Catholic Economist

Ezekiel A. Nichols

Rice Wine

All the good things about this article are from the Lord and the bad is entirely my own.

Having started making my own alcohol at 15 years old I have recently gotten intrigued with it again. What I have never done is make boozed straight from grain without any additives the way ancient man did as I have always used the kits and I also wanted to try to do this as cheaply as possible. First, a couple of issues in this experiment. I am trying to use ancient man's recipe not his method, as ancient man did not have a plastic primary fermentation bucket with a plastic air lock stuck in it or an empty glass pickle jar to get the yeast working. Also, all measurements are approximate as I am kind of a bad scientist in terms of my experimental control.

So, after a trip to the Oriental food market, I have a 50lb sack of white rice and a 20lb sack of brown rice and a quick stop by the brewery supply store has yielded a food grade plastic primary fermentation bucket and air lock. My plan is to use the brown rice to get a rich yeast starter culture going and the white rice is filler for upping the alcohol content.

So blessing everything (always remember to bless before starting), my first experiment was to see if the brown rice will ferment. It, in fact, will if you just add a little water and let it sit tight. The video on the right is after two and 1/2 days in the cupboard. This turned out to be much easier that I planned, as I just placed a cup of brown rice into a jar and added water and let it sit and I have quite the bubbly fermentation going on to get things up and going with my full scale project.

Now to scale up the project and getting side tracked I have my attention turned from fermenting this from wine to pondering how much rice goes into beer production. My economic spin is to figure out how much rice it takes to make 5.5% alcohol brew and then calculate the total grain production that goes into alcohol for the U.S. and attempt to put a number on how much grain prices would deflate if the rice were left on the market. My intuition is that it is a lot but this is going to have to wait as I did not get a hydrometer to measure specific gravity of my wort.

Turning my attention back to my brew I cooked up the white rice with an addition of raw brown rice to the wort for nutrients, enzymes and to act as the yeast starter. The enzymes and nutrients are important for brewing as I did not want to use additive yeast nutrients this time nor did I want to add cooking/brewers yeast to the wort as ancient man wouldn't have had these either. A

s with any experiment of mine I have over-done it for the first batch and used way too much rice. 20lb white rice uncooked and after cooking it filled the primary fermentation bucket all the way to the rim. Ugh, I am prone to gluttony and overdoing everything. But that's ok a few prayers and getting back on track I am just going to split the wort into two separate containers and let that be that.

I also added 5 cups of brown rice and my brown rice yeast starter pictured above and after a day and a half we have the primary fermentation bubbling. (Pictured below). In my effort to use everything with no waste, I am taking the spent grain, and, well, eating it as fermented rice is a thing, apparently, and I got rather obsessive about no waste.

For the edible rice I need bacteria fermentation in addition to yeast to add protein and nutrition so I am going to have to expose my spent rice to oxygen while keeping mold out of it. As a home brewing note you should never leave your brew exposed to the open air as it will in fact spoil and turn to vinegar when oxygen is present. Below is my wort with the brown rice and the primary fermentation bucket.

Stay tuned for updates!