BEGINNERS GUIDE ON CORN MASH PART 2
We're gonna go straight to the core, you need to know to hear back around hear me back. We're at the point where it's time to do a checkup. Now, I've been at this for about oh, maybe 2025 minutes. And I want to give you a look inside so you can see what we have developed since I last saw you. You see that now that it is some real thick, like corn and seeds just like a porridge it's really thick.
That's what we're looking for. Now, again, this was four gallons of water and five pounds of corn so you can see how much water that corn soaks up. What's next you as well, we're gonna let this sit. It's not gonna get any worse and it probably won't get any better, but I got some time on my hands. So I've already been doing this for about 25 minutes or so. I'm gonna let this sit for another time. 10 or 15 minutes just to soak up everything you possibly can. What is our next step? Because we're at 209 as a matter of fact.
So what's our next step? You're right, we've got to cool it. And there's some ingenious ways of doing that. But we're going to call this down before we add any of the amylase enzymes because this is only active right at 155 degrees Fahrenheit. Now there's a window there but look man, just use 155 is your mark if you can get it at 155 you're good to go. Okay, a little too hot up to about 165 in you inoculated. You render it unusable. Anything below about 145 it's just not going to be active. So 155 is your sweet spot to get into 155 use your amylase. Now remember how thick that it's still just as thick as it was a little earlier. And we are just about at that point. Now we've got a couple of different options here. One is I can just leave the pot sit and allow that to cool off on its own.
And that's going to take quite a while. I could put in a beer Brewer, I could put a word chiller in there and cool it. That's another method, you know, a clean sanitized water chiller because you know, now you're trying to be a little bit more clean. I've got some freezer bags with ice. Now I could just throw ice in there. You know, eight pounds of ice is about a gallon of water. Okay, I could just throw ice in there to cool it down but then that would really start to dilute it a whole lot and I want to convert that corn first and then sparge you know, the rinse. That's how I want to introduce more water.
So I just put some ice cubes in a freezer bag and drop those in there. Now it'll take several iterations of that, but at some point, I'm going to bring that down to about 106 55 degrees Fahrenheit with me, I'll be back when he gets there. Now I've done a little shifting around, I'm at 155 degrees. But now let's check our starch content. And all that takes is one drop of iodine. So I will pour that on the spoon. And I drop a drop, you'd notice how black that gets, no matter what I do to it, it stays black. It's just a god awful color. It's just really, really dark.
Now that shows me the presence of starch. And if that starch was Not there, I could drop a drop in there shake, it would start to dissipate. So that's, that's my challenge now. And that's what I'm shooting for. All I've got, that's the only way I can test it at the very end. But I already know that the next step that I'm going to do is going to do that. And that is to add my alpha amylase. Now I've got this thing at 155 degrees and it will remain such a turn that back Yep, for quite a while. More than enough time for those starches to be converted to fermentable sugars. Now this says it takes 1.1 to point three teaspoons per gallon and I've got four gallons in here give or take.
And so I'm going to use just about a teaspoon and This is one of those you don't have to get real specific enough is enough. So and again, our corn is just as thick as it was before we call it if not a little thicker. So what I'll do is I'm going to add this amylase and then I'm going to mix it. I'm just going to mix it around the corn and allow that to sit. There we go and allow that to do his job. Now, you're your conversion, most of your conversion takes place in the first 2030 minutes.But we allow it to sit there for at least 60 minutes up to 90 minutes just to make sure that it's All finished. So what I'll do now, see if this would be the time. But you would need more water that you would put in the two row barley if you were not using amylase, okay, this would be the time.
But remember, you'd have to have more water in there for that to take place if we don't have that much water. So we're just going to use the amylase that I can get out of it. Little jar. I shall put the lid on that. Ah, sit back. Relax. We are going to wait for that to happen and when it does, we will be back and we'll test it. Well, you're ready to see the results. Let me show you what we've got. Remember how thick that was? Look at it now. We've extracted some of that out of there.
And now this is the liquid and I want to show you what the results are now because I've got it in the shop class so it's a little bit easier to see. But if we drop in a draft and you look at that, give it a shake and look at it dissipate. It almost turns to just like a light, lightest purple color.
That is an indicator of starches converted to fermented sugars. Now that we've got our conversion complete and I've got this thing lifted and set, it's time to just start rinsing and this is how we're going to add the liquid necessary to ferment and at the same time we're using this to rinse out all of those fermentable sugars out of those out of that flake corn. This will take a while only because it's a flake product that's why flake corns it's not. It's good, but it's kind of difficult to use because it is. Oh, it gets so mushy, that it kind of compacts here that is you move around a little bit it starts to run through. So we'll be back shortly. You know, I get excited every time I do this. This is so cool. Um, I'm using color Water. Now, it's a rinse sparge rinse the greens, because what's my next step is to ensure that I can drop the temperature down. Now, I've got to get down below 90, so I could pitch East when the time comes.
So let's just use cold water. Do I just make sense? I've also already added a five pound bag of sugar. Now I took a hydrometer reading and did the correction factors. I'm gonna 1.029 I wish it would have been a little bit higher. That means my efficiency is a little bit off. That's okay. But you know, the interesting thing is that look, you're going to get dirty or messy. But the interesting thing is, you can feel as you stick your hand in and pull it out and it's all sticky. And you can tell when you converted starches to sugars because you can feel it and this is going to get all over. Don't be afraid to stick your hand in there.
I don't like using the paddle but sometimes you do. Just take a hand it right now I've just got this mess of all the flake corn is left over and all this is really is just like the fibers portion of it because all the starches are gone as much as I could get and others converted as much as I could convert them. And wow. All I gotta do now is just add this to the firm and get the right temperature, add the fermenter but one last thing. Don't forget to remind me. Yeah, we gotta gotta check the pH one more time, just to make sure that we're in the right ballpark.
Now that we're at this stage, see I used the false bottom or you know, one of the Oh yeah, well then bottoms from my rice cooker. And I just kept pushing down, pushing it, I squeezed all of those sugars out, poured more and did the same thing and I'm gonna Right Now, little over five gallons in here are just about filled it. So I want to show you this. This is the real thing, this is what's left over.
And so what is that good for? It's, it's not really going to do you any good in Can you firm it? Leave us in it? Yeah, you sure can have a look at whatever turns you on. Whatever floats your boat. But now that it's got some, of course, it's unrealistic to think I've got every bit of the sugars out of here. So there are some sugars. And so what does this make? This is a perfect environment for some bacterial growth. I'm thinking sour mash, that throws this into a bucket.
You know, leave it open for just a little bit. But the lid doesn't let it sit there for a couple days. It will sour you, take that and reintroduce That into another batch. And now you're starting a sour mash corn based mash. So I mean that's one thing it can be used for. Otherwise, you can just leave it out for the chickens or throw it out whatever else you want to do with it, but that's about where we're at. So I'm moving this out of the way. And I've got all the way up to here. So, I've poured enough water in here that I've got probably five gallons. Oh, I know that I'm at about nine and a half percent ABV. I'm happy with that.
What the next thing to do is get the right temperature is double check the temperature but now we need to test the pH. You're supposed to remind me. I just got to find my pH meter and I was sitting right here. Right there it is. So we'll do one last check on the pH before we transfer this into our first Enter and then once in the fermenter.
What's in fermenter? All we're going to do is add some yeast nutrient. Maybe you can add tomato paste in some yeast. Well by golly I'd show you this but it would change before I got it to its 5.6. So I'm gonna leave it as it is. I'm happy with that. clean that off just a little bit. Look, you got any questions? Send them in. You've seen it.