Experimental bread whisky

[stilly_bugger]

Okay, this may be as dumb as it sounds, but last night I set a wash of bread whisky going.

Bread whisky?

I'm glad you asked.

I've been toying with all-grain ferments using unmalted barley and enzymes — either enzymes introduced through home brew shop (HBS) γ-Amylase enzyme (a.k.a. Modiferm/AMG/'dry enzyme'/glucoamylase/amyloglucosidase), or as light malted barley (which contains various activated enzymes) at a ratio of one part malted barley to 10 parts unmalted barley. The idea is to try to make a 100% grain whisky — no sugar.

Well, last night I was pulverising the shit out of some barley in the missus' blender when I thought, "Look what you've done mate; you've just made flour". Light bulb moment.

"That's exactly right," me thinks.

You need to mill grain in order to more efficiently convert its starch into fermentable sugar. Brewers coarse mill their grain so that they can filter it off after mashing or before bottling. But we're not brewing beer, so it doesn't matter if the crushed grain is left in the fermentor to settle out. After all, we refine the contents of our fermentors, unlike those beer brewing kinds. So why not just substitute unmalted milled grain with wholemeal flour?

Off to the kitchen cupboard I go. There's a heap of old breadmaking ingredients in the bottom of the cupboard — about 4kg of old unbleached plain (wheat) flour and 1/2kg of unprocessed natural wheat bran. Both are well past their used-by dates. Sweet. Then I found 3/4 of a pack of Lowans bread improver sitting there doing sweet FA. This stuff is a mix of wheat flour, malted grain flour and amylase enzyme. Even better — something to help covert the flour starch into fermentable sugar.

Back to the shed we go.

So, start mixing things together in a 30L fermentor. After mixing 3kg of unbleached plain flour and 250g of unprocessed natural bran with a few kettles of boiling water I've got a thick slurry. I keep adding boiled water until the temp is up to 68°C — a good mashing temp.

At this point the fermentor is sitting at about 19L full. I stir in 75g of bread improver and 10 drops of liquid amyloglucosidase enzyme (MODIFERM) and let it sit there and cool, or, if you want, reverse mash.

Bugger: what's the pH?

Run a test and we're sitting just acidic at about 6.5. Optimum enzyme pH is 5.1-5.5 (see below, and here), so I add 3 teaspoons of citric acid to a glass, dissolve it and work it into the slurry. Things should be peachy now, or at least a bit better.

enzyme_temp-pH.gif

When the slurry gets to 40°C (5 hours) I add cold tap water to 25L. Now the temp is at 32.5°C. Near perfect.

In a small container I shake together with a bit of tap water another 75g of bread improver and 30 drops of liquid amyloglucosidase enzyme. This is just to ensure that there are living enzymes present if the early mash temp was too high for the first lot to survive. So I stir them into the mix and then whisk in 75g of Lowans baker's yeast. Seal and airlock the lid, wrap that shit in a towel and say goodnight.

She started bubbling within 10 minutes and is still going strong this morning.

Anyway, initial SG looks around 1032, but this stuff is too thick to tell. Also, if the enzymes do their job, more fermentable sugars will become available as time goes by, so an initial SG reading is going to mislead. What I need is a final %abv reading of the fermented wash.

I would have liked to have had more of a range of specific enzymes on hand — stuff that can convert starches to all kinds of fermentable sugars — but, alas, I was limited to what was in the cupboard and at the HBS. I hope the Lowans, which contains wheat and malt (malted barley) flour, brings some α- and β-Amylase to the party, but the improver is well out of date, so I don't hold out too much hope.

Because amylase enzymes are simply digestive enzymes and are present in saliva, I could always spit into the fermentor. I read somewhere that chewing barley and spitting it back into the wash was an early way to introduce additional enzymes to whisky washes. I'll hold off on the spit inoculation for now.

Comments, criticisms and predictions welcome.

:handgestures-thumbupleft:

P.S. Here's a good crash course on enzyme fermenting.

[Kimbo]

:clap: :clap: :clap: Bloody good post Stilly,
let us know how it ends up :handgestures-thumbupleft:

[emptyglass]

They said man can not live on bread alone.
Apparently, we can now!

[MacStill]

They said man can not live on bread alone.
Apparently, we can now!

at worst he could probably make a decent pizza base from it :))

[Lowndsey]

20L of flour paste? :)) They'll wanna jump your bones over at homedistiller :laughing-rolling:

[emptyglass]

Cant wait to see how you go. That much homework should pay off.

tip top whiskey mate!
is the whiskey Helga's?,
sunny crusty scotch?
Nahh, Flour power, man.

[crow]

Ang a fucking bout :shock: how come I got called a god damn peasant for coming up with bread wash and now its innovative and visionary :? sycophantic anti crow cunts . There are some South African recipes around for bead whiskey , flour is normally used to make a grain neutral but i believe they have some fun clearing it

[stilly_bugger]

...how come I got called a god damn peasant for coming up with bread wash and now its innovative and visionary :?...

