What Malt Is Best For Moonshine?

Why Do We Need the Best Grain for Making Moonshine? – Grain seeds are a vital part of making whiskey (scotch) or bourbon. These grains contain the starch that people convert to sugar with the help of special enzymes in fermentation. The entire process of distillation and germination to create the grain-based spirit e love today. Although every mash recipe is unique, people who don’t have experience brewing their drinks don’t know which grains are best for making moonshine. Most moonshine makers use barley as the primary grain for alcohol. This is why 2-row and 6-row malts, as well as other types of distiller’s malts, are barley.

Do you need malted barley for moonshine?

How Are Enzymes Created? – During the malting process, barley is dried to a moisture content below 14% and then stored for for 5 to 6 weeks to overcome seed dormancy. The grain is then steeped in water to allow it to absorb moisture. This causes the barley to sprout.

1. When the grain have a moisture content of around 46%, they are air dried over the course of a number of days.
2. Once the malt has been air dried, it is kiln-dried to give the grain its color and flavor profile.
3. Barley develops enzymes during malting that are needed to convert starches into sugar during the mash process.

A typical grain bill for a whiskey mash normally consists of malted barley with other added grains such as corn, rye or wheat. Hot water (hot liquor) is added with the grain which allows the enzymes in the malt to break down the starch in the grain into sugars.

During the mash process, enzymes in the malted barley will convert starches into sugar. Without enzymes the starch would not be converted into sugar and the yeast would not have any sugar to ferment into alcohol. It is critically important to use CRUSHED malted barley and not regular or flaked barley.

Remember, distilling alcohol is illegal without a federal fuel alcohol or distilled spirit plant permit as well as relevant state and local permits. Our distillation equipment is designed for legal uses only and the information in this article is for educational purposes only. Emmet Leahy is the Chief Operating Officer and lead product developer at Clawhammer Supply, a small scale distillation and brewing equipment company. He loves the process of developing new equipment for making beer at home just as much as he does using it to brew his own beer.

What is the best grain for moonshine mash?

This blog provides information for educational purposes only. Read our complete summary for more info. March 29, 2013 Last updated March 14, 2023 The first step in making moonshine is to create a moonshine mash. This is an essential process that involves mixing moonshine ingredients to prepare for the fermentation process. The primary ingredients used in a moonshine mash are corn and barley. Though other ingredients are sometimes added to provide a distinctive flavor or to increase the proof.

• A mash made with corn, barley, and rye is perhaps the most popular moonshine recipe of all time.
• However, did you know that there are actually a lot of different moonshine mash recipes? In this article we’re going to give you our all time favorite moonshine mash recipe plus six additional mash recipes that we love.

Each varies in difficulty, cost, and time required to make. However, they all have one thing in common – they produce high-quality moonshine. Though before you make a moonshine mash at home, it’s essential to keep in mind that making moonshine mash is generally legal, but distilling alcohol at home without a federal fuel alcohol or distilled spirit plant permit (for commercial distillers) is illegal.

Therefore this article is for educational purposes only and we highly recommend that you read our legal summary for more information on the legalities of distillation before proceeding. Also, check this out if you’re looking for an educational article on the entire process for how to make moonshine,

It’s a comprehensive guide on making moonshine, from start to finish.

What can I use instead of malted barley in mash?

Malt Alternatives are Influencing the Future of Beer Brewing Shekhar Kadam, PhD, RD&A, Manager Global Beverage Enzymes & Brewing Ingredients | Josh Taylor, PhD, Principal Scientist Brewing Ingredients & Enzyme Applications

Brewing beer with malt is increasingly cost-prohibitive, which is one reason brewers are experimenting with other, often locally grown ingredients.Malt alternatives (aka ‘malternatives’) for beer brewing include cassava, raw barley, maize, rice and sorghum. Enzymes and process aids are usually required to help optimise quality, yields and cost savings when working with malternatives.

Beer has become more expensive to produce, due to climate change, inflation and rising costs along the supply chain—from barley grains to the aluminum used in beer cans. In response, breweries around the world are raising prices and trying to reduce overhead costs.

Does Jack Daniels use malted barley?

Raw ingredients – Mash bill & water – Jack is made from a mash bill consisting 80% corn, 8% rye and 12% malted barley, mostly sourced from contracted farmers in America’s Midwest. The corn comes from south west Kentucky and south Illinois, the rye mostly from Western Canada and Minnesota, and the barley from Montana.

Unusually, Jack has always been made exclusively from No.1 grade corn. Over the past 150 years, production of Jack Daniel’s has only stopped twice – once due to Prohibition and the other during World War II when the American government legislated that No.1 grade corn could only be used for food products.

