Chicha

[oldbloke]

Bought a bag of maize kernels today, local garden centre sells them as squirrel food. Have put 20oz to soak...
IF it sprouts AND I get the mash right, I'll be making a gallon of Chicha.
Probably going to flavour it with fennel (Herself's pick from the list of suggestions in The Alaskan Bootlegger's Bible)
Wish me luck!

[trucker5774]

Good luck...........(you expected that)

[killer]

Where did you find the dozen or so peruvian women to spit in the mashtun ?

[oldbloke]

Where did you find the dozen or so peruvian women to spit in the mashtun ?

No, this is the spitless version, I think the other stuff has a different name. I'm going to malt the maize...
If it fails to malt I might try some with amylase as a spit substitute

[oldbloke]

Where did you find the dozen or so peruvian women to spit in the mashtun ?

No, this is the spitless version, I think the other stuff has a different name. I'm going to malt the maize...
If it fails to malt I might try some with amylase as a spit substitute

Chicha de muko is the one with spit, chicha de jora is the one without

Leon Kania reckons a 4 day soak, after 5 days I had no sign of sprouting and it was generating gas and beginning to smell, so I was about to dump it when I found:
http://xb-70.com/beer/chicha/

So there may yet be hope!

[seymour]

Where did you find the dozen or so peruvian women to spit in the mashtun ?

I brewed chicha de jora once. I used some juice from sauerkraut which should be lacto bacteria very similar to spit. Another excellent method would be the Lactobacillus acidophilus liquid sitting on top of your yogurt, or even probiotic dietary supplements for that matter. Let it sour with this stuff at high temps for several days, then pitch a modern-day ale yeast to dry it out and make it at least somewhat palateable. I didn't use fennel, but boiled with pineapple rinds. The taste was definitely interesting, unlike anything I'd ever had, but my Peruvian friends said it was 100% authentic. They used it to slow-cook absolutely delicious lamb chops.

[oldbloke]

mmmm I thought the spit provided amylase, to do the starch conversion the same way it works when you malt.
Anyway, I'm getting very inconsistent sprouting, I suspect round about Tuesday I'll be binning this first lot.

[seymour]

mmmm I thought the spit provided amylase, to do the starch conversion the same way it works when you malt.
Anyway, I'm getting very inconsistent sprouting, I suspect round about Tuesday I'll be binning this first lot.

I don't know much about that. It's not like corn kernals normally need human spit to sprout. More likely, you just have stale seeds with low vitality, or perhaps they got root rot early in their germination process, or something like that. As far as conversion of starch to sugar, any primarily corn-based beverage like chicha is just going to be much less efficient than barley mashes we're used to. I'm sure a main reason Peruvian tribal women kept it boiling for a day or more was to breakdown those long proteins and carbohydrates, etc.

[oldbloke]

No they don't need spit to sprout, the spit provides the enzyme that sprouting would have: they don't sprout the spitted version.
The seeds may well be stale (sold as squirrel food!), but I haven't helped matters by soaking them too long - some are surely on the edge of rotting.

[oldbloke]

Dumped them into the compost today - 10% germination (and that's optimistic)
Will try again next week with a shorter soak.

[Eadweard]

Too long a steep can drown the grains. When malting barley they alternate steeps with air rests.

[seymour]

Another way I've heard of is to soak the grain in a big plastic bucket with dechlorinated water and an aquarium pump for aeration.

[Nofolkandchance]

FFS man. Why? Have you drank this before and did it float your boat?

[seymour]

Have you drank this before and did it float your boat?

I don't know about other brewers, but for me the answers are no and no, but I don't regret the exercise. I had talked about chicha de jora with Peruvian friends, read anthropological and archeological articles about it, seen it in movies like Medicine Man, etc, and so I wondered what it was like to brew, wondered what it would taste like. Answers: extremely tedious and terrible. I've had similar experiences with dark ages gruit, Finnish sahti, Viking wormwood honey wine, Welsh braggot, Prohibition-era Choctaw beer, etc. Learned a lot, made some rich memories, but the resulting beverages were generally rough on the palate. I got into homebrewing as a connection to the past, a way to recreate interesting drinks which were, in most cases creative experessions and everyday staples of cultures which are long-gone or at least much changed. I even go so far as to order obscure seeds from other countries, grow the plants in my garden in order to brew particular recipes.

But, as I think you're insinuating, there are obvious reasons almost every society throughout history when given the taste choice, switched to crisp, clean ales and lagers. They're cheaper, easier, yummier, and nowadays more available.

However, some more interesting reasons are less obvious: the old ingredients were associated with witchcraft, modern-day ingredients were grown/regulated/taxed by the church, purity-laws outlawed experimentation, prohibition laws drove diversity out of the market, restrictive distribution agreements prevent healthy competition, mindless advertising dumbs-down the consumers....I digress. Those are the stories I get into.

[oldbloke]

FFS man. Why? Have you drank this before and did it float your boat?

My wife's coeliac - can't have anything based on barley (or wheat or rye or oats...)
She misses it, so I occasionally try something a bit experimental but ale-like, to make a change from all the TurboCider I make her.

Millet works surprisingly well. The Africans who've been making beer with it for centuries just need to get over this let-it-sour-via-lactic-and-drink-it-very-young thing they have going on. It's much nicer done the way we treat barley.

Maize should work - the Incas weren't daft, and nor are the zillions of SAmericans who make chicha now, but they too have this young&sour thing going on. I think it's something to do with the initial fermentation being easy but decent conditioning needing a bit more technique and equipment and protection form oxygen. I messed up the malting this time, and it won't taste as much like a barley-based beer as millet does, I'm sure: but I want to know.

We have a sorghum-based kit lager conditioning, should be reasonable from the taste I got when bottling.

Eventually, just for laffs, I intend to work my way through as many legumes as I can get to sprout.
Chickpeas. Peas! Broad beans! Red kidney beans!