There's no doubt that you're an innovative and visionary peasant, Crow. :laughing-rolling:

There are some South African recipes around for bread whiskey , flour is normally used to make a grain neutral but i believe they have some fun clearing it

Clearing is going to be a bit of a task. I think she'll be sitting for a while. That's okay with me. I want to make a lees pizza base.

As for the South African bread whiskey, I'll have to look that up.

[stilly_bugger]

There's a bread whiskey recipe at distillique.co.za. The recipe uses old bread as the carbohydrate source for the wash. There's also a discussion of this bread whiskey recipe and other Russian bread whiskey recipes at the New Distillers Yahoo group.

These all use old bread, not the raw ingredients. But the aim seems to be the same: to get a whiskey out of flour without the addition of sugar.

[stilly_bugger]

Bloodleoop.

Captain's log.

Weeeeee've hit a plateau.

After 72 hours of good fermentation, activity has been reduced to one airlock 'blop' every 10 seconds. This was to be expected.

Approximate ferment history is. as. follows.

• 0hrs. ~SG 1032
• + 24hrs. ~SG 1018, 1 'blop' a second
• + 48hrs. ~SG 1010, 1 'blop' every 3 seconds
• + 72hrs. ~SG 1002, 1 'blop' every 10 seconds

But ... like I said ... SG readings on this slop are not all that reliable. More to come.

Bloodleoop.

[grumpthehermit]

BUMP !!! :D

Keen to know how this went / is going?

Any news?

Cheers
GTH

[stilly_bugger]

Yep. I've let it sit for a couple of weeks to really clear. I'll run it this arvo through a simple pot still and see how much alcohol comes off. Will report back.

[stilly_bugger]

Okay, results are in.

Rack & run

From the 25L of bread beer I managed to pull off a clear 17L for the boiler. Any more and I would have disturbed the sediment or the ~1cm layer of what I think was bread improver hovering on the surface.

Cover my lower element with water (approx. 10L), add the 17L of beer and fire up the boiler for a simple pot still stripping run. (I run a thermo port in the 90º of my pot still.)

So, she gets up to boil and the temp starts to climb. But it doesn't steady until 97.7ºC. This isn't looking good. Anyway, I start collecting everything, wanting to know actually how effective the enzymes and my mash has been at converting the starch in the flour into fermentable sugars.

Theory - vapour_chart.jpg

Now, going by the above temp chart I'm pulling 22% abv at 97.7ºC vapour temp. Good, I can test this bread whiskey straight from the still. So I wait for a little bit for the fores to clear — not that I can sense any — and have a wee sip. It tastes good. Slightly sweet. Completely inoffensive.

Once I hit 100ºC there ain't no alcohol left in the boiler so I stop collecting. I've got 4L of low wines. Let it cool to 20ºC and take an alcometer reading: 14%.

Yield

Okay. 4L at 14% is 560mL of 100% alcohol, or 1.4L of 40%. This also means that the 17L I took out of the fermentor was around 3.3% alcohol.

How effective was the mashing and the enzymes?

The nutritional info on the bag of Wallaby Bakers Flour that I used says that it contains 0.1% carbohydrates as sugar. So the 3kg of the stuff that I used would give me 30g of fermentable sugars up front. The unprocessed bran contains no carbs as sugars.

According to this yield calculator over at HD it takes 952g of white sugar to make 1.4L of 40%. Assuming that all of white sugar is fermentable (which I'm pretty sure it is), the enzymes, the heat from the mashing process, or the acidity of the brew (or all three) has produced around an extra 922g of fermentable sugars out of the carbs in the flour and unprocessed bran.

Was it a success or a failure?

So far, a success? It depends.

Pros
I'm pretty happy to have converted 3kg of flour and 250g of unprocessed bran into nearly a kilo of fermentable sugars.

Also, the low wines tastes pretty good. I'll run this again through an old 5L boiler that I've got and see how it comes off double distilled.

Cons
As you could imagine, this wash produces a lot of sediment. Tomorrow I'll see if I can strain off the remaining liquid and bake the dough. Just for shits and giggles.

The other obvious con is the low yield. There's a lot more work in getting one of these washes going than a tomato paste wash, yet you produce less booze.

The next step

I'll try to improve on this yield by changing the mashing procedure. Instead of a reverse mash I might try a regular mash. And I'll up the enzymes too.

See how she goes.

[grumpthehermit]

Thanks for the info and for all your efforts. I find this very interesting as I am having a "big play" with bread improver myself at the moment.

Cheers
GTH

[stilly_bugger]

Thanks for the info and for all your efforts.

No problem, and it's no trouble. I quite enjoy the experimenting. I've got enough to drink, so I don't mind a few losses or some low yields. Especially if it will help out the people getting into enzyme brewing.