Tag Archives: Malting

Belize, Fermentation, Saving Money

Brewing Preparation Day.

Gnome.Pushing.Up.GlassesI would continue on the theme of brewing maize beer today:  As I mentioned before, home-brew shops, barley and hops are unavailable here so, I have had to go about things a bit differently.  One of my previous posts was about malting corn (maize); having done this and having kilned some of it into the maize equivalent of Chocolate, Crystal and Munich malt, I am ready to proceed to the next step…getting everything ready physically and psychologically (I have never done whole grain brewing using firstly, my own malted grains and secondly, those grains being maize and thirdly, replacing hops with a different bittering agent).

So here are my kilned malts, Chocolate, Crystal and Munich…

Chocolate, Crystal and Munich Maize Malt.
Chocolate, Crystal and Munich Maize Malt.

Maize has a higher gelatinization temperature compared to barley which means some playing around with temperature is going to be necessary in order to make the starch do what it is supposed to and at the same time not denature the necessary enzymes prematurely before conversion has taken place.  The other issue is that maize does not have a hull and I am going to use rice hulls from the rice mill during sparging.  Since I am doing this, I decided to grind the maize malt very finely…

Malts Before Grinding.
Malts Before Grinding.
Malted Maize After Grinding.
Malted Maize After Grinding.

Doing this by hand took a ridiculously long time and that is why I have needed a whole day just for preparation!  The rice hulls also needed a lot of cleaning since “getting rice hulls from the rice mill” does not mean buying a packet from them, it means going out the back with a sack where the mountain waste pile is out in the open and finding the freshest hulls next to outlet.  It further means soaking them, bleaching them, drying them, sieving the sand, bugs and crap out of them…it took about two weeks of work…

Lautering Tun with Rice Hulls.
Lautering Tun with Rice Hulls.

In terms of hops, I have decided to go with Jackass Bitters.  I was thinking of Serosi or Bitter Gourd but Jackass Bitters won out simply because to be able to say, “I made beer with Jackass Bitters!” sounds way cooler than “I made beer with Bitter Gourd,” I’m sure everybody would agree.  I decided to extract some Jackass Bitters into a tincture just to be able to standardize the bitterness; again, I’ve never done this before and I have to start somewhere in order to get some sort of reproducibility for future batches.

Ground Jackass Bitters.
Ground Jackass Bitters.

Okay, all the ingredients have been prepared and everything is getting sanitized today, let’s see if tomorrow is a nice day for the actual brewing…

Catch you later!!

Belize, Fermentation, Saving Money

Let’s Make Some Maize Beer…Part I, Malting.

Gnome.SmilingLike most foreigners that have come to Belize, we wasted a lot of money buying (really crappy, cheap, screw-top wine priced like fine, premium) wine in an attempt to have a taste of home and feel sophisticated.   In addition to the price, the heat and humidity, the higher alcohol content of wine was sure to make us uncomfortable for the whole night, the fuzziness continuing to the next day and making work difficult.  Now, after having lived here a while and given up all pretense at being sophisticated, we just want some good, honest-to-God, alcohol that doesn’t burn a hole in our pocket or our stomachs.

Having had some experience while at University with brewing, the obvious answer is to brew some beer.  How to do this, though?  There is no friendly brew-shop down the road to get all the essential ingredients…no barley, no hops, no nothing!

Well, we do have plenty of maize, grown by the bushel by our friendly Mayan neighbours (I’ve tried growing corn and I just haven’t managed yet…go figure!), GMO free and cheap.  What do you do with it, though?

The first step is this…

Sprouting Maize for Malting.
Sprouting Maize for Malting.

After the maize has sprouted it needs to be dried before it can be turned into the different types of malt we are all familiar with…like, pale malt, chocolate malt, Munich malt, crystal malt, etc.  Here it is dried…

Dried Malted Maize.
Dried Malted Maize.

And this is the basis for my maize, gluten-free beer.

For a more detailed discussion on the malting process have a look in our Bored-in-Belize section for Malting Maize.

Tune in next time for Part II, Brewing with Maize.