How to make a corn mash for distilling

hey welcome back to barley and hops we're going to do another quick video today and this was going to be on doing a corn mash I've had a lot of requests for this and I thought man this is great I always wanted to do this one we're gonna do a corn mash right here and I'm going to show you how we do it and remember there there are literally hundreds of techniques so so don't take this as gospel this is just a technique that works there are many many others so you know if you get into that well you know he said this and then I always did it that way what by golly it's out the way you do it works continue doing it this is really just a good opportunity for me to explain some specifics about what's going on and you can use any technique you like um I recommend a couple of books for you I mean one really good one is called home distilling by Rick Morris it's a really good book it covers a lot of great information there's another one called moonshine and moonshine is written by a guy named Matthew Rowley the really good easy read it really does clarify a lot of stuff for you it'll give you a really good basis of history of moonshine and the advent of the more popular stills and how things go up and then there's John Palmer's uh how to brew this is a really good book it's actually written for of beer brewing but a lot of the aspects of distilling and preparing a mash or exactly the same as brewing beer so it gets into a lot of explanation about enzymes you know the alpha-amylase and beta-amylase it gets into a lot of explanations in the real scientific area of distilling and extracting sugars for mineral sugars things like that so it's a it's it's a really handy read but it's and of course none of these are absolutely necessary you can do without but I recommend if you've got a got nothing else to do just go ahead and read today what we're going to do I've got about three little over three gallons of water here and I'm using the pick a new way pick titanium hot plate it's a magnetic induction cooktop I love the thing because I can set it in five degree increments and I want to get this at 155 degrees which is right where I'm at now so I'm gonna leave it at 155 degrees and the reason before that is that the action that I want to take place within my flaked corn happens at 155 degrees so I've got 4 pounds of flaked corn and then I've got 2 pounds of 6 row in the six-row barley this is a malted barley the six-row barley um best way to explain it's got a hunt and 68 dye aesthetic power and don't let that be a weird term to you what that really means is that on the scale it's 160 the one of the highest ones that we have is a 6th grade six row it only takes 35 to convert itself it's own starches to fermentable sugars and everything leftover will convert anything you add to it and with it so you know any adjunct corn flake corn and soar some other types of adjuncts that you want to add to it so you've got this way you don't have to use alpha amylase without this we would be required to introduce some alpha amylase but it's already resident here inside the grain so we're going to take advantage of that so it's not as much for flavor as it is for converting starches and deform edible sugars I'm going to place all of that inside one of these nylon bags and it should be careful this new wave if you put it on seer which I'm going to do right now as a matter of fact because I want to heat it up to about 160 because once I drop the grains in of course it's going to drop the temperature is going to drop and I wanted to start happening right away so I'll put it on sear I'll let that thing heat up a little bit more and then I'm going to add the corn and the barley together and then we're going to put it inside here we're going to let it set and steep at 155 for about about an hour and then what we'll do is we'll stop then so when I come back to you it's a it'll be been about an hour and then we're going to test it and I'll show you how to test it to find out whether your starches have converted to fermentable sugars or not but that's really about all there is to it now one addition that I always make now this is totally up to you and again a lot of this is personality-driven so I always add 10 pounds of corn sugar this is one bag of 5 pounds I always add 10 pounds or so of corn sugar to my mash when I make a five gallon batch and the reason I do that is I'm trying to increase the alcohol by volume in the mash let me explain that if if I and my goal is about 20% as close to 20 s I get it 20% of 5 gallons is 1 gallon so I've got all the flavors from the corn and anything else I use in the mash and if I increase the alcohol volume with that flavor I'm gonna I can anticipate distilling about one gallon of a five gallon batch 20% and with that I've got a quality product and my quantity is going to be almost a gallon it'll run will be short now if I only have a 10% alcohol by volume of course my outcome is only going to be about 1/2 a gallon so it may just kind of make sense there's a correlation it just kind of makes sense I'd rather put all the effort and work and hard work into two distilling because of distilling process it a little long little lengthy and wind up with a gallon as opposed to a half a gallon but then again it's totally up to you now this kind of begs the question what if I want one gallon and I don't want to use corn sugar well John Palmer's book will explain that in great detail about how to go through the mashing process with an extremely high amount of grains because you can get the same results without adding any sugar but we can do this by just adding sugar to it so we're going to we're going to spite the fermentable sugars with coarse sugar so that's it except for we'll table sugar work absolutely table sugar works is about 15% on fermentable sugars but that's okay because it's just a little tiny residual sweetness left over and again table sugars a little bit cheaper can you use molasses absolutely what about honey Oh what about brown sugar all of those are fermentable sugars so yes you can the amounts that you use and the combinations are totally up to you you're only limited to your imagination a lot of it is going to be trial and error there are some rules of thumb but the trial and error is going to get you through the day and my rule of thumb when it comes to sugar is about 10 to 12 pounds per five gallons and everything else is flavoring so we'll be back with you you in probably about 60 minutes I'm going to put this together in a bag I'm going to tie a string to it I'm gonna tied to the side of the pot so it kind of stays up and it doesn't melt on the bottom you don't want that to happen because it defeats the purpose of having the bag and the reason for the bag in my opinion so that I can remove the corn and I can remove all the grain because I've gotten everything I want out of it and then when I go into my fermenter which I'll use the fast fermenter when I do that all I'm putting in there is fermentable sugars in a wash