All Grain 101 For Distillers : How A All Grain Mash Works

how's it going everyone I hope you're having a kick-ass week I've got some old grain meshes planned and that coming up soon on the channel so I thought it would be smart to do a distillers or 101 guide to all grain meshing first welcome to steel everyone I'm Jesse and this is the channel all about chasing the craft of home distillation and making it a legitimate hobby so if that's what you're into guys if that cracks your corn make sure you have a look around check my stuff out and if you dig it make sure you subscribe down below so you don't miss anything if you guys follow what I'm doing closely you'll probably realize that I've been little and absent for the last fortnight it has been bonkers I feel like I haven't been home at all I've been doing all sorts of crazy stuff but I'm back now and I want to get stuck into some cool stuff for still it's what I'm going to do today is a quick video to prepare those of you that haven't had the joys of all grain distilling for what's coming up soon so what am I talking about when I say all grain mashes the idea is that you can take grains cereal grains mostly and essentially take the starch and magically convert it into sugar which you can feed to your yeast and then of course fermenter and distill it further on down the track so an all grain mash is something that is using only cereal you're not adding any simple sugar table sugar raw sugar molasses any of that sort of stuff the only thing you're using is essentially starch and you control the process of how you turn that starch into sugar it's pretty freaking cool really so what is the absolute basics of a or grain mesh essentially you need water you need starch you need enzymes and you need heat or more correctly you need the right temperature the water's pretty easy you can go way down the rabbit warren on that I'm not gonna do that for a long time on still it yet because it is in my opinion the last thing you should be looking at but what we are talk about today is the starch the enzymes and the heat cool now that I've said that I want to go way back and talk about what's malted barley or other malted grains are and the reason I want to do this is if you're going to do things traditionally it is the basis for pretty much any all grain mash you could ever do there really is it's that simple so let's never talk about what malted barley is to start with tumult barley first of all you want to steep it you want to soak it in water and the idea is that you are getting that little seeds to germinate and start growing when that process is triggered in the seed it starts generating enzymes that are able to take the starch source the food source for the seed and turn it into a food source so the little tiny plant can start growing the maltsters will stop that process before it really takes off by killing the barley and essentially what they're doing is during it right out to stop the process to stop it from growing and and hold the process at just the right spot we've still got lots of starch but also a whole lot of enzymes the key at this stage is to heat it and dry it enough that it stops that process and makes it you know a relatively shelf stable product but it does not denature the enzymes that we're gonna need those guys later on so right now guys pretty much most places you are in the world you're going to be able to buy malted barley that is done extremely well from homebrew stores pretty much anywhere on the globe but that might be a little bit more expensive in different places obviously that's an exaggeration but really it is pretty high pretty hard to find a place that you cannot source malted barley on the other hand some people take pride and doing it themselves like my man bearded and board and if you would like to look into the process of doing that yourself a little bit more you should totally check out his video so now we have malted barley which is this little bundle of Awesomeness and a starch and enzymes packed into a perfect little perfect little package for us and the next thing we want to do is grind that up the reason you grind it up is you want the water to be easily accessible to it when we get to the meshing stage you want all of that starch to be utilized to be dissolved and then eventually converted by the enzymes the tool you will want for that job is a grain mill and I actually just made a video on my Malta muncher and how to set it up just a little while ago so if you would like to know more about that once again check the video out so we have malted barley we've crushed it up and now we are ready to actually go ahead and do the mash essentially all the mash is adding warm or hot water to the grain and letting it sit simple right and actually it is kind of simple a lot of people get really hung up on this point and if you want to totally geek out about it you can but on the other hand if near enough good enough and you just want to get started that's really not something you should be scared of it really can be very simple essentially all you need to do at this step is give the barley a bath and warm water and hold it at the right temperature for the period of that mash we need to do it in water because it needs to be in solution we need to be able to dissolve everything that's going on in there to allow the enzymes to do their thing and we need to get the right temperature so we don't denature the enzymes but it is warm enough for the enzymes to start working I keep saying enzymes right let's talk about alpha and beta amylase for just a second s Brewers as distillers these two enzymes that we are most concerned with alpha and beta amylase let's talk about alpha amylase first alpha amylase is most active at a slightly warmer temperature than beta-amylase essentially what it does is takes the big complex starch molecules and cuts them up it's kind of like a cleaver it doesn't worry too much about where it's cutting things it doesn't worry about what size it's cutting it down and - it's just hacking these big starch molecules down into smaller more dissolvable molecules beta-amylase on the other hand is more like a scalpel that's the surgeon it goes in and does a very specific job it acts on the ends of those smaller molecules that the alpha amylase has created and it nips off little maltose sugars which are just perfect for our yeast tougher means so when you're doing things naturally you kind of need both of these enzymes working together to break the giant clumps of starch down into smaller manageable bits that can then be broken down into maltose which is exactly what our yeast loves to eat and this is the reason that we have a relatively narrow window for our