Whisky... Easy, Cheap and Better! - Part 1/2

hi about a year ago we did a couple of videos on distillation and the final product was a banana brandy called hora G or war gym today what we're going to do instead of producing a wine as a precursor to produce a brandy we're going to produce a beer as a precursor to producing a scotch style whiskey [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the grain that we're going to be using is barley and to do so we're going to also do a little bit of a change in the process where instead of using an artificial enzyme to convert the starch of the banana into sugar that the yeast can grow on we're going to use the natural enzymes that are produced by the barley in order to break down the starch in the barley and convert it into sugar which will eventually be then converted into alcohol now in order to use barley to produce the enzymes what we're going to have to do is a process called moulting and effectively what that does is when the barley is grown it contains primarily starch and it's in a dormant state but when you warm it and moisturize the barley grains for a couple of days what will happen is you will trigger the generation of an amylase enzyme within the seedling and after about three or four days that enzyme is produced in enough quantity that you then halt the process by heating the grain up to about 45 or 50 degrees centigrade you'll essentially kill off the seedling or stop the germination process but you won't have heated it so high that you destroy or denature the protein or the enzyme and at that point we can then use the barley to convert the starch into the sugar there is a factor a number that they use called dye aesthetic power and in the distilling industry it means how much enzyme is generated by the the malting process if you have a diastatic power over about 30 there's enough enzyme to convert all the starch in the existing barley to convert itself into into sugar above that you can then convert passive grains that have not been malted and in our start in a starch form and so you can mix in malted barley in a ratio with passive or unmalted barley scorns wheats other grains and these dye aesthetic powers can go up to a level of as high as 180 so just a couple of kilograms can sometimes do five or six times the quantity of a non malted barley in this case though just going to use malted barley and when I went into the local brew shop to pick this up I also had them do something called milling which is to break up the fragments of these seeds into a much finer fragment or almost a powder that makes it possible for us to get the water in the in the process of converting enzyme into the the grain into the end of the starch more readily you can do this in a blender but I wouldn't advise it because it produces like a flowery dust that becomes very difficult to filter out in later stages in the process one last thing about the Barley's is they're grown all over the world and there are all different styles and this is an American this is in English and this is a German barley and if you put your head in the VAT where the the supply comes from you can smell the differences they all smell a little bit like a breakfast cereal but there's subtle differences between them the American tends to be a little sweeter the English a little bit richer a little bit more like oatmeal and the German little Tangier a little spicier but it's subtle nevertheless that will come through in the process of producing the whiskey the drying process also when you halt the germination can be done in an electric oven or a stove but it can also be done as they do in Scotland by burning wood or peat and that smoke will then be imparted into the grain so that the therefore also will transmit through the the final process and change the character of the of the whisky so there's a lot of control that you have and a lot that you can do to alter the final flavor now in preparing this the ratio that I use of barley to water is approximately 1 pound of barley for every 1/2 gallon of water or two pounds of barley per gallon of water or half a kilogram per liter of water and so with this 8 pounds or 4 kilograms of barley I've got effectively 4 gallons of water or 15 litres of water in the pot and we're going to be heating the pot up to boiling and then we're going to let it passively cool down to the optimal temperature for doing the mash so I'm gonna get the heating going right now and then I'm going to tell you a few more things good let that burn now as you can see inside the pot that mount of water is not very high but it also is a good idea to have a lot of extra room above there because you'll get some foaming you'll be adding the grip of the barley you'll be adding instruments in there and so you don't want everything slopping over when you're moving this thing around now part of the reason I'm gonna bring this to boiling and it's not particularly necessary to do that is that you want things as clean as you can practically make them and you shouldn't get OCD about it because the fact is you cannot sterilize the barley the barley is going to come in tubs it's going to be clean but it's impossible to sterilize it because if you were to heat it to that point that you could remove all the the bacteria or the yeast that may be present here you destroy the enzyme so keeping things clean not making things any dirtier than necessary is a good idea but you're going to use another little trick to help to try to make sure that what you end up with is what you want and that is you're gonna follow a little chemistry rule which is the solution to pollution is dilution and so if we can overwhelm any kind of foreign bacteria or yeast with the desirable yeast it will eat up all the sugar it will produce the toxic alcohol from a bacterial point of view so quickly that the other eye other living items that are existing in the pot just can't get a toehold so what we're gonna do is we're going to add some yeast and sugar to a preliminary mixture here and give it a chance to kind of bloom and grow while we're doing the other process this afternoon so in about a half a liter of warm tepid water I'm going to add about 100 CC's of just table sugar [Music] it's a little humid here so some of this gathers up but we'll get it through and then we're going to add to this 10 cc's or two teaspoons of a champagne style yeast this is a higher alcohol tolerating yeast than a