Has anybody tried making wine from cracked corn with Angel leavening?

[Erik the Awful]

I just bottled my rice wine a week ago, and as I opened the cabinet to inventory my wine making supplies, I still have a couple dozen packets of Angel leavening. I was at Tractor Supply last week buying wood pellets, and I saw they have a pretty good stock of feed. Now the wheels are turning.

I know the distilling guys sometimes use feed corn for their mash, but the distiller's license here is a solid four figures in price, so I'm sticking to the wine making processes I'm familiar with. I've heard that the leavening works just as well on corn as it does on rice. I'm a cheapskate, but I know enough to skip the deer corn and go for the feed corn. Tractor Supply is pretty close by, and I can get a 50# bag of cracked corn for $13.

Is this a good idea? Has anybody tried it and have any input? I'm willing to guinea pig it out, but I'm just wondering if there are any readily avoidable pitfalls or if there's a knowledge base out there.

 

[Erik the Awful]

Since I haven't had anybody tell me I'm stupid yet, I'll take y'all along on the adventure. I went to Tractor Supply looking for cracked corn, but they only had whole corn. That's what I got, for a whopping $14. I think I spend about $40 just on cherries for this year's batch of cherry-jalapeno wine. I'm sure cracked corn would give up the sugar a little easier, but I'm making wine, so time's on my side.

I put half a gallon of corn in a pot on the stove with half a gallon of water. I'm trying to simmer it instead of boiling it, and it's slow going. I think I might need to go ahead and boil it, but in my experience with fruit, that tends to make pectic haze. It might be different since I'll be using Angel leavening instead of EC-1118 yeast.

At the same time I put a half gallon of corn plus water in the Insta-Pot on the rice setting. The corn is still a bit al dente, but it's not like I'm going to be eating this right out of the pot.

My current plan is to fill two four-gallon buckets most of the way with cooked corn. I'll sprinkle Angel leavening in them as I fill them up, and once they're full, I'll keep them moist for a couple days until the leavening produces enough liquid to keep the corn wet. I used this technique on my rice wine, and it worked well.

Instead of doing a one-week primary fermentation and then moving them to secondary, I'll probably just set both buckets aside for a month or two and then rack them into secondary. I know that's not normally the process with rice wine, but I'm doing what has worked for me in the past.

I'm also considering putting a couple gallons of bananas in with the corn to help sweeten the flavor. Partly because I have plenty of frozen bananas, but also because I think the two tastes will complement each other.

 

[huckdavidson]

The angel leaven instructions should give a good general direction, seems you're on the right track.

https://en.angelyeast.com/products/distilled-spirits-and-biofuels/angel-leaven-yellow-label.html

 

[waynetempro]

Erik, Please be careful with that cracked corn. If the bag says "not for human consumption", then leave it be. Those have a small amount of mycotoxins that are allowable for deer and cattle but are at a level that are poisonous to humans.

 

[Erik the Awful]

There are no "not for human consumption" warnings anywhere on the bags. I did look for that before I bought.

I've been spritzing the top of the corn with water morning and evening, and I have a nice, thin layer of white mold on top of the corn each time. The liquid level is now just about flush with the top of the corn. The corn hasn't softened, and the stuff on top has lost its al dente and gone back to "slightly softer than a rock". Reading the Angel Yeast instructions above, I really needed cracked corn, or I needed to mill it, or I needed to cook it for a several hours.

I currently have it in two 4 gallon buckets with the tops covered by paper towel - I have the plastic tops cut out to hold the paper towel flush. Some time in the next week I'll put solid plastic lids on and move the buckets to the garage for at least two months to let the leavening work.

 

[DuncB]

This would have been right up the alley of one our recently deceased members @bracconiere

I've got nothing to offer you re your plan, but distilling videos using sour mash corn might give you some clues.

 

[passedpawn]

Erik, Please be careful with that cracked corn. If the bag says "not for human consumption", then leave it be. Those have a small amount of mycotoxins that are allowable for deer and cattle but are at a level that are poisonous to humans.

Pfft. Jimmy cracked corn, and he don't care.

 

[Erik the Awful]

I've got nothing to offer you re your plan, but distilling videos using sour mash corn might give you some clues.

My biggest note right now is that next time I'll use a large pot and simmer batches of corn on the stove for a couple hours at a time.

The buckets are in the garage. Time will tell if it works.

 

[skunkape]

Corn and banana wine. Hmm. Hope this works out to something amazing cause it kinda sounds like something convicted felons would dip out of a toilet with a tin cup. I’m guessing this will need distilling eventually to become more than an experiment. I salute your adventurous spirit.

 

[Erik the Awful]

Most of my wines are combinations that most people don't think of - usually because my freezer space is limited and I never have enough of one fruit to make a whole batch. Cherry-jalapeno is my most popular, so I make it every year now. My potato-mint was far better than expected. I recently made a wine from old jam that turned out very nice. Don't hesitate to try something new.

 

[skunkape]

Most of my wines are combinations that most people don't think of - usually because my freezer space is limited and I never have enough of one fruit to make a whole batch. Cherry-jalapeno is my most popular, so I make it every year now. My potato-mint was far better than expected. I recently made a wine from old jam that turned out very nice. Don't hesitate to try something new.

Cherry/Jalapeno sounds interesting. Potato/Mint I'm not so sure. I've done just enough experimentation to know that the flavors you associate with certain ingredients don't manifest the same way - if at all - in a finished wine. Watermelon and persimmon come to mind. Never made dandelion but that always tastes like oranges me - or whatever other fruit is added besides the dandelion petals.

My dad was not scared. He brewed wine with oak leaves. Onions. Tomatoes. They all came out tasting like paint thinner to me. Then he would back sweeten them or make them again with more sugar than the yeast could handle and they'd taste like sweet paint thinner.

Potato vodka is pretty good. Wicked hangovers though.

 

[Erik the Awful]

I opened my buckets yesterday to check. One had turned gray and smelled foul. The other had severe flowers-of-wine going on. The corn was still very stiff and there was more solid corn than liquid. Both buckets went into the trash.

I still have about a third of a bag of corn left, so sometime soon I'm going to try again, but this time I'm going to cook the corn all day before putting it into primary.

 

[waynetempro]

Eric, what else did you have in there besides corn, water and yeast?

 

[Erik the Awful]

Bananas, simply because I needed room in the freezer.

 

[waynetempro]

Bananas, simply because I needed room in the freezer.

OK Erik, I think that I figured out where you went wrong. Corn needs to be crushed and cooked. But it then needs to be cooled to about 150 F and then mashed with some 2-row or 6-row malted barley. The amamyse enzyme in the barley will convert the starch in the corn to simple sugars that can them be fermented. Adding bananas is OK too but they need to be cooked as well to kill any microbes on them. Instead of the malted barley, you can use some amalyse enzyme to convert the corn starch to sugar. The mashing process usually takes about an hour. But with cracked corn, the efficiency will be lower than using ground corn or grits.

 

[Erik the Awful]

Yeah, I have whole corn, which is even less efficient than cracked corn. This next attempt I'm going to put the corn in a crock pot all day, and then I'm going to blend it. I'm thinking that with the leavening amalyse enzyme won't be necessary. That's the whole purpose of this experiment, to use up some of the large number of Angel Leavening packets that I have.