Poor mans wet cob ale

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webfoot

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OK
so I'm bored and I have two weeks until I can get to the brew shop.

Having animals I always have wet cob running around some where and have decided to try making ale with it.


I have not hops, I do have.

1qt sugar
2qt wet cob
5gal water
1 packet redstar champagne yeast


I put the water on to boil and added the sugar when it was warm enough to stir in but not boiling then added the wet cob, covered and waited for a simmer.
Simmered for 60 min and ladled (keeping as much of the wet cob as I could out) into a sanitated carboy in cold water to let cool.
I then put 1/4cup sugar and 2cups water into a pot and warmed enough to to dissolve the sugar, let cool to 100deg and pitched the yeast.

I let the wart cool to 105deg and added the starter and an air lock.

Now we wait.
 
Three things:

1) What is wet cob? SWMBO (who owned horses for a long time) has never heard of it and a google search gives me ambiguous results. I'm going to venture a guess that none of it is malted.

2) You don't have malt (I'm assuming) or hops... so this is definitely not a beer. 'Hooch' is a bit more fitting. :D

3) 100 degrees may be too hot for your yeast. There's a good possibility you're not going to see any fermentation due to the fact that you've killed them.
 
A little weird? You got that right. Add a bag of sugar to the pot, wring out your wet dog into it, then thermal shock your carboy before cooking your sugar starter yeast in hot warts...all for your ale made with champagne yeast and no malt or hops.

We're gonna need some clarification here.
 
"Cob is corn, oats, pellets (like alfalfa pellets) and other grains. Dry cob is just that, wet cob has molasses added to it."-from some other person.

Interesting. If I didn't know it was horse food I would wonder if it wasn't too bad. Let us know.how it is.
 
I'm glad to see that We have an open mind.

wet-cob is allot like sweet feed without all the forage added, its rolled grains and molasses.
SWMBO may not have feed sweet feed or wet-cob, maybe used only alfalfa.

Not all that has malt is beer, not all that is beer has malt. (or hops)

Red Star recommends the temp for champagne west starter to be 100-105 deg Fahrenheit, read the package. I am sure of this due to the fact that it is fermenting as I type.

"I dunno, his previous posts indicate he's been looking for other brewing info."
Please do not accuse me of bootlegging distilled spirits ever again.

I hope this clears the water. :)
 
Oh I'm not trying to put it down... I'm actually curious as to how it turns out... but I'm going to have to be a bit of a "definition nazi" here

Beer is classified as an alcoholic beverage consisting of malt, hops, yeast and water. It can include other ingredients (except in Germany) but if you're missing one of those four ingredients, it isn't beer.
 
Well next time I should have hops and malt so maybe I will try something like:

1gal water
1/4cup golden malt extract
1/4cup cob
1/4 oz yet to be determined hops

BTW it seems that around here wet-cob is just rolled corn, barley, oats, wheat and molasses, if it has alfalfa pellets in it they call it sweet feed.
In Missouri it was all called wet-cob. edit:(note I see alot of hulls in this stuff so this ma not go over well)

I don't know maybe this will be called horse feed swill ale, I can always add a hop pellet and some golden malt to appease the Nazi regime. ;)

Webby
 
I guess I should post the why of my waste of carboy space.
The nearest home brew store is 60 miles of Windy mountain two lane highway from where I live, so I cant really just hop in the car and go grab some malt.

I was feeding the llama and wondered if the cob would make a palatable fermented drink.

heres to discovory

Webby
 
Yes sire!

My Wife hates the movie.

The not-beer is bubbling away, hope it doth not kill me.
 
If thegrains are not malted will the yeast only convert the sugar? I thought the point ofusing malted grains wasthe conversion of the starches?
 
Yes sire!

My Wife hates the movie.

The not-beer is bubbling away, hope it doth not kill me.

I doubt it will hurt you, I also doubt it will taste good. But what the hell it makes for an interesting experiment. Better than adding meat.
 
My guess is this was one of the cheapest beer ingredient lists ever made. Throw in an oz of centennial and I bet you could beat out any bmc!

And also I think we need to be careful with the llama jokes. This thread could get out of hand as the night progresses.....
 
