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Grain to Water Ratios


DenverDistiller

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Is there any resource you all have access to that discusses the optimum grain to water ratios when creating the mash? I've seen lots of 'rules of thumb,' such as 1.5 lbs of grain to gallon of water, and some much higher than that. But it seems like because the amount of sugars available from say corn vs barley are different, we would have a different 'rule of thumb', for each grain...

Secondarily if my grain bill is 70% corn, 23% rye, 7% barley and I'm doing 100 gallon runs, how much total weight of grain is needed?

Thanks as always...

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  • 2 years later...
  • 1 year later...

We are just re-assessing this, as recently we've had stalled fermentations and I'm pretty sure it's our gravities being too high and the yeast not coping (making 100% rye and 100% wheat whiskies).

With our rye mashes we are at roughly 2:1 litres of water to kg grain, and that has always been fine. Recently increased our wheat grist bill to hit 1.5:1 to fit more in our kettle, and the resulting mash hits 12% ABV if it ferments fully. Problem is it isn't fully attenuating.

Processing of very thick mashes doesn't seem to be a problem with enzymes and enough agitation. And there's obvious process benefits to high gravity mashing and stripping (I can't say anything about flavour). But you need to increase the amount of yeast you use exponentially, which gets expensive.

As for how much weight, all grains are different but roughly you'll get .325-0.350 litres of alcohol per kg of grain (this is the grain spec called litre degrees/kg you might see). So a 1000kg grist would yield 325 litres of 100% ethanol. Sorry, no idea what that is in Proof Gallons or Imperial measurements. As suggested, you can use a calculator to work it out.

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