Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

I was in doing a couple of things in the shed and I got a whiff of rum fermenting, however my current wash has finished and is waiting to be distilled. I found the smell coming from my molasses drum. It is a 25L drum and has about 7L in it at the moment, I opend the lid to find this...



The molasses is definitely fementing, weather it is from some wild yeast or the bacteria I dont know but regardless it smells bloody awesome. However I am undecided, should I boil the molasses to kill the bacteria before I add it to the wash or should I allow the bacteria go generate some extra flavour and let the yeast/alcohol kill the bacteria.

On a side note I have used aged dunder that had a bit of bacteria growth and it did not cause any problems with the wash.

What about just using it as is , add some sugar and get a wash going. Let the yeast you have found go to town on it and see what happens.

Totally with SBB on this ...Let it rip in the bucket its in .

Personally I would however add about 2-3 times the amount of water to whats in it so it will fully ferment out. Since you have 7 liters of molasses in a 25 liter Drum I'd just top up to near full.....otherwise I seriously doubt that the yeast will have a shit show of completing the job

I wouldn't add any extra sugar .I've been doing some straight molasses with no added sugar lately and I think its better than the stuff I used to make with sugar .

I have a jaded memory that some famous Aussie distilleries got their yeast from wild sources so you might want to save that yeast cake ,you might be onto a winning flavour

Dominator wrote:On a side note I have used aged dunder that had a bit of bacteria growth and it did not cause any problems with the wash.

Those moulds look just like what I get in my dunder buckets the large brown ones and the white thin ones :think:

:text-+1: to what Yummy said.

Some of the best known flavours in the world today, came from wild yeasts.

I'm keen to give some corn wild yeast a run for a bourbon :D

Sounds pretty unanimous, I will transfer it to a fermenter (easier to monitor) and add some water/dunder from my dunder pit and see what I get.

The wild yeast must be in the storage container of the feed store I get my molasses from. I usualy get it in 3L milk containers and I have to leave the lids cracked or they explode. :scared-eek:

Ive had one lot do the same thing, they said it was fermenting in the tankers when it was being delivered. Some sort of stuff up at the Mill i was told.

If you were to boil it to kill bacteria the alcohol that was made would be gone and you would lost the sugar the yeast ate. Camden tablets would be only thing to kill yeast with. I do agree with others water and let it rip.

Well I added 5L of dunder and then topped it up with water to 25L but there is no action. I will give it untill the morning and if it still not moving I think I will pitch some bakers yeast.

How'd you go with this Dom? Any action out of it? And have you run it?

It is fermenting but very slowly. I am going to let it run on the wild yeast for a couple of weeks, then I think I might chuck some bakers yeast in to finish it off.

Around christmas time, cant remember what date, this wash got itself going. Not a vigirous ferment by any means however I was getting a bubble through the airlock every 2-3 seconds. It carried on like this for about a week then it started to slow down. I ran the wash today, it had definitely stopped fermenting and had quite a big yeast cake in the bottom.



The results are quite dissapoing though. I am guessing it did not ferment all the sugars as the yeild is nothing short of shithouse. It ran at about 92-93% however I only got just over 750ml before the bottom plate dried up and I hit tails. Stripped the rest and only got another 750ml or so. I think I may get 250ml of hearts at 92% if I am lucky. It does smell good though, quite different to my usual rum.

I have put on a second gen and will see what happens. If it does ferment I will wait for it to stop, then I will rack it to a secondary fermenter and pitch some bakers yeast to finish it off, that way I can try amd reuse the wild yeast.

Thanks for sharing Dom....shame about tje shithoise yield....I take it you didn't add the bakers yeast then.

It will be intersting to see if you can start another batch of tje yeast cak.

Appreciate you sacraficing a fermenter for th team ...thanks Dom ...keep up the reports

Yeah I didnt add bakers yeast, I was worried it would kill my wild yeast. Hopefully it will take off again. If it does I might do some research into harvesting/storing the yeast.

Dominator wrote: It does smell good though, quite different to my usual rum.

Thanks for reporting back on that Dom, sounds promising in the taste department, but not so good in the yield department. Im wondering if you kept doing very small ferments (even a liter or two at a time) using that yeast it might after a while start to evolve into something that might become more capable of fermenting all the sugars and coping better with the alcohol in the wash. Just a thought.

Just to be unnecessarily anal, that's not yeast on the top, definitely mold / bacteria of some form. There's likely yeast in there too though. You get some great funky / sour flavours with spontaneous ferments in beer worts. You also get some effing awfull ones depending on what's actually taken hold. Might be worth kicking in some yeast as well to ensure it ferments out fully. The bacteria eat different forms of sugar that yeast don't so definitely worth the experiment.