typical bread yeast although you can use say a 3-star yeast or Fleischmann's yeast it doesn't matter that much but the aficionados of distillation and fermentation will all have their favourite yeasts because the yeast itself adds another control over the flavor now initially the yeast to begin reproducing actually needs oxygen later on to produce the alcohol we'll wanted a private of oxygen in the batch but what we're gonna do is we're gonna blend this up and mix it up make foam it's kind of a slurry in here make sure the yeast and the sugar all blended in and then we're just gonna leave this with a loose cap so we don't turn the stopper into a rocketship and then while this is heating up this is gonna go for a couple of hours you can will begin to see some foam and some growth and that's what's going to help to supercharge the project so when we get this up to about a hundred and sixty degrees I'll go through with you the next stages see in a bit alright so I think it's going pretty vigorously in here if you look it's boiling and what we're gonna do is let this go for about 20 minutes or so that'll make sure that the water is very very clean so is the inside of the pot and then I'm gonna turn off the heat and we're gonna let this naturally cool down to about 160 degrees by elevating the temperature of the enzyme above room temperature we're going to increase the reaction rate about doubling for every 10 degrees but we can only go to about 160 before we destroy the enzymes so that's why we're gonna let this cool down to a temperature that the enzyme will tolerate before we add the grain so see in a little bit okay it's been about 1 hour and the temperature is passively drifted down to about 160 159 degrees Fahrenheit about 60 degrees centigrade so now what we're going to do is we're going to add the barley now a little trick here to save time and money and expense and additional equipment is to use a technique called brewing a bag you can obtain these from a company called brew in a bag and what they are is nylon mesh bags that have little straps little handles and straps that allow you to place them in a variety of different sized kettles and by placing them in the kettle you can then put the malted barley inside of a bag that will allow you to draw or withdraw the debris after we're done soaking it and that way we don't have to use some sort of a transfer method into another vessel which adds expense and also adds you know something you have to store and potential for contamination so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna take the four kilograms of barley I'm going to slowly add this into the pot and that will bring the temperature down about five eight degrees Fahrenheit about three or four degrees centigrade just because of its relatively low thermal inertia and we're gonna stir it as we go so that we can end up eliminating a lot of balls of cereal that would tend to form if we put it into one big clump now you don't want to boil the bag inside of the container when you're doing your initial cleaning initial heating because the nylon can melt and you can damage it so it's best to put it in after the fact another thing too is that the still that we're going to be using has a capacity of about 15 liters and by the time we're done here we're gonna have added a total of about 20 liters of liquid but some of that liquid is going to be drawn out in this moist barley and also at the end when we're done with the fermentation we're going to end up leaving behind a couple of litres in the bottom that have the the yeast in them and we don't want to have that that cloudy mixture at the bottom of this container inside of the still and so you're gonna end up losing about anywhere from about 10 to 15% of the total volume of liquid that we're adding in waste within the processor in the containers it's an interesting smell to used to live in Chicago and we used to drive through Milwaukee which was famous for its beer brewing and there was a smell that you could smell when you drove through the city that's very similar to the mashing process that we're using here it brings back a lot of memories I didn't particularly appreciate it when I was a little kid I grew to appreciate it a little bit more when I got older and certainly now I appreciate it a lot now give this a good stir and then what we're gonna do is we're gonna give this about 90 minutes to work and the residual heat within the container is going to be enough for the 90 minutes for the enzyme to work but we're going to encourage that heat to stay in there because this is about the optimal temperature so a couple of towels put over the top of the container with its large volume and relatively low surface area and even though it's pretty cool out here today this will stay within about five six degrees centigrade about ten degrees Fahrenheit during the process and then after ninety minutes we're gonna draw the bag out we're gonna lift it out and we're gonna do a process called sparging and I'll get to that when this is ready see in a bit okay it's been about 90 minutes and that should be enough time for this barley to have been extracted of its sugar so we're going to take off the covers it's nice and warm in here and let's take a look and see what's been going on in there mmm that's rich so now what we're gonna do is we're going to move the entire pot over to my handy-dandy block-and-tackle and then using these convenient little loops I'm going to gather them up and we're gonna draw the whole bag out of the wash now there's a proper tour as a process called sparging which is where you would rinse some of the residual sugars that would be present within the liquid in the barley and it would require a separate container but we're gonna take advantage of the fact that the liquid is already still too warm to be able to pitch the yeast so we're gonna let this hang for about four or five minutes and then I'm going to rinse it with some nice cold water that'll bring the temperature down and also rinse the of residual sugars out of here so let's give this about four or five minutes to drain on its own and then I'm going to help it along all right we could let this go forever but I think we've gotten the majority of it out and now what we're gonna do is a poor man's sparge we're gonna rinse through the barley with some ice-cold water this is not actually Walmart water I've filled this with some of our well water we have a