2021 Batch 5 - Rice Wine 5.0

I'm doing yet another batch of Rice Wine since I still have plenty of rice and Angel Yeast on hand. I had some issues with the last batch that I want to be sure I've sorted out.

Ingredients

15 pounds of Kroger-brand long-grain White Rice
40 grams of yellow-label Angel Yeast
1/2 tsp. Gypsum
1/2 tsp. yeast nutrient (Fermaid O)
3 gallons of RO water, heated to 177F
Additional RO water to get to 5 gallons of fermenter volume

As with previous batches, the process for this one is:

Heat 3 gallons of RO water to 177F
Place 15 pounds of rice in a sanitized fermenter
Pour the heated water over the rice and let it sit for at least one hour (I did overnight)
Add cold water to the 5-5.5 gallon mark in the fermenter
When the temp is 90F, add the Angel yeast and stir well
Clean and sanitize your stirrer, you'll need it later
Seal the fermenter and hold temp at 90F

For days 1-3, stir the contents of the fermenter twice daily with the cleaned and sanitized spoon. After day 3, leave the fermenter alone and allow the yeast mix to do its job.

You may smell some funky and unpleasant aromas from the fermenter. Unless you're seeing mold or something growing on top of the fermenter contents, this should all be normal.

After 7-14 days, you should notice the unpleasant aromas are nearly gone and a Saison-ish funk remains. If you're not seeing bubbling in the liquid or other signs of fermentation, or you've had three or more days of completely unchanging readings from your hydrometer, it should be finished.

Post-Brew Notes and Observations

04/03/2021: Sanitized the fermenter, added the rice, and the hot water. Left it alone until almost 5pm on April 4, by which time the temp had dropped to around 73F. Stirred in the Angel Yeast and set up temperature control to hold the fermenter at 90F for the rest of fermentation.

04/04/2021 ~5pm: Temp is reading 74F and gravity is reading 1.009 SG. BTW, it's not at all unusual for the gravity in these batches using Angel Yeast to start out and remain low. The enzymes in the yeast mix tend to break down the starches in the rice into sugars at about the same speed that the yeast consumes them, so we generally only see some slight fluctuations in gravity during the fermentation process. This makes it a bit challenging to know when fermentation has finished, though if you use something like the Tilt Hydrometer to measure it, you'll see the gravity almost completely stop fluctuating at the time the fermentation is over. It will tend to just land on a value under 1.000 SG and stay there for 3-4 days.

04/04/2021 8:54pm: Gravity is reading 1.011 SG and temp is up to 88F.

04/05/2021: Gravity reading was 1.003 in the morning, and temp was 90F. This drop in gravity from last night suggests that the Angel Yeast is doing its job and has begun converting and fermenting the rice.

04/06/2021: Gravity is reading erratically on the Tilt today, randomly showing 0.999 SG through 1.007 SG depending on the moment you look at the data. However, in Brewfather, the general trend of gravity is downward - as I would expect to see from an Angel Yeast ferment.

04/07/2021: Gravity is reading 1.004-1.010 SG today, but as it fluctuates it looks as though it's still headed downward. Temp is holding at 89F.

04/11/2021: Gravity is now reading 1.023 SG, and has gone up periodically since its low point of 1.006 on Wednesday. I don't quite know what to make of that. I may need to toss another batch. I stirred the contents of the fermenter well and since the gravity seemed remarkably high, tried pitching some champagne yeast to see if that would scavenge any remaining sugar.

04/12/2021: Gravity continues to read 1.023 SG.

Yellow Label Angel Yeast vs. Typical Brewing Yeast

I currently have my second batch of rice wine fermenting with the "magical" yellow-label Angel Yeast from China, and wanted to share some of the more unusual aspects of using it. If you've never seen or used this yeast, I suspect you're not alone. It ships in a 500 gram package that looks like this: What makes it "yellow label" is that yellow box you see in the upper left corner of the package. This implies that it's yeast for distilling (though you do not need to have a still or distill the output to use it). As I understand it, inside the package is a mix of yeast and other materials which will convert starch into sugar and directly ferment it, without the need for a traditional mash step. This can radically shorten your brewing time. For my most-recent batch of rice wine, I heated 3 gallons of water to 155F, poured it over 13+ pounds of uncooked rice straight out of the bag, let that soak for an hour, rehydrated some of this yeast in warm water,

2021 Batch 1 - Rice Wine made with Yellow Label Angel Yeast

I've become a big fan of the Still It channel on YouTube. About a month ago, Jesse posted a video about how he made rice wine using nothing more than water, rice, and a purported "magic" yeast from China called Yellow Label Angel Yeast. Perhaps even more amazing was the fact that he was able to make the rice wine without gelatinizing or mashing the rice. He shows three batches in the video. One was made by cooking the rice before adding the yeast mixture. Another was made by adding uncooked rice to boiling water. The last was made by adding uncooked rice to room temperature water. All three fermented out to roughly the same amount of alcohol in about two weeks. He was amazed by this, as was I. I resolved to buy some of this magical yeast from Aliexpress.com and try it out. In the Still It video, the rice is ground up in the grain mill into smaller chunks to make it easier for the enzymes in the yellow label yeast to convert and ferment. I'm changing this up s

Making Alton Brown's Immersion Cooker Fennel Cardamon Cordial

Alton Brown's "Good Eats" series is my favorite cooking show. I love the way he explains the "why" and "how" of a recipe in detail, which helps you understand (if things don't go right) where you may have gone wrong. In his episode on immersion cooking (also known as sous vide), he shows you how to make a cordial in an hour using an immersion cooker. It took me a while to locate all the ingredients here in Columbus. I ended up getting the fennel and vodka at Giant Eagle. The cardamom seeds, pods, and anise stars came from Amazon. The Fennel fronds and bulb came from Trader Joe's at Easton. Ingredients 32 ounces of 80-proof vodka 2 cups of fennel fronds 10 green cardamom pods 3 ounces granulated sugar 1 tablespoon fennel seeds 1 teaspoon black cardamom seeds 1 whole star anise Begin by loading your sous vide vessel with hot water and set your immersion cooker to 140F. While the cooker is getting up to that temperature, meas

Begin Brewing!

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