I really don't know if it will even be fit to drink but I have no other ingredients and it may be a week or two be for that changes.

we shall see.

webby
 
I really don't know if it will even be fit to drink but I have no other ingredients and it may be a week or two be for that changes.

we shall see.

webby

If you get mail you can get brewing ingredients. Northerbrewer orders usually arrive in 5 days for me

Good luck with your experiment!
 
There are so many web based homebrew suppliers, don;t let that stop you. Many have fairly low flat rate shipping.
 
Well as predicted this failed :)
I'm sure I did a lot wrong but I might try again some time.
I boiled my water added my sugar and wet-cob and ice bathed until the temp was 90 and pitched the yeast.
After the first week it really smelled like beer but when I went to bottle it at two weeks it smelled really bad, like some one did the eark and gurgle in my carboy.
I'm still not sure if it was an underlying flaw or bad planning or both.

I think I will do a real batch of ale and try this again some time like I was making real ale.(it was after all mostly tong in cheek.)
 
Webby,
Don't give up on the wet cob yet. I have added a LITTLE bit to my beers before. Turned out fine. Cool use of bored energy on your part.
Next dark beer you brew---Add up to a lb. of wet cob but "sanitize" it in your oven first. I suggest that this will serve a few purposes. It'll knock the llama funk/barn germs off of it AND will hopefully darken the grains a tad. No reason to get to scientific with it, if you burn it everyone in the house will hate you and if it's not darkening up let it go another few moments. I think I might have gotten a slight bump in OG from the corn and the oats were hard to mistake. Unfortunately the cob effect could be all in my head. Either way, at $11/40lb bag from my local producer, I can use as much cob as I want. The molasses is an awesome bonus too!
 
This stuff smelled real good in the primary so i think i will take your advice (at least part of it) and throw some in the oven first.

I may start a 1gal batch tonight and see how it goes.

Webbey
 
i think for the next run at this i will do as Drowninginbeer said and roast some of the wetcob in the oven and steep it like an all-grain batch, any ideas on what to add to it seeing as how it wont be malted?


Webby
 
I made a batch of horse feed 'beverage' and it actually came out good. I'm brewing another batch today and was googling to see if I could find others who have tried this when I ran across this thread.

I get a kick out of experimenting and trying new things, so I thought hey why not? Fermentation has been going on for a long time and in fact before beer there was just fermented grain, no hops or malt. In some places in the world feremeted grain drinks are still consumed. In fact it seems that somewhere in the world whatever you can think of, someone is fermenting it. So I came up with this:

14 cups sweet feed (corn, barley, oats, molasses)
4 pounds brown sugar
2 cups malted barley
tbsp lemon juice
yeast nutrient
a handfull of raisins

I boiled about two and a halt to three gallons of water and added the sweet feed, raisins, sugar and lemon juice. Then I let it simmer until the temp was low enough to add the malt. I added the malt and let the whole thing cool down to where I could pour it into the sterile 5 gallon bucket. I added water to almost fill up the bucket.

I added Redstar Champaign yeast and let it ferment on the grain until dry. The hydrometer reading said that the resulting brew would be about 10%. After about a week I carefully poured the clearish liquid off the lees into another sterile bucket, sealed it up and let them sit for another week. Sounds more like making wine at this point.

By that time the stuff in the buckets was mostly clear. I poured that into champaign bottles, put a pinch of yeast and a pinch of sugar and let them sit for a month. A few others I didn't bother to add the yeast and sugar. The ones with the pinch came out mildly carbonated, with a dark amber color and a malty, bready taste kind like a belgian tripple, but not. The drink packed quite a punch. The bottles without the yeast came out tasting the same, but without the carbonation. I thought they were both great.

I could see how some people wouldn't like this beverage. It's not really something one could identify as beer or barley wine. It's certainly not beer. It's more in line with a traditional barley wine which seem to have hopps these days. Several friends have tried it and thought it was "great, but weird." Another friend was amazed that 4 gallons of something that actually tasted good like this could be made for for about 5-10 dollars.

Anyway, making a tasty product from horse feed is possible. That's why I'm on my second batch.

Paul
 
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