base and I'm not there's no grain in there because I've got to filter it anyway I've got to get all of that out I'd rather take it out from the very beginning than to introduce anything like that into my steel which could scorch and once you scorch it you're not going to get that flavor out you just got to redistill it but I mean now can you do this without a bag absolutely just remember once you've finished you know once you finish fermenting or before you go into the fermenter at some point before you distilled you're gonna have to remove all of those grains and remove all of that corn or else you stand a good chance of scorching everything inside that pot okay welcome back it's been a little bit over 60 minutes now I know this is all stopped that's all happened convert all those starches and fermentable sugars I'm confident that I've done that now I asked you I know I asked you to trust me but now I'm going to give you some proof then this is a way you can test it you can find out whether your process or whatever you've done has converted those starches into fermentable sugars and we're going to use iodine to do that now but before we get to that I just wanna let you know that you know cornmeal works too this is a pound of cornmeal it cost me like a dollar for dollar for cents no this is 2 pounds 2 pounds of cornmeal and you can actually do the same thing or you can use and we're going to do one later we're going to do another mash later with just cornmeal and amylase enzyme but I'm approved to you now that the amylase actually does convert those starches into fermentable sugars and the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to use first of all my test is a potato and everybody knows that a potato is full of starch then I have a little bit of this mash that I collected at the very beginning and I saved it I set it aside and I've got the mash that's completed now that I just dipped out of there so I'm just going to add a little bit of iodine to all three of those and I'm going to show you what happens this is pretty amazing and it's a real simple test you don't have to do this every time you do it once and then you're convinced and then after that you'll have to worry about trying to use iodine anymore but this is it also this is a good way to do prove to your kids want to do a science project or your friends now watch this we know that a potato is full of starch so when we add some iodine to it you'll see how it starts to turn black you'll notice the blackness in that see how quickly it turns black and if you allow that to sit for a while it'll turn a very very dark black you'll see how it's doing that now and that's only because of the iodine interacting with the starch molecules that's inside this potato now the very same thing would happen if you have starch inside your mash now watch this this is really interesting I'm gonna put a couple of drops in this and look how dark that has become that's become black and that's because you've got a lot of starch molecules in there now once you've used the amylase out of the six row with your corn and you've allowed it to steep for 60 minutes all that action takes place now watch this and you put in a couple of drops and you just you'll notice the color of the iodine is there but then when you shake it up just to look at it's gone so that means that there's no starch left as opposed to this one when you shake it up it stays black so that's a way that you can actually prove your hypothesis or your theory about converting starches into fermentable sugars this is an amazing process like I said you don't have to do it every time but it works I mean this this is iodine a tincture iodine tincture I got this at the Walgreens for like three bucks you get it just most any store that's got a little small pharmacy so but use iodine and iodine will always give you an idea of or not you've converted starches into fermentable sugars so in just a moment here I'm going to go ahead and remove all of these greens and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use I will use my strainer and I'll dip these out and until I get the bag smaller up to where when I remove the bag it doesn't go everywhere and then we're going to continue on with the next step which is to add our sugars and more water and it would put it the fast firm in I might add my yeast and my yeast nutrient and then I'm just going to put it down and let it burn just to make the bag smaller so it's a little bit easier to maneuver with and while I was doing that you know I rinse them out a little bit now remember I've got 155 degrees I got to get it down to fermenting temperature and in order to get it down to that fermenting temperature I'm just going to add some cold water to it and I'll take advantage of the cold water I'll use that too and that's what I've been doing just to rinse whatever I've got in there which is going to be all the fermentable sugars stuck inside those grains and wrapped all around it so that's all over a bag that we leave up I threw the ice in there kind of cool it down a little bit add a little bit more water oh we're down to right at 70 degrees so that's perfect temperature for me what I've done is I put in a little bit extra water a little bit over 5 gallons because when I remove the ball on the bottom of my fast ferment to dump the yeast I'm going to sacrifice a little bit of this mash so I just want to make sure I have enough in here so when I put it into my 5-gallon still that I'm at five gallons I've already checked the gravity it's one point one to zero so I'm looking at about probably about 17 percent maybe 18 percent ABV of potential I could probably get a little bit more out of it if I add more sugar but I'm looking like I'm really happy with that so i'mma leave it as is I've added the yeast nutrient two ounces of that and short look if you don't have yeast nutrient and I've read I haven't tried it yet but I've read that tomato paste a little 8 ounce can of tomato paste does the same thing or something very similar and I've also added the yeast and the yeast the way I did that you know I keep my yeast this is daddy the still has active dry yeast I get it out of its floral bag I put it in a plastic bag keeping a refrigerator I just uh my exact measurements for this for a five gallon batch is just one big heaping teaspoon or tablespoon and then a half so I use it one and a half tablespoons other than that that's that's really all there is to it so look if you have any questions give us a call like us on Facebook but would I like this video so join our channel to keep track of what's going on and if you have any questions or if you need anything or if you wants to do a specific video just drop us a line let us know alright you have a good one and happy distilling

Channel: Barley and Hops Brewing

Views: 361,783

Keywords: converting starch to sugar, barley, moonshine, corn mash, home, iodine test, and, barleyandhops, beer, distilling, brewing, hops

Id: 99sD-LwepEY

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2015