Short Mountain Distillery TN

[AGarrison]

Rainy day trip to Short Mountain Distillery. We got a few pics and some interesting info from Bill Kaufman (CEO) and Ronald Lawson (old time shiner). They were all very helpful, and there was a steady stream of people braving the constant rain to tour and sample the shine.

There are two active stills. The smaller one shown below is located in the "Shiner's Shack" and produces a wonderfully sweetcorn smelling clean shine at about 115-120 proof, according to Mr. Lawson. The mash bill is 30% corn to 70% sugar.

The larger still inside the main building shown below is recognizable from the column. The product from the Shiner's Shack is combined with this still and redistilled here.

The stainless steel pan feeding into the white, round thing on the left is the grinder for the corn. The blue hopper feeds the ground corn into the cooker (hidden behind the column still). After cooking, they ferment the mash for 1 week to 10 days which is quite a bit longer than I expected. (For comparison I believe Prichard's ferments for about 3 days.) Mr Kaufman said the longer ferment time is due to the use of sugar.

They bottle the original shine at 105proof. It has an initial burn, of course, but is pretty smooth after that with a light taste of corn. They also produce an Apple Pie Tennessee Shine which is bottled at a much lower 40 proof. Of the six women and two guys present, one guy preferred the 105 proof shine, while the other seven preferred the Apple Pie. The pic below is Mr. Kaufman kindly posing with his original and Apple Pie shine in the distillery tasting room/store.

Business is good. They are building another distillery building nearby this October. Mr. Lawson said it will house four new column stills. The two existing stills would be converted to pot stills and used for "top shelf shine" (a working name) or whiskey.

Lastly the guys at Short Mountain are aging about (5) 53gal barrels of whiskey. Mr. Kaufman plans to release it as bourbon and says it meets all the criteria. It will be released "when it is ready," which sounds like the perfect answer to me. He expects it will sell out immediately right from the distillery when its released. I'm sure it will too, they have a constant traffic through the distillery store.

They also have a stack of new, unfilled 10gal barrels still in plastic wrap. I'm told they plan to experiment with a mixture of 53 and 10 gal barrels for their whisky. You can also buy tiny barrels of your own to experiment aging their shine (or some other if you prefer).

I recommend stopping and sitting on the porch for a bit and listen to Mr. Lawson tell about the old days of illegal moonshine. All in all a pleasant stop in a beautiful part of TN.

[squire]

Good report, thanks for posting.

[cowdery]

In these shine recipes, they don't use any malt, nor enzymes, so they're not getting much conversion from the corn. I suspect it's such a slow fermentation because there is not as much fermentable material as there aught to me. "Because of the sugar" doesn't make sense to me because I assume yeast would just burn through sugar -- it's everything they like and nothing they don't. I've talked to some of the people who use these recipes and they admit they're getting very little alcohol from the corn but they are getting some characteristic flavor. It also fits the mythology better. If a real moonshiner used corn as the sole source of fermentable sugar, it would be malted first. This is what Finger Lakes does for their corn whiskey. Another possibility is that they deliberately hold the beer after fermentation completes for some reason.

Love the old time set up with the dual thumper barrels, intended not for a second distillation but to prevent puking. (of the still. The imbiber will still puke.)

Edited July 9, 2013 by cowdery

[tmckenzie]

Pure sugar ferments slow, and it may not ferment all the way. Sugar creates osmotic pressure on the yeast, stressing it. You have to have nitrogen for yeast to work, one reason for backset again. If they mashed some of their corn, then sweetened it, they would get better fermentations and better juice

[wadewood]

We should call their product what it really is and it ain't moonshine; its an unclassified spirits distilled from grain and sugar.

[SmoothAmbler]

Thomas is right. Those all sugar washes can be pretty weird. There's usually not enough nutrients in the wash for the yeast to be happy. Of course, you can adjust that by adding nutrients. The corn in moonshine type products usually just adds a bit of flavor, but certainly not similar to the flavor if it was made from an all grain mash bill.

[tanstaafl2]

Saw this in a store for the first time but got distracted talking bourbon with the owner and forgot to get a pic or check the price. Wasn't really tempted to buy one though!

[cowdery]

Thanks. It seems counter-intuitive, but I get it now. You can't live on a diet of Skittles.

[Leopold]

Thomas is right. Those all sugar washes can be pretty weird. There's usually not enough nutrients in the wash for the yeast to be happy. Of course, you can adjust that by adding nutrients. The corn in moonshine type products usually just adds a bit of flavor, but certainly not similar to the flavor if it was made from an all grain mash bill.

Yep. I think Mr. Cowdery mentioned recipes with creamed corn in a sugar mash. Essentially, this is like that scene in the Pope of Greenwich Village where a customer complains that his martini isn't Beefeater. When the customer isn't looking, the bartender adds a couple of drops of Beefeater in the glass and hands it back.

If you don't add enzymes from malt or something else, that corn will never ferment. It's merely there to hide the fact that it's made from cane sugar---and cane sugar is by far the worst possible thing you can feed to yeast, for the aforementioned reasons given by John and Tom. When you feed yeast a bunch of glucose, the glycolytic pathway is such that you get massive amounts of ethyl acetate that you can never fully remove it from the distillate. Many of the small rum distillers in the US make do this----ferment bleached sugar.