Rather than compromise quality and move to No.2 grade production was halted. Corn is the predominant grain in the mash bill (80%) so produces a sweet spirit with light corn character. Malted barley is an essential part of the mash bill as it provides the enzyme that allows the yeast to process the rye and corn, and also provides body and a light cereal character to the whiskey.

Rye is a very flavoursome spicy grain and Jack Daniel’s stands out for using a little less rye than is typical in other American whiskies. Jack Daniel’s is therefore less peppery, less spicy and a little sweeter and more oaky in character. (Incidentally, Jack specify No.1 grade plump rye.) The grain is milled using a roller mill and mixed with water from Cave Spring Hollow, a limestone cave spring whose iron-free water runs at a constant temperature of 13°C (56°F).

Iron is detrimental to the distilling process and fortuitously, limestone acts as a natural filter removing iron. This plentiful supply of ideal distilling water is what led Jack to site his distillery here in the first place and while the flow slows slightly in summer, two million gallons a day typically flow from the cave. This is far beyond the production needs of the distillery who barely use a quarter of that, pumping around two gallons per minute to the distillery.

1. Municipal water is only used for cooling (which incidentally is pumped to top of hill, cooled and recycled).
2. Even the water used to reduce the whiskey to bottling strength comes from the spring, although that is purified, using reverse osmosis.
3. The grain is cooked using a process lasting six days.
4. The corn is fine milled using a hammer mill and mixed with spring water.

This is heated to 100°C (212°F) and then left to cool to 77°C (170°F) at which point the rye is added and then the barley at 64°C (148°F). The three grains are cooked at different temperatures based on what is optimal just to solubilise the starches and so allow the yeast to covert this to alcohol during fermentation.

What makes smooth moonshine?

The Classic: Corn Whiskey – So, purists opt for a corn whiskey mash, which will give you the classic, smooth, full-flavored moonshine. This is the recipe we will be tackling in this guide. However, experiment and figure out what you like best!

What grain yields the most alcohol?

The results showed that maize spent grains yielded more alcohol than wheat spent grain when they were processed at 142°C in the presence of the enzyme mixture. Results and discussion.

	Alcohol yield (LA/t) dry
	142°C	85°C
Wheat spent grains	36.1	84.9
Maize spent grains	43.6	17.6

Is single malt better than single grain?

There are so many different categories of whisky out there so we’re breaking down three similar ones, so you know exactly what you’re getting. – Let’s start with some simple definitions of each. Single Malt: A whisky that is made of malt from one single distillery using malted barley.

• It is made from blending different malt whiskies from the same distillery and on site.
• Single Grain: A whisky that is made of whisky from one single distillery using different grains such as wheat, rye or corn (amongst others).
• A blend of various grain whiskies from one distillery, on-site.
• Single Cask: Whisky made from malt that has been matured in a single cask.

It has not been blended with any other whiskies and is from one cask only. Now that we have the definitions, let’s take a look at the flavours. Single Malts tend to be very characterful and complex. They are rich in body and their flavour profile will vary depending on the distillery, region and maturation process.

• They are usually made with copper pot stills and the ageing process will be over three years.
• By law, they have to be bottled at 40% ABV or above and matured in oak barrels.
• There is a lot of leeway with what type of barrels are used and this will influence the flavour profile just as much as what distillery the malt is made at.

This isn’t dissimilar from a Single Grain Whisky, which will also vary depending region, maturation and distillery. However, grain whiskies do not tend to be as flavoursome as malts. They are typically used to give body to blends and are made in column stills, which is more efficient than pot stills.

However, Single Grains can be just as complex and enjoyable as Single Malts. They are become more and more popular as well, with lots of new Single Grain bottlings appearing. Haig Club is one of the most famous, and here at GreatDrams, we have our own Single Grain bottling from the Girvan Distillery,

Single Cask Whiskies are quite rare as they usually don’t produce as many bottles per batch. This means they can also be quite pricey. The flavour will be a lot more intense than malts and grain whiskies as it has not been mixed with other malts from other barrels.

Is malt the same as malted barley?

A Complete Guide to Malted Barley You’ve probably heard the word “malt” more often than “malted barley.” Generally, these two are the same. Barley simply refers to the seed or plant grain, while the malt is the result of that dried barley seed sprouting through a process called malting.

Why barley is preferred for malting?

Introduction – Malting is the term used for the preparation of a brewing raw material, employing a controlled germination of grain in moist air. Barley is the preferred grain for malting; however, other grains such as wheat, rye, sorghum, millets, triticale, or oats may be malted and subsequently used in brewing, distilling, or food production.

