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Welcome to Part 2 distillers! Share us with your friends. Enjoy reading and I hope you can learn more. 

The most expensive investment today was the set of three colanders that I got from Walmart. cost me 24 bucks. But then again, it’s all worth it. Now what I did was, I took a tape measure and I measured across the top of the pot its 270 millimeters, 27 centimeters arm or a good 1010 in five, eight inches. Take color is just a little bit wider. It's 11 in five-eighths. Give or take a little bit, 30 centimeters, and the knees come, I've got small, medium, and large and the largest one in here and this is just from side to side, in the end, is all just a tad over 11 inches. Just to tell what about an eighth 11 and an eighth inch or 20 quarter centimeters.

Now, this will fit here and it lays there well or it falls in. Once you remove the handles and straighten out the edges and then cut it, it fits perfectly so that nothing goes over the side. This just keeps the greens separating all the way down. In order to do that with this one, I'll have to do a couple of different things. One of them I take these handles off if you just kind of work them back and forth. They’re just like tack welded their seat and they pop right off.

Now, let me get this one-off. I'll go through with a pair of pliers and needle-nose and I'll bend that fold that out because this has just been rolled over. And to make this lip the smooth round lip up adult needed to be smooth around, it just needed to be round. So I'll clean that out. Now I know from experience from the other one that I cut that there's quite a bit of metal in here. So I can make this a little bit larger and I only have to go around about another half inch. So that'll be enough to slide down on top of that.

This without the knob will become the screen that will support my grain bed. It's a pretty good offset. So we're going to have three, we're going to have about a half-inch, a two-inch and a five-inch offset. To do our mash in it, we're going to go through the whole thing and go through the cooking the conversion, we're going to use rye, oats, flake corn, six-row barley, two-row barley, we're going to use all of it. We're just going to throw it all together. No, no. So we're gonna use all that stuff though because we want to make a rye whiskey next, and this I have to do another adaptation to it, Well, that took me just a little bit longer than I expected probably about 40 minutes or so. 

I use a hammer, a pair of offset needlenose pliers, a regular pair of pliers, and a screwdriver in the issue that I had was to get this thing to layout for it did finally, use that hammer with a small Anvil, just to beat it out to try to make it flat and it looked like a mess. But it'll work and that fits right down there you go inside, and that offsets on the bottom of my turbo 500 boiler. The last but not least, my $1 screen. I left I just bent the handle up. And I'll place that in there. And that will be my green bed. So looking inside, it looks like that.

Let me get these filled with water. And I try to keep these discussions as short as I can because I know that I've got your attention span based on my analytics for about eight or nine minutes. Let me get some water and get going, we've got a lot going on. I'm going to heat up at different times. What am I looking for 180 185 degrees. If you want to boil, I want to hydrolyze this and kind of just, get it super wet. And you do that with hot water. And at the same time, that's going to make one heck of a pile of like porridge. And that's quite alright, I'm just going to give this one a stir. Now remember, we talked about those rice holes, I have them I'm just gonna use them just because I got them. But I'm gonna go for about a half of them. 

The reason for that is it helps keep those things from sticking together so bad. We'll still be able to check our start content with iodine. It's about half a bag. I got four panels. Now remember we talked about apparently in a half per gallon so I'm looking at maybe I'll have a wind up with about six gallons of six pounds in here. I'm just trying to make the basis for a really good mash. You turn that back on. And let me let that cook up.

Now, if you were making a beer, this would give you a whole lot more mouthfeel and that kind of creaminess in your beer, but, of course we're not making beer but it's a really good base. If you are gentle, and you do the same thing and convert these starches to fermentable sugars, which we are also going to do now. We throw in some of these I'm not going to put quite as many in here. That should help keep that from clumping together and it's really nice and soupy.And last but not least, as soon as the center one gets heated up, we're gonna have another combination of grains and I'm gonna also use a little bit of flake corn. 

Now, there's a method to this madness of got rye oats that I'll have corn. In these together, the profile that I'm kind of looking for is heavier rye with some basic mouthfeel potential potentially from our oats, but this is going to be all green. At the very end, if there's an adjustment that has to take place, I've always got that option. I could throw in a couple of pounds of sugar to boost the ABV just a little bit, but what am I looking for? I'm looking for around 13%, let's not go nuts 1.090 that's my goal was my target almost in every one of these are my targets going to be 1.090 on my gravity scale. That works out to be some little over 12 less than third somewhere in that neighborhood.

Remember, the commercial standard, again is anywhere between nine and 11 they'd be 15,000 gallons are happy when they get nine to 11. And that's what they worked with. So why don't we do it that way? Again, process versus technique. So I've got about a pound and a half of corn, almost two pounds of corn. And I use that I'm only using that as a base so I can get some sugars out of it. And then I added two pounds of peated malt. Now I added it now. I'm going to 180 190 degrees. And I'm just going to get that really hydrolyzed and cooked in together and convert. It won't convert any starches.

I want to extract all that peated smoky flavor and mix it into that corn. And then when I drop that temperature in, I add the rest of my peated malt. So that's the only thing that will go in here is a corn unpeated malt. So I'll use four pounds. That's the remainder of this. And then on these two on the ends, I'll just use my six-row barley. Two pounds each. A little bit longer, we got to cook this up. This will take 20 to 30 minutes or so. And then we'll shut down and with that, let it cool off. This is the sparging. Now this one is plenty hot and it's really built itself at loadouts. That's just a big clump. And I've got some rice holes in there. So it really looks good. 

The temperatures, right, but see what's different and this is the turbo 500 kettle don't have a controller on it. And just for simplicity, I didn't put one on there. I just unplug it for now because it's hot enough. Now. One here, the center. I've got this one set at 80 degrees centigrade. What 82 degrees centigrade, it's 180 degrees. And I'll let that one run and of course this one's all my new wave.

This is just as simple as we're in that hot mash back in there. And I'll do this several times and then we'll start working my way down. And last but not least, this is our flake dry. Put a drop of iodine and you'll see how that drop right to the bottom and it's black. And now that we know that we have starch, this one is fairly impressive because even at that high temperature as now as it starts to cool down, some of that amylase has survived, But there was still a lot of sugar in there, too. 

Now, you have two types of amylase, you have alpha-amylase, and you have beta-amylase. And your alpha-amylase, again, is active at 155 degrees. And beta-amylase that's in there,, someone that does that found cutting off all those starch chains. How important is it? It's important if you got it, but which means you have grain but if you don't, use of alpha-amylase really does the trick. 

Now, what's the backup for that? The backup for that is glucoamylase now glucoamylase is a sort of like makeup for the beta, but it goes in at fermentation temperature, as opposed to with the alpha-amylase. Remember, alpha-amylase will stay active and worked extremely well at 155 degrees. So you got this window of like 145 to 161 65 155 is your happy medium and that's where you want to be for 90 minutes. Most of your conversion takes place in the first 30 minutes. But you allow it to sit there there's no sense in rushing the inevitable. 

Give it time, be patient, allow it to fully convert all your starches to fermentable sugars. And trust me, you'll be happy in the long run, I'm going to add my six-row barley and then my pita barley that's peated in a six-row and sexual going on there. They're all down to about 158. Anywhere between 158, there's one's 152. I'm gonna heat that one up just a little bit more. And then I'll let that sit for 90 minutes and we'll be back.