Dan,
The mash is the process where you run those enzymes as hard as you can by heating the mixture of grains up to around 150 F and keeping it there for an hour or so. You then sparge, which involves pouring hot water through the grain to wash the sugars out.
What you are talking about is malting, which can be done with corn, although modern barley has much more enzymes in it; enough to, for example, saccharify the corn starches as well as the barley starches in an 80% corn / 20 % malted barley mix. The enzymes formed by malting are supposed to be used by the seedling plant to slowly grow using the starches stored in the grain. By heating them up you force them to break it all down right now, instead of in the regulated way that the plant requires to grow correctly over a week or so.
If you have a yeast strain that generates its own amylase, then you get to skip this step, although there are some problems of scale: you might put ten pounds of grain into a five gallon brew, it will be hard to get more than a few ounces of yeast cells. Even if you succeed in generating a few pounds of yeast, that might throw the flavor off pretty hard.
On the other hand, one thing that is nice about an experimental yeast strain that creates its own amylase is that you have a built in selection protocol: if the yeast doesn't break down the starch, it doesn't eat. You won't have to fool around w antibiotics, which is good if you want to drink it.
On Thursday, March 21, 2013 3:05:54 PM UTC-5, Dan wrote:
On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 3:57 PM, Ben Hunt <ben.g...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeast can't do it, that is correct, you have to malt and mash some amount of
> barley or else add enzymes to break down corn. There are fungi that are
> happy to break down starches though, like koji (Aspergillus oryzae) which is
> used in making sake, and has had a genome out since 2005.
So when you say "bourbon without a mash, barley or enzymes" - is the
mash a process where you partially sprout and then roast the corn?
-Dan
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