DIY rice syrup

I decided that I would make my own rice syrup since I had seen people posting on other sites trying and trying to make the stuff. Here's what I came up with.


3 pounds rice
1 gallon water +2 cups
bioferm L


I boiled the gallon of water then added the rice and cooked till soft and "soupy". After that I stuck it into a mesh bag for BIB. When that was ready I got the temp up to 154 and added the Bioferm L and let it sit for two hours in a mini cooler.

Heres the cool part though.


After I had the wort collected I used a large pan to reduce the wort into syrup. It came out looking exactly like the syrup from Lundbergs and tasted just like it too! I made about 1.25 pounds of syrup so my extraction was only mediocre but that's what I expected from BIB.

Probably a stupid question, but a quick search did not produce the answer.

What's "BIB"?

Sounds like brew in bag or brew in a bag.

Thanks Kevin. Brew in a Bag, sorry about that.

What was the gravity of the end product?

What's "bioferm" and where do you get it? Or more importantly, where can *I* get it? I'd love to try making rice syrup out of black rice or red rice or toasted rice etc.

The OG? Since I reduced it to be super thick I didn't take a measurement but before I reduced it I had 1.055 which is decent. Bioferm L is a commercial enzyme and I don't know if it's readily available but there are other options to get your diastatic power from. Maybe a local nano could hook you up?

Hmm...looks like Bioferm L is just alpha-amylase. Can you confirm or deny this?
http://www.brewerssupplygroup.com/Enzymes.html

When you weigh the time of making it, plus cost of ingredients, do you really come out on top of just buying something like Lundbergs?

Seconded. There's definitely the question of, "why make it into syrup rather than just using it as wort and making beer with it straight away?"

I'm looking forward to reading more on this. An OG of 1.055 seems good to me. Whether or not there is any cost savings to be realized, I can certainly appreciate the experimental mind set. It seems that some of the most interesting things come from the decision to just try something new...like making our own rice syrup.

Question: Did you use standard white rice or some other variety if rice?

Yeah bioferm L is just an amylase from what I remember, I was just making a small amount of syrup which is why just an amylase worked for me. Why make syrup? Granola man granola! Cost was 3 pounds of rice at .48 a pound and I got a little bit more then 16 oz which not only saved me about 3 bucks compared to what is at the store... Also DIY has a little bit of satisfaction...

I used calrose but it darkened while being reduced. I don't use brown rice too much in brewing because I'm already battling the strong flavors of sorghum so a subtle rice flavor that's closer to bud really helps with that.

Can you use this to replace or partially replace malts in starters?

We have lots of rice here and malt is very expensive.

So... you just mashed some cereal rice with amylase, 3# to a gallon and got 1.055 wort? How many gallons of wort did you get out of that, before reducing to syrup? I know that when I boil rice to eat the rice soaks up crazy amounts of water; if that were happening I'd think a quick simple sparge would really help out. If we assume it's 70% fermentable, that's about double the gravity needed for a "standard" strength beer (not that homebrewers tend to go that low-gravity ). Assuming 70% fermentable, that'd be 7-8# of rice for a 5 gallon, 5-ish% ABV brew.

I know that simply mashing whole rice has been discussed before, and while I think the discussions were mostly hypothetical, IIRC the potential problems people came up with were the germ and oil content. Did you notice any signs of excess oil in/on your wort? If so did it skim off easily?



Now I'm thinking about this a little more. If we were to steep some rice at lauter/sparge (long grain) or mash (short grain) temps for a while to gelatinize the starches, and then just mash with exogenous enzymes, how would that turn out?

Now you've got me tempted to do my next brew with this sort-of-but-not-really cereal mash of rice, dumping in some oat malt with the enzymes... this may renew my interest in making some buckwheat crystal malt to toss in, even though malting is a royal pain in the ass...

Hi all,

I know this thread hasn't been active in a couple years, but I'm hoping some of you are still out there. I want to make my own brown rice malt syrup and there is surprisingly little information online on how specifically to do it (like a recipe). The closest I've gotten is the website of a Japanese company explaining how they do it, and beljica's method using bioferm L. I'm interested in doing it completely from scratch which means malting my own barley instead of buying commercial enzyme extracts like bioferm.

I'm pretty confident that I could do it, but do you have any suggestions on how much malted barley I would need per pound of rice? I couldn't find any sort of conversion between bioferm L and malted barley. That piece of information alone should be all I need to get started.

Thanks!

This thread was originally posted in the "Gluten Free" forum so you may not get a lot of people contributing to how much barley to use as anybody brewing true gluten free is not using barley. I think there is a section in John Palmer's "How to Brew" on adjuncts that might help.
http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter1-1.html