I Mashed Corn Whiskey w/ ONLY Apple Juice - NO WATER!

do we really need to use water to make corn whiskey let's find out [Music] all right so I thought I was super brilliant and I came up with this idea of mashing my whiskey without water and just using something else like fruit juice and I thought man nobody's ever tried this before of course people have tried this before if you come up with an idea 5 000 other people have tried it I'm kind of coming up with my own process here we're just gonna see what happens so we're gonna make corn whiskey with unmalted just regular field corn I don't know why but this is my favorite thing to do anybody else just me so I've got nine pounds of corn that I need to grind up the starches in corn are really really stubborn you have to gelatinize them before you can mash them with malt enzymes in order to get them to break down into sugars the gelatinization temperature is usually around 190. it's a really big pain in the ass when you try to gelatinize Corn because you basically have to almost boil it for like an hour hour and a half sometimes you're making porridge and it gets really thick and it really wants to Scorch to the bottom of your pot so it's a huge pain in the butt so I'm going to skip all that I'm going to grind up my corn and then I'm going to throw it into my big old tamale steamer pot with a grain bag and I'm going to steam it on some apple juice to get it gelatinized that's going to take a long time but the upside is I don't have to stir it and I don't have to worry about it burning let's get that done [Music] thank you all right so steaming a giant bag of cornmeal was a complete and total fail who could have guessed I had to try because I don't know if I made this plane before I hate dealing with corn I love the results but I can't stand stir in that magic it's just it's a nightmare so rather than try to boil the the apple juice and the cornmeal I'm just gonna do an overnight Mash so I've got all of my juice in here about four gallons of apple juice the only problem with trying to boil all the corn in the juice in order to gelatinize it and then cool it down to mash it is that you're going to end up boiling out a lot of the flavor and also because it's full of sugar already I have a suspicion that it's going to end up making it much more likely that you're going to Scorch it if I had you know a fancy Brew rig where it could kind of recirculate and all that stuff that'd be great but I don't I have a big aluminum steamer pot and a brew bag so this is what we're working with I got some amylase enzymes that I threw in there and also some gluco amylase enzymes just to get this to break down now I've got my oven up to about 150 degrees Fahrenheit I'm going to throw this in the oven and let it sit for about an hour and then I'm just going to turn the oven off and let it cool down overnight those enzymes will continue to work all day tomorrow while I'm at work so cool and we'll see you tomorrow [Music] so we ended up getting about four gallons of our Mash I'm really impressed by how much extra I was able to get by using the Apple press I got about two and a half extra quarts pressed out of there and that's amazing because this was a fairly low yield because I only used about four and a half gallons of juice it looks like I got about four gallons or 3.75 back now my gravity is a little high because it was such a dense batch I should have gone about five and a half gallons of juice the gravity came out to be 1.087 now that's crazy high it's if it ferments out to dryness I get 11.4 ABV now the cool thing is because I mashed overnight I put everything into the Brewers friend recipe calculator I put in 10 pounds of grits and four gallons of juice and it predicted 1.089 and I got 1.087 so that's pretty good that means my my efficiency was better than it's been in the past it was better than it than expected for hand ground corn especially so I want this to be a super healthy fermentation because I want this to be successful because I'm really curious as to how it's going to taste to me I tasted some of the wash and it tastes like cornbread and apples so to get this fermenting I'm going to use some k1v116 the k1v is really good at keeping the Apple flavors in there also I'm going to use some fermate k for yeast nutrient and because it is a cidery type of thing I'm going to go ahead and throw in some pectic enzyme just to help break down any pectin and one other thing I'm going to do because this is a higher gravity mesh I'm going to oxygenate it with my little aquarium air pump and my air stone and we just need to give it between 15 and 30 minutes of oxygen so now we've got the vented lid on and we're just going to let this sit until it's fermented and then send it off to the liquor Ferry all right we are at 1.000 and it's only been three days this stuff just tore through the sugar now I'm just going to add some gelatin and cold crush this stuff to see if I can get as much of that sediment to drop out as possible so I'm just going to use some unflavored gelatin that I got from the grocery store doesn't matter what the brand is as long as it's unflavored and there's no sugar in it I'm going to take two of these packets of gelatin and we're going to stir them up and then nuke them in the microwave for about three minutes [Music] so as you can see the gelatin and cold crashing worked really well most of the sediment has been compressed down to about an inch to an inch and a half down at the bottom of the bucket so now we just need to drain that into our boiler and that brings me to today's sponsor vivore so I've had several viewers and even a patreon ask about whether or not you could actually use a vivore still like this one to run Whiskey A lot of people think they're just for running brandy or sugar washes but you can run anything in the V4 my liquor fairy has used the vivore six times and run a variety of different things so once again I'm going to send the liquor fairy the vivore to run the corn and apple whiskey wash thing because it's got a thumper on it uh we can actually Infuse a lot more flavor into this corn Apple whiskey than you normally would in just a straight runt if you've never heard of the vivore still or you don't know how to hook up the thumper for the V4 still check out my previous video right here and I will go into detail about how to set the entire thing up for maximum flavor extraction here's your Thumper my liquor fairy has never had a problem with it overflowing or filling up or anything like that right now