I recently bought a small moonshine still and am trying to learn. My question is simple: Does malt syrup have the enzymes needed to convert the starches in rye and corn to sugar? Thanks!
No it does not. You need to do a real mash if you want enzymes. Mashing is not very difficult. Warm up your malts to 150 F for an hour, drain, sparge, and roll.
You can buy distillers malt and use 25-50% of that in a mash. Or you can buy amylase for this purpose. You’ll need to cereal mash the unmalted grain to gelatinize the starch so it can be attacked by the amylase and converted to sugar.
You’ll need to crush/crack the malt and the unmalted grain. You can buy cracked corn at a farm store, it has a lot of cob in it but works OK. A lot of people use a sugar wash with some of this cracked corn for flavor, its kind of a simulation of corn liquor but it works and sugar is as cheap or cheaper than the corn.
Hopefully you’ve found the homedistiller/org site, if not then you want to read up on things there. Lots of good info.
