Corn Whiskey

[Almanac]

Corn Whiskey is made mostly, but not exclusively, for making Bourbon Whiskey.

In most of Europe, Corn is called Maize but Maize Whiskey doesn't have the same ring as Corn Whiskey even though they're the same thing so while I may refer to 'Corn Whiskey' you'll know it's Maize were talking about.

Conventional wisdom says that to make Corn Whiskey you must use Cracked Corn and boil the hell out of it for 90 minutes. Anyone who's tried this knows what a nightmare this is and how it can go horribly wrong. The purpose of boiling Cracked Corn/Maize is to release the starches and gelatinise them so that enzymes from malted grains can break them down into fermentable sugars.

The good news I have for you all is that, unless you're a complete purist, this nightmare stage can be omitted completely without compromising the end product in any way.

To make good Corn Whiskey forget cracked Corn and use Flaked Maize instead.

Flaked Maize is whole Maize (Corn) that's been crushed and steam cooked so that it is already gelatinised then dried – so to get the starches ready for conversion by your malted grain's enzymes you only have to soak the Flaked Maize in hot water and stir to liquify the gelatinised starches before adding your Malts.

Note: I buy Flaked Maize from a Horse Feed supplier and it's produced by a company here in Ireland called Red Mills. Nothing in it but Maize and it costs me €10 for 20Kg which does me for 6 batches – that's just €1.67/£1.46/US$2.38 per 26Lt batch!

The recipe I am using, and it works wonderfully, is;
3.25Kg Flaked Maize
1.6Kg Malted Barley (I use Maris Otter from my HBS)
500g Malted Rye (optional – depends on personal taste)

I'm currently writing up the mashing instructions to post for anyone that is interested and I hope to have it ready by next weekend or earlier.

For anyone who's looked at All Grain brewing and decided it's too complicated - this one is for you.

For anyone already familiar with All Grain you'll be scratching you heads at how easy this is.

You do need a Mash Tun but I didn't buy a proper one from a HBS, I just use a cooler box with a tap and a Mashing & Sparging bag for holding the grains – Simples! (and a hell of a lot cheaper too!)

More soon!

aidanmac

[optic]

I would say be very carefull using that boiler mate,I have filled one of those FVs up with boiling water before and it was very wobbly to say the least.Not trying to preach mate would just hate to see you get scalded by 5 gallons of boiling water.I have a 10 gallon boiler from hop & grape that I use for my all grain beer brewing and I noticed in my local HB shop they had a plastic bin exactly the same as my boiler is,fairly cheap to cant remember the exact price,around £20 I think.Thinking of buying one to make a hot liquor tank for my all grain brewing

Optic

[Wideyed]

great looking set up will be interested in the results as I still have some barley left over from beer brewing and could use this in the recipe with the maize. on my mash tun I have a tap connected to a perforated copper pipe which go through the side (I didn't notice one on yours), and a sturdy polycarbonate mesh above it to help strain the grains when drawing the liquids off.

[Almanac]

These pdf's were maliciously deleted by a now banned member and are reposted because the info they contain may be useful to other members to download.

Corn Mash.pdf

DIY Boiler.pdf

DIY Mash Tun.pdf

Mash Diary Sept 11.pdf

AM

[Almanac]

Follow up:
In doing this Corn Whiskey Mash I decided, for this run, not to include the grain in the fermenter. I may leave the grain in the ferment in future batches depending on the result from this one.

The volume of the Mashed grains was 4Lt.

For total mash water volume calculation purposes the Grain Bill in this instance was 3.2Kg of Maize/Corn and 1.6Kg Malted Barley, a total weight of 4.8Kg. When strained off the Wort the grain weight was 6.75Kg, a gain of 1.95Kg or approx 2Lt of water.

If you're using the Mash Calculator at http://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/calculators.php?#BATCH_SPARGE the above figure is what you should enter for "Loss due to hops and trub"

I also discovered, in the course of this exercise, that a Mashing & Straining bag is not the best way to get max wash from the Mash. I used a Stainless Steel strainer to remove about 95% of the Corn/Barley solids and a Stainless Steel bowl to press the grains in the sieve to expel as much liquid as I reasonably could. In my next Mash I'm going to try the SS strainer/sieve without the Mashing Bag

AM

[Capt-Cudellez]

Nice one Aiden - never done a propper mash - but I have done a few sugar washes with a grain element.
Fermenting on the grain means there is a grain yeast sludge at the bottom of the fermenter that you cant get to - this is fine when doing back to back washes in the same fermenter.

I now most often filter out the grain before pitching - I find a pass through a pasta colander removes the big bits - you can give it a squeeze, then pass it back through a sieve if you want to get the smaller bits.
Works well for me, and no new equipment needed - so I like this method.

My colander has handles so a bit of wood (or wooden spatula) across the empty fermenter, and it sits there just the job.

The T500 boiler with power control makes an excellent wort boiler too.

[Almanac]

I resurrected this thread because I'm going to do a pdf on making a Corn Mash without boiling the mash and using powdered high-temp tolerant enzymes instead of malted grains.

If this works out it will revolutionise the making of small batch grain washes!

AM

[Capt-Cudellez]

I will also be using enzymes this weekend to try and turn a 15kg sack of baking potatoes into a tattie voddy - exciting stuff.
Let me know how you get on and I will post a thread about my success, or as I suspect, my absolute failure.

[Almanac]

Extracting the starch from spuds is a bitch of a job especially 15kg of them.

I found the best method was an electric juicer - I knew that thing would come in handy one day!

Good luck with them!

AM

[goinbroke2]

Excellent thread aidanmac. I was debating getting the high temp enzymes too but still haven't. (one of those "get to it" things hehehe


As far as the potatoes goes, in early Feb there was a supper put on by the local ladies one weekend. The wife was involved and they were boiling a shitload of potatoes for the supper. COOL! I brought some fermenters with lids and as they finished boiling a pot of taters I'd dump the water in my fermenters and give them the potatoes to mash. They thought I was so helpfull, dumping those big heavy pots, LOL!
I got 1 20L and 3 30L buckets full of hot starchy water, took them home and converted them, fermented, ran it and got around 22L of 70% whiskey. I gave a couple of pints to some of the ladies who knew what I was doing so they were happy. (yes I cut it to 40% first)

Since the starchy water didn't cost anything, I thought it was great, now if I had to buy all the potatoes...ehh, hard to say. The conversion worked all right. (and then I cheated and added sugar to bring it up to 11% or so)

[Almanac]

Great idea! I mentioned to the wife to keep the water off the potatoes each day and told her I want to collect 50Lt for fermenting. She said it might take a while she uses a pressure cooker to cook the spuds - 250ml water each time

Nice result for you and there's nothing wrong with adding a little sugar to help things along. Ingenuity - don't you just love it!

I've been away from the hobby for a few weeks and in particular the past two weeks have been a washout - but I'm finished with all that now and back in the distillery from tomorrow testing my new boiler which is finally ready for testing.

I'll be getting on with the Corn Mash soon - promise and I'll post here if anything useful crops up.

Hey CC, how did you get on with those spuds?

AM