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chicha (corn beer)

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This summer past, I grew a crop of purple maize from a dried cob an argentinian friend gave me.

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This type of corn is not sweet at all and very hard, so cannot be readily prepared for eating through steaming or even boiling. Reading up on the traditional use of purple maize, it seems in peru at least it was mainly used to make a type of unfermented chicha that was sweetened with pineapple.

This seems nice, but I would like to try and make a fermented corn beer similar to chicha de jora, that would normally use yellow or white corn. Does anyone know if the starch in purple corn can be converted to sugars using either the traditional (chewing in the mouth) or modern (mashing) techniques?

I have soaked, sprouted and dried about 2kg of the kernels. I also have some malted barley and ale yeast, and was thinking about combing the corn and barley malt in a 1:1 ratio, and fermenting using a standard all grain procedure. Alternatively I could chew the 2kg of kernels (sounds like fun for a lazy sunday) and use something like sauerkraut juice for yeast, to make a more authentic chicha.

Any ideas or tips? cheers!

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I'm not sure how much of this would work for corn as well, but some time ago I was looking into using koji or ragi-tapai type yeasts (sourceable from Aussie homebrew suppliers & Asian grocers) for making a millet beer. These yeasts include Aspergillus for breaking starches to sugars, plus classic saccharomyces for fermenting those sugars to alcohol. Another tip I learned is that raw sweet potato contains amylases - though for chicha this might be unnecessary as the grain has already been malted, I dunno - but if you feel it's still too starchy after processing, these might be some options. And you could always try a simple iodine test to check the starch conversion.

Sauerkraut juice might be a handy source of some of those tasty lactic-type bacteria - I would definitely want those. Cool project man, good luck! Can't wait to see the colour of your brew!

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I dont know the fermentable content of the purple corn but if it was me just experimenting,. I would mash the corn then add an alpha amylase enzyme to break down the fermentables that you missed in the mash and then ferment on the grain with the barley.

Edit - I missed you already malted the corn so you wont need to use extra enzyme combined with the barley

Edited by shroomau5

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Yeah I think some extra amalyze may be required. So I could cook up some sweet potato and add some of the water to the mash? Saliva contains amalyze as well, hence the tradition of chewing and spitting out the corn I guess. Might do a bit of both.

Yeast is the other thing I need to think about - a regular ale yeast might not work so well with corn, or at least won't make a very authentic chicha. I'll chase up some koji or similar - helping convert starch to sugar is probably what the South American wild yeasts did.

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maybe its worth doing a mini mash on say a handful of your sprouted corn, give it a taste and see how sweet it is, or measure its gravity..conventional corn is not exactly an unusual ingredient in beer.

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I think if you're using sweet potato you want to add it to the mash raw (maybe grated), give it some time to work at low temps (so as not to denature the enzymes), then heat to sterilise (& denature the enzymes) before adding your yeasts. There's some discussion of its use around on homebrew forums - so you should be able to find info about specific temps plus discussion of any issues they encountered. But yeah I'd want to do a test batch first. If you wanted to try using ragi-tape yeasts I can see if my local market still sells it - it's meant for rice, but then so is koji.

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