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Method of Preparing Malt Wash for Distillation to Obtain Spirit

A fermented malt wash made with malt, flour, water, and yeast for distillation.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Malt and flour work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 260 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Method of Preparing Malt Wash for Distillation to Obtain Spirit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the malt and flour in a large bowl.

  2. Stir in 2 gallons of cold water.

  3. Pour in 5 gallons of boiling water and stir briskly.

  4. After 2 hours, stir the mixture again.

Ferment

  1. When the mixture cools, add the yeast and cover loosely.

  2. Let it stand in a warm place to ferment.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Malt + flourtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Malt
Provides the starches and enzymes that convert into fermentable sugars.
Yeast
Consumes the sugars and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Common flour
Adds additional starch that contributes to the sugars available for fermentation.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast only after the mixture cools. Yeast is killed or stressed by very hot liquid, so it must be added once the wash has cooled enough for the cells to survive and begin fermenting.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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