Barley is the most common cereal used for the production of malt for brewing since it has a high starch-to-protein ratio and adhering husk that contribute to the economic yield and ease of processing in brewing and produces the characteristic flavors associated with malt for this purpose. Malting aims to convert or modify the physical structure of the barley grain and allow synthesis or activation of a series of enzymes such that the final product, malt, is more readily used in the subsequent stages of brewing, distilling, or food manufacture.

During the malting process, hydrolytic enzyme production and/or release is maximized leading to cell-wall degradation and protein solubilization with minimal starch breakdown. In order for this to occur, malting aims to both accelerate germination and retard embryo growth, essentially conflicting activities.

1. Any shoot or root growth produced during the malting process is physically removed from the final product prior to storage and delivery, and therefore, minimizing embryo growth reduces losses incurred in the process.
2. The final product of malting, malt, physically resembles the original barley grain but is friable when crushed, reflecting the complex biochemical changes that have occurred during the malting process.

Read full chapter URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780081005965001530

Can I malt my own barley?

Malt Your Own Grain at Home – It’s quite simple to malt your own grain. All you need are whole, unhulled grains, water, and a bit of patience. Barley works best due to its high potential for enzyme conversion, but other grains such as sorghum or field corn (dried, not sweet and right off the cob) will work as well.

I recommend starting with enough for a 1-gallon (4 L) batch of all-grain beer, as it will help you to understand the process before you try malting larger amounts. Once the grains are malted, you can follow my technique for 1-gallon all-grain brewing in chapter 8, and you’ll have the pleasure of being able to say that you made a batch of beer entirely from scratch! You can easily scale up from there.

The whole process should take two to three days.

Is all Scotch 100% malted barley?

Raw Materials – Nearly all spirits distilled in Scotland include malted barley (and we’ll get to the reason for that in a moment). In general, malted barley is simply barley grains that have been allowed to start to sprout. The grains are soaked in water and then laid out in a malting room for some period of time while the seeds inside the barley start to germinate.

Now, there’s a very important reason for that germination. Seeds are made up of complex carbohydrates, which are intended to be used as food for the new plant. But plants (and yeast, for that matter) can’t directly use carbohydrates — it needs to be broken down into simple sugars for the plant first in a process called “enzymatic hydrolysis.” When the new seed germinates, it releases natural enzymes that break down the complex carbohydrates into simple sugars that it can then use.

For Scotch Whisky, only natural enzymes are allowed to be used to convert complex carbs into sugar, which is why you’ll see malted barley used fairly universally. The trick here is that we want this all to happen, but we don’t want the new plant to eat all the available sugar before the yeast can.

That sugar is what our yeast is going to eat and turn into alcohol, so we need the barley to stop growing. This is accomplished by heating or “kilning” the malted barley, which raises the temperature of the seed and stops it from growing any further. Most malting facilities will use a clean, modern source of heat such as natural gas, but the traditional method of heating the barley is with peat — a natural fuel that creates a distinctive smoky aroma.

Some distilleries still use peat smoke during the kilning process to impart that smoky flavor into their spirit. For Single Malt Scotch Whisky, 100% of the raw materials must be malted barley. Adding smoke to the kilning process is optional for distillers.

The other kind of spirit that is commonly produced is Single Grain Scotch Whisky, In this case, the “single” refers to a single distillery producing the spirit (not that only one kind of grain is used). Most of these spirits also use malted barley in their mixture, as the malted barley will provide the enzymes needed to break down the starch in the other grains and make their sugar available to the yeast.

There is no real restriction on the number or kind of grains that can be added, just that they are indeed grains. For grains other than malted barley, typically they are milled or crushed and then cooked in a warm bath before moving to the next step.

Is all Scotch malted barley?

What’s the Difference Between Scotch and Bourbon? I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve heard some version of the following: “I love bourbon, but Scotch is just too smoky for me.” Or, the opposite side of that particular spirituous coin: “Bourbon is just too sweet for me, and way too strong.

I really just stick with single malt.” We have so much to unpack here! There are, of course, significant differences between and bourbon, but generations’ worth of bad information and boozy stereotypes have resulted in a lot of misapprehensions about both. To begin, both Scotch and bourbon are, meaning they’re wood-aged spirits that have been distilled from a fermented mash of grains.

In Scotland, barley is the dominant grain, and single malt Scotch whisky, for example, must be composed entirely of malted barley. Single malt Scotch is the product of a single distillery, as opposed to a blend of distillates or maturates from multiple distilleries.

• There are, it’s important to note, other regulations that guide the production of blended whisky, single grain, and more.
• © Anya Semenoff/Getty Images The whisky from each region of Scotland tends to boast its own unique character, often the result of some combination of terroir, climate, distilling tradition, and more.

