Chasing Jack Black

[ChasingJack]

hmm....learnt outcome? My notes so far..

Chasing Jack Black
August 2019

200g Roasted Barley
200g Crystal (Crushed)
200g Wheat
200g Caramalt
1kg Mangrove Jack dark malt powder
750g Australian 5 Grains porridge
5kg sliced corn (stock feed)

Basically all the 200g portions were an attempt to rescue the mash from my ignorance. I had originally assumed that the Mangrove Jack dark "malt' powder had sufficient diastatic power to extract the sugars from the corn. So i boiled up the corn and porridge to soften it up, while stirring continuously so nothing burnt - yes, that was really hard work and hurt my shoulders heaps!. Cooled the mix to about 65c and added the "malt". Except that it turns out that any malt 'extract' product (read the label carefully!) Has exactly ZERO diastatic power. Amazingly I measured a gravity of 1020 the next day so assumed that at least some sugars had made it through. At the time I had exactly 10 dollars to my name so bolted down to the local homebrew store and had a lovely chat with the lady there. I explained, as best I could in my ignorance of nearly all things, the situation and asked if she had any suggestions. We ended up 'phoning a friend' and explaining the situation again. It became evident that this was a house of beer with little experience in AG whiskys. Pooling our combined ignorance we decided to throw the 4 x 200g products into the mix in an attempt to chase some more points.

Having made another 65c soup i added the 4 newbies stirred like a machine for about 30 minutes then let it cool overnight before adding it back to the fermenter. This time it measured 1062 - success! I thought. Except that, according to forum gurus, the added ingredients also had little to no diastatic value and the sugars i was reading in the gravity were most likely unfermentable!! Cue really sad face!!

I had too much invested so I just pitched my yeast and walked away for a week. When next I took a reading it was 1010 so I was again encouraged. It never got any lower so I ran it through the still. Nothing came out much above 40% abv and to be honest was not particularly pleasant. Not bad on the nose but not much fun in the mouth. I stripped the lot and put half into my feints jar for later and half into a spirit run of the 2nd gen of a UJSSM - which was lovely! :-)

I was not ready to give up on CJB just yet so I dissolved 4.5kg of sugar in about 4 litres of backset, let it cool and added it to the fermenter on top of the original grains then topped up the water to around 25 litres and let it go for a week.

The outcome? “Burnt” is the foremost impression - far too many dark corners for a single product. When combined with a 3rd gen UJSSM and a first gen ‘tur-boat’ (750g australian 5 grain porridge, 4.5kg sugar and a ‘cough’ turbo yeast into 25 odd litres water) it added the kind of loch ness depth I had originally hoped for :-).

I have more wash (and generations) to come so will try to keep you updated on the outcome.

[tipsy]

200g Roasted Barley

The outcome? “Burnt” is the foremost impression

200g of roast barley would probably be the culprit there..


As you said, the only thing you had in there with much diastic power was 200g of wheat...you'd probably want to up that to 4kg or more for a 22lt mash.