I've got some of my corn that was in the initial wash and then I used the the vivore Apple press to press it out and get all the liquid out this is that corn mesh and as you can see it's fairly dry because that press work so good I'm really really glad I have that I've got about an inch of corn Grist down in here the spent grain and I've also got some very old apples that have been floating around in the back of my refrigerator and we're just going to cut these up for the thumper and then we're actually going to take some of our wash and add that to our apples and corn just to give a little bit of liquid for the vapor to actually bubble through otherwise you're not getting that second distillation in the thumper like you're supposed to and you're not using it effectively so always make sure you have just a little bit of liquid down in the bottom and uh last but not least you want to make sure that your down tube that goes into the thumper has some steel wool or copper wool mesh it's going to plunge down in there so that you don't get stuff clogged up in that tube I'm going to send all this to the liquor fairy and get this apple corn whiskey back from them and then we'll do a tasting so if you want to pick up one of these vivore pot Stills this is the eight gallon version and I recommend the eight gallon because if you're brewing in five gallon buckets you're going to end up invariably having some head space in your boiler which is a very good thing it's a safety Factor it keeps you from boiling over and uh you just end up having a much easier time trust me so I'm going to go ahead and put the link for that down in the video description and there's also a coupon code this one right here make sure you use that you're going to get an additional five percent off on your purchase it's already cheaper there than on Amazon and then you get a five percent discount on top of it so check out the link if you want to pick one up all right so back to what we're going to send to the liquor Ferry now if you noticed there's only about a half a pot here it's about four gallons and you know you can do a run with four gallons in this pot it's not a big problem however I think I have something that would really add to this whole process because now at this point we have proven without a shadow of a doubt that mashing your grains in something other than water like juice Works a hundred percent so now that that's done and I have proven my point the whole premise for this video I'm gonna do something a little weird I have a ton of apple cider and I won't be able to drink all of this before I need the bottles for another project so [Music] all right so the run is done and the liquor fairy brought all of my jars back for me I have to say I'm really pleased with the result now we know you can manage in juice and that's really cool because it opens up possibilities for pretty much anything this was just a basic apples and corn to see if I could still taste everything so before we get to the tasting let me go ahead and thank all of these folks right down here and anybody who's not listed all of my patreons thank you guys so much I am absolutely grateful for your support each and every day you make these videos happen with your support and all of your feedback and ideas so thank you guys so very much because you are still keeping my lights on so I'm gonna do the tasting with just one of the Jars of Hearts mainly because the Run split itself so distinctly the heads are all Brandy it's all Apple Brandy kind of flavors in there and then down in the Tails It's All Grain it smells like corn and grain so it's it's really interesting so I'm just gonna go for a jar of the hearts and see what we get proof this down to about 45 percent I'm really curious to see if we get a mix going on in here if I can pick out both of them I'm getting some apple like a really clean ethanol and some corn a little bit of kind of a sweet corn wow that's a pretty dead-on mix of apple and corn that's weird honestly I figured one of them was going to be a standout more than the other I really didn't know if I'd get any Apple in the in this at all because like I said it's just Hearts there's no there's none of the bright aromatics added in from the from the heads but I'm getting enough yeah and grain an accord flavor is not as pronounced but it's definitely in there I would say this is almost a 50 50 split of corn whiskey and apple Brandy I have to say this is pretty interesting and if we end up aging it watch out there's a decent amount of implied sweetness to this too I haven't decided what I want to do with this though if I want to age it or if I want to keep it white it's really good so yeah we'll figure that out in the future anyway so we did some science today that's pretty awesome you know it was just kind of a crazy idea that I had and turns out lots of people do it already I hadn't really come across it in any any reading or research that I did so I'm really glad that I tested this out and you know it was only it was only when I asked my patreons that they had ever done it and several of them piped up and were like well yeah I don't know why it's not more common because you you get a really cool result like I'm as I'm talking it's Apple Brandy and corn whiskey so I I don't know why you wouldn't want to play around with this stuff a lot hmm yeah me likey stay tuned to the channel because we've got uh several coming up this month I've got a tequila video coming out in about a week and then uh something special for St Patrick's Day so keep an eye out and if you enjoyed this video do me a favor and hit the like button because it really helps out the channel if you want to see what I'm going to do next time get a notification for when that next video comes out hit the Subscribe button and the little bell icon right next to it so you get that notification if you have any questions comments you want to share some of your own juice and grain interesting experiments please post them in the comments section down below I'd love to get some more ideas all right thanks for watching talk at you later [Music]

Channel: Bearded & Bored

Views: 11,128

Keywords: Bearded and Bored, Can you Mash Whiskey WITHOUT WATER?, how to make whiskey, vevor pot still whiskey, still it, how to make moonshine, home distilling, how to distill corn liquor, how to make corn liquor, how to make corn whiskey, apple whiskey, how to make apple whiskey, how to make apple corn whiskey

Id: gsEnLqHuuNI

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2023