very deep well and very good tasting water tastes a little bit better than the stuff that comes from Walmart now again we'll give this about three or four minutes to drain and then we're gonna go ahead and I'm gonna measure the specific gravity of this and that's good we're gonna be called the OG or original gravity that'll determine how much sugar we've got to work with and then after the fermentation will measure the final specific gravity that differential is the loss of sugar into a lower density alcohol and that'll take several days but I'll demonstrate that just as soon as we get a little bit more of that mixture out of there see in just a sec all right that looks pretty good so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to transfer and just gather up any of the waste in this little waste bucket move this back over to a convenient location then what we're gonna do is I'm gonna measure the specific gravity of this mixture and way to do that it's gonna take our little float our hydrometer place it in here and as you can see this represents the amount of alcohol or sugar and the density of the liquid in here will determine how high this this float sits in the water the denser the liquid the more of this is exposed and the higher the original gravity so we want this thing to be way up in the air with very little of this submerged meaning we have a very dense mixture so go ahead and pull some of this up we'll take a look at what we've got to start with so we have an original gravity let's see if I can get rid of some of that fog if I just find the right angle on this and we'll see the numbers here so we have a specific gravity that runs right around 7% alcohol eventually we'll get 7% alcohol with an initial specific gravity of 1.06 oh now you can make corrections for temperature and a whole bunch of other little details but that's roughly where we're going to start and we'll hopefully find that when we're done with the fermentation this thing is going to sit way down there as the sugar is converted we'll drink this it's actually very tasty now we're going to go ahead and take the yeast that's had a couple of hours to do its thing and we're going to mix this in to the barley water that's good stuff let's give it a little stir yes all right and now we're going to take a dedicated aquarium thermometer that's been set to about 75 degrees and we're gonna set this inside of here and then what we're going to do is we're going to put this lid on I'll get this thing completely submerged and then feed this out this little gap that I formed inside of the lid and then with a little rubber gasket we're gonna seal this up now the reason I don't use the airlock or the bubble lock is because frankly I don't think it's necessary we've got about 15 centimeters of airspace above this mixture that's going to be soon filled with a lot of carbon dioxide and constantly there's going to be a little gas flowing out of here so the chance of getting some wild yeast or something going retrograde upstream when the whole rest of this is sealed up is very low and it's just a little easier to do the fermentation in the same boiling bin because it also means that we don't have to clean and worry about contamination in another vessel it's like the boiling bag or like the brew and a bag things that are easier sometimes go a little bit better and there's less chance to screw things up wrap that all the way around there and then just to keep those things from popping off behind my cameraman I'm gonna go grab my oh never mind I was wrong I've got it right here little clip there now we're set we'll plug this in put this in a convenient location for the first two or three days there's no reason to even look inside of here but what will happen is after about three or four days the bubbling and the churning and that very sharp smell of carbon dioxide that you'll smell coming out of that little port will begin to dissipate and so if you sneak a peek in there you can take another sample of the liquid and you can see how the density is going down when the sharp smell disappears when the bubbling disappears or when you see that you've reached a plateau where you're not getting anymore conversion of sugar into alcohol it's time to stop the process in theory you could let it go for weeks because you've essentially used up all the sugars so nothing else is gonna be able to grow in there you even if you inoculated it with some some bacteria or some other yeast and in addition the alcohol is pretty bactericidal even at least back to your static and so there wouldn't be a problem in terms of an infection but because of the fact that you have deprived the yeast of any nutrition it will die and when the yeast dies it can impart all flavors to the mixture so once you're pretty much convinced you've got the complete conversion then it's time to go ahead and transfer this into the distillation and that's what we're gonna be doing in the next video now we're gonna break this up into two videos but I'm going to put the videos we're gonna post them within a day of each other two days of each other because you're not gonna have to wait long for the second one but we're not gonna do a two-hour feature-length film with this this particular one I want to thank you very much for watching I will see you in a couple of days please let everybody know that my DNA the subject to know about the channel and appreciate it if you subscribe you have a wonderful afternoon and happy experiment see you soon [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tech Ingredients

Views: 622,459

Keywords: scotch, whiskey, scotch whiskey, barely, fermentation, sparging, distillation, malting, oak aging, amylase, scotch whisky, whisky

Id: meB09jXHhRY

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/jeffroddit]

It was pretty good, but man people come up with some silly idiosynchratic methods. Boiling clean potable water before mashing is just goofy. He even explains some of the reasons why, but wastes time and gas doing it anyway and claims it's virtues. All he's doing is driving out the last of the dissolved oxygen which unless you add it back just makes the yeast not want to multiply.

(Some of) the scotts get their water straight from surface rivers or reservoirs and don't boil. Any water you drink on a daily basis is clean enough to not need boiling.

[u/faranheit]

Scotch whisky isn't made by doing a single run through a pot still.