sugar wash with the "cooked cracked corn" (ie "CCC") along with the proper yeast (turbo yeast?) could I get an acceptable batch to RIMS? (Run In My Still). The abbreviations are just killing me....sorry for being scarstastic.

MB (malting barley) is possibly a bit beyond me at this time in my learning, anything simpler?

Thanks again to all.

No turbo yeast... UJ stands for Uncle Jessie, the forum handle of the owner of this site...

Left Coast wrote:Thanks, and now I need to ask what UJSM is? I am guessing the SM is Sour Mash but the UJ has me stumped.

Half way there. I'm in a good mood today. If you type ujsm in search function you will find 2074 posts on it. 2075 now. You'll find everything you want to know there. Don't use turbo yeast. Bakers yeast is fine.

blanik

What is best corn for shine??pencil cob corn or Hickory king corn?

Hickory, of course!


Seriously, which one is cheaper?

Checked the local feed supply today, cracked corn was around a dollar a kilo.

Geoff