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Single Malt Scotch Whisky
Now that I have used bourbon barrells, I am thinking of doing a Scotch style single malt. Can anyone offer some advise on the best types of malt to use? I was planning to do about 10LB of Malted Barley ground into a flour and 6 gallons of water. Will I need to buy peated? What brands/types of barley work best?
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7 Replies
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Personally, I wouldn’t do ‘flour’ fine, won’t be able to get it out for cooking unless you like cooking glop. And peated is for smoky ‘scotch’ not the highland malt variety.
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— Scotch style single malt–
I am pretty sure there are no Scottish distilleries making “single malt” by grinding the grain to flour.
Typically the grain is crushed, leaving a lot of the grain as 1/4 chunks and the husk in as large a piece as possible.
After mashing, the clear sugary wort is drained off through a lauter bottom before yeast is added.
Unless you have some very fancy filtering system you won’t get a clear wort if you fine grind.
From reading this forum, I believe most (but not all) who do a fine grind will ferment on the grain, then distill with the grain as well.
Fine grinding will probably make nice whisky, but I doubt it will taste much like a Scotch single malt, except with reused barrels you won’t get that big hit of new wood that is typical of many American whiskies.
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Typically the grain is crushed, leaving a lot of the grain as 1/4 chunks and the husk in as large a piece as possible.
After mashing, the clear sugary wort is drained off through a lauter bottom before yeast is added.
Unless you have some very fancy filtering system you won’t get a clear wort if you fine grind.
That sounds most reasonable.
In the absense of leaf hops, the larger grain husks form the filter bed in the lauter process to hold back the actual grain chunks.
Remember when scotch was made in the old days it took a lot of manpower to make flour instead of just cracking the grains. They aren’t about to change from what the old timers did over there. One large/old distillery even took laser measurements of the dents from years of use on an old still they were removing and made exact duplicate dents in the new one, thinking the dents make a profile difference.
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I would like to ask a question regarding single malt. If I will be using single malt barley to make whiskey. But I add alpha and beta enzymes . Is this consider single malt or not?
thank you
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You wont need enzymes to make a single malt product. Just mash in the high 140s for 75 mins or so and lauter. Yeast strain selection is important. Most (all?) of the SMS producers use Mauri and/or Quest (or at least that’s what they say). Scots will distill hot — upper 80s low 90s.
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Thank you very much
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I would like to ask a question regarding single malt. If I will be using single malt barley to make whiskey. But I add alpha and beta enzymes . Is this consider single malt or not?
thank you
To explain ebstauffer’s reply for those who are new to brewing and distilling
Un-malted grain, including barley, contains starch that needs to be converted to sugar before it will ferment to alcohol.
Laboratory manufactured enzymes can be added to grain to convert the starch to sugars.
If grains have been malted, ie soaked in water and allowed to sprout, they produce their own enzymes. With good malting there will be much more than enough enzymes to self convert all the starch.
Single malt Scotch whisky made in Scotland must be made from 100% malted barley whereas traditional Irish whisky is made with some Un-malted barley in the mash. Extra enzymes are not normally used as there are surplus enzymes in the malted proportion of the mash.
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