So while there are certainly plenty of smoky, peaty whiskies out there, not all single malt Scotch whisky is smoky. Islay, far south in the Hebridean Islands off the west coast of the country, is home to producers like Laphroaig, Octomore, and Ardbeg.

It’s the most famous region for this style, a result of the fact that the malted barley is dried using peat-fueled fires, the smoke of which dries the grain and imbues it with its characteristic peaty smoke. Yet there are also un-peated whiskies from Islay – Bruichladdich is a great example. The whiskies from the Highlands and Speyside often tend in the opposite direction, with notes of orchard fruit, dried stone fruit, honey, heather, and occasionally even flowers coming to the fore.

And on top of that, individual producers have their own styles, types of pot stills, water sources, and climates where their aging warehouses are located. Bourbon, on the other hand, is based on corn, not barley. According to regulations, it must be composed of a mash bill (basically the list of grains that have been used) consisting of at least 51% corn.

Some brands use a lot more than that, but 51% is the legal minimum. Beyond that, rye, wheat, and barley are common supplements, though other grains may be used as well. Once distilled to the required strength (no more than 160 proof, and barreled at a maximum of 125 proof), bourbon must be aged in charred new oak.

While most brands use American oak barrels, the law actually doesn’t specify that the wood has to be from the United States. Any expressions that have aged for less than four years have to specify the amount of time they spent in barrel prior to bottling.

Some brands finish their whiskeys in a secondary barrel (ex-Port, for example), but the primary aging must be in charred new oak. In general, bourbon is a sweeter spirit than single malt Scotch, but just as it’s impossible to paint all single malt Scotches with a broad brush, the same goes for bourbon.

A higher percentage of rye in the mash bill, for example, will bring a more spicy character to the equation, whereas more wheat tends to lend sweetness, softness, and a pleasantly plush textural component. Then there is the issue of the barrels themselves, which are impacted not just by where the wood is sourced from, but also the type and level of char.

Whereas warm vanilla notes are not uncommon in bourbon, some deeply and intensely charred barrels can lend a smoky hint to the whiskey inside. Finally, there is the issue of spelling: In Scotland, whisky is spelled without an ‘e’ and rendered as ‘whiskies’ when referring to several. In the United States, Bourbon tends to be spelled with an ‘e’ and referred to as ‘whiskeys’ in the plural.

But there are exceptions: Maker’s Mark, for example, uses whisky — no ‘e’ — on their label. For all of their differences, however, single malt Scotch and bourbon are both unique and deeply expressive evocations of their respective places of origin. There’s room on the bar cart for both of them.

Can you make moonshine mash without malt?

What is Moonshine Mash Made of It? – Moonshine mash is usually made with corn, sugar, yeast, and water and allowed to ferment for 5-10 days. A sugar wash can be made with just water and yeast and no grains to make moonshine or spirits.

Is barley malt necessary?

Malt is one of four essential ingredients used in producing craft beer. It is malt that provides color, aroma, flavor, and body to every ale and lager, and can set each beer apart. Although a variety of grains have been used for brewing, barley is the preferred grain for beer.

What does malted barley do to moonshine?

Malted Barley for Moonshine Whiskey Mash by North Georgia Still Company. Whiskeys made from barley produce sweet flavors with caramel and brown sugar hints.

Does barley have to be malted for whiskey?

Laws – The exact definitions of “malt whisky” and “single malt whisky” and the restrictions governing their production vary according to regulations established by different jurisdictions for marketing whisky. For example, Scotch whisky regulations require malt whisky to be made in pot stills using water and malted barley without the addition of any other grains or cereals, and the whisky must be aged for at least three years in oak casks.

The use of new barrels is not required. Caramel coloring can be added, but no other additives are allowed. Irish whiskey regulations are almost identical to Scotch regulations. Malt whiskey must be distilled in a pot still from a mash of 100% malted barley, which may be peated or unpeated in character, although unpeated malt is typically used.

All Irish whiskeys must be matured for at least three years in wooden casks (which may have been previously used) and must contain a minimum of 40% alcohol by volume, with caramel coloring as the only allowed additive. Single pot still whiskey, while also being primarily made from malted barley, is not called malt whisky because it contains unmalted barley.

1. It is considered a separate category under Irish regulations.
2. In the United States Code of Federal Regulations, the Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits define a “malt whisky” as a whisky produced at an alcohol by volume (ABV) level not exceeding 80% from a fermented mash of not less than 51% malted barley grain that is stored for aging in charred new oak containers at less than 62.5% ABV.

If such a whisky has been aged for at least two years, contains no added coloring and flavoring, and has not been blended with neutral spirits or other types of whisky, the adjective ” straight ” can be applied, as in straight malt whisky. A blended whisky that contains at least 51% straight malt whisky may be labelled as blended malt whisky or malt whiskey – a blend.