Corn Mash For HERMS

This was an experiment to see if I could do a Corn Mash on a HERMS system. I could not find much information on this, but what I did find seemed to indicate that the Mash would likely stick due to the flaked Corn gelling during the first part of the mash.

What I did was add 2 pound of Rice hulls to the flaked corn and add these at 170 degrees. I kept this going for about 30 minutes and then turned off the heating element and let the mash cool to 148 degrees. I then added the 6 pounds of malted barley and kept this at about 145 to 147 for the next 90 minutes.

It was difficult to keep the original corn and rice hulls stirred up and flowing. I had to almost continually stir. However, I stopped stirring from time to time to see what would happen. It basically came to a trickle in about 2 minutes, but I was always able to get the flow going again. It was MUCH easier to keep the flow going after adding the malted barley. I also raised the temperature to 180 in my boil kettle and did a whirlpool to both pasteurize the beer and make it cleaner for the fermenter. The wort was very clean when I put it in.

Once I was done I had an OG of 1.049 with 15 gallons of wort. I added Distillers Active Dry Yeast. My yeast was very well vacuum packed, but old (probably 2 or 3 years old). I tested it first using teaspoon of sugar in 1/2 cup of warm water and the yeast seemed very healthy. I pitched about 60 grams in the 15 gallons and it is fermenting extremely well.