mash we need a temperature range where both of these enzymes are active neither of them are being denatured and we can actually promote a more or less fermentable worth depending on where and that temperature range we set now that honestly is probably more of a thing for beer makers because they want to adjust the final gravity of their beer based on how fermentable the worse so for home distillers we're really looking at the lower range of that temperature window which is around about 62 to 64 degrees Celsius or a hundred and forty four to one hundred and forty nine degrees Fahrenheit okay so let's review up until this point we're using malted barley only you can make your own or buy it it's easy either way we crush it down to allow the water to access to starch freely we want to mash it at around about 60 to 63 degrees to make it nice for me into wet so then we can take that sugary word or wash and put yeast into it in ferment it but there's always a but what if we're not using malted barley I'm guessing that you guys could think of a ridiculously popular spirit that uses corn and malted corn I can also think of another relatively popular spirit Irish whiskey which uses unmalted barley as well how do we do with that stuff so what I haven't mentioned up until this point is that you also need to gelatinize the starch before you even think of getting it into a mash the reason I haven't mentioned that is the process of malting and kilning automatically does this so if it's a malted barley you just don't have to worry about it in fact it's a malted anything you don't have to worry about it so what does gelatinization essentially gelatinization takes a super-tight tangled ball of starch and loosens it up to the point where it can be accessed in solution by the enzymes to start breaking it down into smaller and smaller molecules all like we talked about before so if you take unmalted corn crush it up throw it into your mash even with the enzymes nothing really is going to happen to that corn so how do we gelatin eyes it it's actually pretty simple you literally put it in water and heat it if you've ever made porridge you've seen this if you've ever made polenta you've seen this you'll get to a point where suddenly the starch molecule sort of swell up and the whole mixture becomes gooey and gummy and thick that is gelatinization so for those of you that have been looking into making whiskey from corn or anything like that that is what the cooking stage or the boiling stage is for the corn it's just gelatinization it's worth noting right now that you can actually buy unmalted but gelatinized grains some forms of quick oats have been gelatinized but from my understanding that differs depending on the region you're in as does whether or not steamed flaked barley as gelatinized i don't understand how you can steam flaky barley and not gelatin eyes it but apparently it happens okay so either by unmalted gelatinized grains or we heat the stuff up and hot what's up to gelatin eyes it and now we're good to go right actually there's kind of a problem with that yes it will be jealous alized but you won't have any enzymes and if you did have enzymes and you just boiled it or heat it up to 80 odd degrees Celsius you did natured all of the enzymes you killed them off this is why most traditional at least all grain meshes will use malted barley even if you're using corn you add malted barley even if you're using unmalted barley you add malted barley if you're using unmalted rye you add malted barley the idea is that malted barley has enough enzymes to convert anywhere between sort of two and three times the amount of starch that in itself contains so if you're using ten kilos of corn and you add ten kilos of malted barley depending on the type of malted barley the malted barley will have enough enzymes to convert the corn as well okay so let's go back and recap again right we need water that's easy enough we need starch that starch can come from malted barley or it can come from unmalted cereals as well but you need to make sure the starch is gelatinized if it's not malted then we need the enzymes which come from the malted barley and as long as you've got enough malted barley to convert the other cereals as well you're not going to have a problem some people do use bottled enzymes too which is totally cool I've never done it but I will try it one day I promise you so now we have the gelatinized starch the enzymes the hot water we add those together alpha and beta amylase enzymes go to work and chop that starch down into nice little maltose units that our yeast can use we cool it down and we pitch the yeast all right team I know if you haven't done this already yet that that is frustrating I haven't told you how to do it I haven't really told you we're start but I promise you I promise you but I promise you when we do start doing all grain meshes people are going to be asking questions and this video is going to be the one that really helps them out I hope if you're in that situation make sure you check the comments out down below because honestly team that is where a lot of the magic happens around here these heaps of people down there that will help you out and chances are someone else has asked the question already down there if you're one of the guys that knows your stuff feel free to jump down below drop some comments about what they've missed out I'm expecting someone should be talking about diastatic power down there hook me up team trust me everyone is going to appreciate it but we will do a video on diastatic power I promise you it's at that time of the video guys where I really need to thank the patreon you guys are awesome and things like this are only available because of you you guys are the ones provide adding me with green to be able to do all grain matches in the first place so for me and everyone else that's watching these videos thank you so there we have a guy's all grain meshes I hope you enjoyed it I know I had a hold of fun talking to you so if you liked the video hit the thumbs up for me if you really liked it make sure you subscribe down below and you ring the notification button and I'll catch you guys next time see ya

Channel: Still It

Views: 50,568

Keywords: enzymes, alpha amylase, beta amylase, all grain mash, gelatinisation, gelatinisation of starch, gelatinised, malted barley, barley, malted, malt, malting barley, unmalted, unmalted corn, unmalted rye, all grain wash, distilling all grain, still it, Jesse, chase the craft, home distilling, diy distilling, distilling, all grain basics, learning all grain, how to all grain, beginer all grain, enzyme

Id: a3DC5UvjCaY

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 02 2018