100% corn beer? How close to that is possible?

[BIGRUGBY]

I just bottled my last recipe and saved the yeast from my 5 gallon bucket fermenter. So now I have 3 mason jars of London Ale III yeast sitting in my fridge just staring at me. I'm also out of base malt and need to go to Omaha to buy some more. In the meantime, I have tons of free flaked corn and propane at work and am itching to brew, to the extent of expirementing. I'm wondering if I can pair my leftover mason jars of yeast with flaked corn and get some sort of a fermented product.

Will there be some enzymes and it would just be a volume play requiring lots of boiling to get the amount of sugar to the right amount due to poor conversion/efficiency?
Or are there no enzymes in flaked corn, requiring some sort of malt? If that's the case, how little do I need? What if I went with 6 row or something else with more enzymatic oomph?

 

[brownni5]

No enzymes in flaked grains - only unfermentable starches. 6 row would do the trick - it is afterall a base malt - but someone smarter than me would have to do the math to figure out how much you'd need to convert the corn - I don't remember the equation. Seems like going to buy some MGD would be easier.

 

[grampamark]

Flaked corn has 0 diastatic power. Nothing fermentable there. It’s usually used to reduce maltiness. Corn syrup is fermentable, but without something else you’d just be making hard seltzer.

Maybe 40% 2-row, 40% corn syrup, 10% white wheat (for a little body and mouthfeel) and 10% flaked corn. That would give you 50% corn so you could call it corn beer.

Or, as previously suggested, buy some MGD and drink it while looking at a picture of a corn field.

 

[day_trippr]

It's all about average diastatic power for the mash. One can use a calculator like this one to compute that value based on the individual Lintner values and weights for the grains used. The average wants to be somewhere between 40 and 70.

So plug in the amount of corn with its 0 Lintner, then you can see what happens as a solid base malt with its Lintner rating is added in increasing amounts...

https://www.topdownbrew.com/diastaticPower.html

Cheers!

 

[BIGRUGBY]

Glad I asked instead of investing time into mashing something with 0 diastatic power.

 

[Robert65]

Malted corn is available. This is how chicha is usually made (no old lady spit anymore.) Some craft maltsters offer it. Go Google. With malted corn, 100% of the grain bill would be perfectly doable. The Pilgrims did it.

 

[AzOr]

Would this make you a maizer?

 

[Jayjay1976]

You could toss a bunch of amylase in there and mash it.

 

[grampamark]

I plugged my off-the-top-of-my-head recipe into Beersmith as a Blonde Ale. I’m half tempted to brew it.

Edit-the 5 minute hop addition is supposed to be .5 oz. I edited it in Beersmith.

 

[Lefou]

You could toss a bunch of amylase in there and mash it.

Yes ... you could use amylase or even amyloglucosidase but it won't really be like traditional beer or taste like traditional beer.
Technically (or in my narrow, anal opinion) some amount of malted barley or wheat is needed to supply a grain essence to balance highly fermentable corn starches. Corn has very little in the way of protein or vitamin minerals found in barley, but it does supply lots of starch easily broken into simple glucose. That's why a lot of brewers consider corn or rice simple adjunct fillers.

 

[Lefou]

Cornhole blonde, aka malt liquor.

 

[grampamark]

Cornhole blonde, aka malt liquor.

Yeah. I thought about calling it Corn .45.

 

[Tobor_8thMan]

I plugged my off-the-top-of-my-head recipe into Beersmith as a Blonde Ale. I’m half tempted to brew it.

Edit-the 5 minute hop addition is supposed to be .5 oz. I edited it in Beersmith.

View attachment 663250

IDK, sorry, but something about the name makes me want to NOT drink this brew.

 

[grampamark]

IDK, sorry, but something about the name makes me want to NOT drink this brew.

What? You don’t like trying to throw a beanbag through a hole in a plywood target? This could be the perfect beer for playing cornhole.

 

[Tobor_8thMan]

What? You don’t like trying to throw a beanbag through a hole in a plywood target?
This could be the perfect beer for playing cornhole.

Name makes me think of something totally different.

 

[grampamark]

Name makes me think of something totally different.

Well, that would be your problem, not mine.

 

[Robert65]

Corn has very little in the way of protein or vitamin minerals found in barley, but it does supply lots of starch easily broken into simple glucose.

This is true of the corn adjuncts supplied to brewers, which (whether grits or flaked grits) are merely the starchy endosperm with the germ and pericarp removed. Malted corn will have a composition similar to malted barley.

 

[Vale71]

This is true of the corn adjuncts supplied to brewers, which (whether grits or flaked grits) are merely the starchy endosperm with the germ and pericarp removed. Malted corn will have a composition similar to malted barley.

Not really. Whole corn grains have a protein content between 10-15% (dry matter) which is similar to barley but in the case of corn it's mostly water insoluble, so it won't make it into the beverage. The germ is particularly rich in oils and if they end up in the beverage you can't expect much head retention because of that as well.

 

[madscientist451]

Yes, you can do it, will it be worth the effort? I'm skeptical about that....

 

[JohnMc]

Not really. Whole corn grains have a protein content between 10-15% (dry matter) which is similar to barley but in the case of corn it's mostly water insoluble, so it won't make it into the beverage. The germ is particularly rich in oils and if they end up in the beverage you can't expect much head retention because of that as well.

The germ gets largely blasted during malting; the rootlets and acrospire, which are dried and removed at the end of malting, are what mostly was the germ and get their start from the energy in the germ, a good bit of which is oil.
I would imagine unmalted barley germ has a good bit of oil as well, as do most cereal germs. Wheat germ sure does and wheat malt works well enough.
The proteins being insoluble also gets altered in malting.
To me, the drawbacks of malted corn are no husk/hull and that it hasn't been bred especially for beer making. That said, rice hulls can make up for the first and barley wasn't as optimized a couple of centuries ago, so don't sweat the second.
FWIW, some of the yield growth of corn over the last hundred years has been increases in endosperm. (The lion's share has been increased plants per acre, but that's not so much of a thing in the composition of beer.)