Bourbon - All Of The Grains

edited May 2021 in Recipes

Mashing a 6 grain bourbon next week, because - why not?

  • Corn
  • Malted Wheat
  • Malted Barley
  • Malted Oats
  • Malted Rye
  • Brown Rice

The malts are all roast or kilned.

The other flip for us - we generally don't use malted rye or malted oat.

Don't want to add amaranth, sorghum, millet, buckwheat, or quinoa - since those are all pseudocereals and not true grains. Didn't add triticale because it's just a rye/wheat hybrid.

Anything else?

Comments

  • edited May 2021

    This looks brilliant and begs the question of a suitable mashing profile for all the above.

    I have attached a mashing recipe settings overview that I am using. Yes lots of similarity to brewing mashing.

    But, if a particular value is not used, I then simply enter 0... (zero) and the programme skips this step, hence I can use it for distilling.

    So what values would you typically enter for such recipe sheet.

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  • edited May 2021

    Cereal mash on the corn and rice - and then mashing in the malt while descending temperatures. Will hold at mash-in. I’ll use htaa on the way up, but I’m not going to bother with any additional enzyme given the high malt percentage.

    Well modified malts, including the rye - so not really worried about glucan or protein rest.

    No mash out.

    Call it reverse mash?

  • 7 / turns out sorghum is considered a true grain.

  • I love it! I cannot handle unmalted grains yet... maybe soon with our production and disti deliveries on a steady incline... 3x 10bbl batches of Stout mash bill wort fork trucked from next door yesterday...

  • Multi grain whiskey is my favorite kind of whiskey.

    StillDragon North America - Your StillDragon® Distributor for North America

  • edited May 2021

    Suspect the roast/kiln makes more of an overall impact than some of the more subtle grains (like rice).

    Big question - what's the right % of corn - since we're calling this a bourbon.

    51? 60? 70?

    We love to do the head fake bourbons at 51% - because we can keep the bourbon name, but emphasize all the flavoring grains - we did this with our Oat, Millet bourbons, etc.

    60% - More of a Four Roses profile

    70% - Typical bourbon territory - probably be the most familiar from a flavor perspective - but fitting all the other grain in this mix - will probably yield something not so distinctive.

  • edited May 2021

    For the curious I found this site which has the mash bills of a lot of the bourbons on the market in the US:

    Bourbon and Whiskey Mash Bills @ Modern Thirst Whiskey News And Reviews

  • IMO, you want to do the corn at 51% to allow the other grains to have more chance to shine while still being able to call it bourbon

  • Yeah, that's where we're leaning anyhow. Surprised more don't try that to create a more unique flavor profile.

  • When I looked at that list of grain bills I was supprised most were 80% maize 20% right. It was something like 90%.
    Still most of those brands were large commercial operations.

  • edited June 2021

    The other thing to consider is that corn (and rye) is cheap and plentiful. Malt is expensive and not.

    I think there is a predisposition towards to increase corn to malt ratio to the maximum possible. Hence the “invention” of Distillers malt with higher enzyme content, which means less required. Also consider the widespread use of raw grain - corn, rye, and wheat (these are generally all unmalted).

    Suspect in the history of bourbon - mash bills were majority driven by economics. This is very different from European whiskys.

  • Same thoughts here @grim.

    StillDragon North America - Your StillDragon® Distributor for North America

  • I want to do unmalted rye and corn really bad, but stuck with malt until I can handle the material in an efficient manner. I am finally in a groove with blackstrap rum, and getting about a hundred proof gallons from ton of molasses every week, taking a break once in a while to lay out 10x the money for a triple batch of wort from the neighboring brewery that basically only charges me labor and materials... For unmalted grain, every time I do the math, the yield is about the same, 100pg or so per ton, and the cost of the equipment for a non-back breaking worker to operate a ton of grain a week is astronomical.. as in $50-100k or more for storage, milling, conveyor, mashing cooling, fermenting and dewatering... I could justify the loan for it if it was turn-key, but that doubles it again and will 99% require a steam boiler......

  • edited June 2021

    We finally picked up a dewatering unit - Kason - haven't run it yet. That's a $25k hunk of metal.

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