[Rarnold]

Not sure I understand your reasoning behind "When you feed yeast a bunch of glucose, the glycolytic pathway is such that you get massive amounts of ethyl acetate" Do you have a source?

I am not sure of their process, but if they are using standard "sugar", the substrate is sucrose which is 1:1 glucose:fructose. Sucrose is hydrolyzed outside of the cell membrane into its constituent parts glucose and fructose. The two monosaccharides are then taken up by the cell through a passive uptake process and directly incorporated into the glycolytic pathway. If using only a grain (ie corn) as the source of sugar and enzymes are used to breakdown the corn starch chains, the main sugar source then become maltose, which is 1:1 glucose:glucose. Maltose is hydrolyzed inside the cell membrane and incorporated into the glycolytic pathway as glucose. Sucrose, if present, is actually hydrolyzed and incorporated into the glycolytic pathway before maltose.

In other words, a mash made from primarily corn does indeed feed the yeast a bunch of glucose, whereas a mash made from cane sugar feeds the yeast a 1:1 ratio of sucrose:glucose.

Edited July 11, 2013 by Rarnold

[sutton]

My understanding is that yeast need other micronutrients to survive, divide, and efficiently convert sugar to ethanol, esp. as the conditions get more difficult for them (higher temp, increasing ethanol concentration). Pure sucrose does not provide these other nutrients; a grain mash would. If those nutrients become deficient in the mash, the yeast become "stressed" and produce other less desirable by-products.

[Rarnold]

I definitely agree with you sutton. Amino acids, proteins, sulphur compounds, trace metals, etc are all needed for healthy yeast growth.

I was pointing to the idea of glucose vs. other sugars causing undesirably high concentrations of ethyl acetate. Since corn starch derived sugars are mainly glucose (in the form of maltose before being incorporated into the glycolytic pathway), and cane sugar is sucrose, I'm having trouble with the logic behind the statement.

[squire]

I suspect those who make mash and still whisky for a living have a pretty good idea of what works.

[Leopold]

Not sure I understand your reasoning behind "When you feed yeast a bunch of glucose, the glycolytic pathway is such that you get massive amounts of ethyl acetate" Do you have a source?

Not on hand as I'm in Europe just now.

It's a common understanding. So much so that both the brewing schools I attended (long ago, I'll admit) made mention that I can recall. One, located in N. America, in the context of adjunct brewing, and the practice of adding corn sugar at places like Miller for flagship brands, as well as for malt liquor. Dr. Power explained using processed sugar quite simply.... paraphrasing, that it's like feeding your 5 year old nothing but candy for dinner, rather than the balanced meal that is a mix of sugars that the yeast breaks down slowly, internally, when consuming an all-malt wort. I was told table sugar was the worst of all choices, leading to a mess of esters, including ethyl acetate.

The other was at a German brewing school in the context of a question I had on the bottle conditioning of hefeweizen, or in the case of my question, using the much easier corn sugar to bottle condition weizenbock. I was warned against it because of elevated ethyl acetate and higher alcohols. Urged instead to use first wort.

But, that doesn't deflect your good question. I'll get to it when I get back and find you a cite.

Edited July 11, 2013 by Leopold

[Rarnold]

Well that's actually why I'm interested, squire. I'm the Head Distiller at the F&R Distilling Co. in Ft. Worth, TX and also a former Ph.D candidate in Biochemistry (I left with my Masters degree to join F&R).

Thanks Leopold. I'd be interested to read the citation and understand more about how different classes of carbohydrates may, in some cases, affect congener production. I definitely understand why pouring in just table sugar with no nutrients will create a very unbalanced fermentation.

But what has me curious now is what if you have all the identical, necessary nutrients (aside from the carbohydrates) in 2 different mashes. In one mash, though, the primary carbohydrate is sucrose. In the second mash, the primary carbohydrate is maltose. Chemically speaking, both sucrose and maltose will be hydrolyzed into their constituents and incorporated into the same pathway. But, if in fact these two carbohydrate sources result in different congener profiles, I'd be really intrigued at understanding the science behind that.

Thanks again.

[squire]

I take it you're Rob then, if I haven't already greeted you welcome aboard. I've been reading the reviews on your TX Blended whisky with interest.

[cowdery]

I can't address the science but I sure enjoy reading about it. I can say that the only distilling 'tradition' that uses refined sugar is the moonshine tradition, where the principal objective is to produce as much alcohol as possible as cheaply, easily, and undetectably as possible. Most people don't understand that moonshine isn't a type of spirit, it's any spirit produced illegally.

Legitimate cane sugar spirits aren't made from refined sugar. Rum is properly made from molasses and cachaça is produced from even less refined sugar cane juice.

The irony, of course, is that if you want to play on the romance of moonshine, refined sugar is the most authentic thing you can use.

[tmckenzie]

Having seen moonshine produced with sugar first hand, what I have seen is soured whole corn and sugar is the ingredients. The first run works slow. Then the next run gets a lot better cause they empty the still into the fermenters, sour mash. The dead yeast cells I know now gave the yeast the needed nutrients. The old timer just knew it worked, not how. And good stuff made from a mash like that tastes like a good tequila or sotol.

[squire]

So that's how they did it, thanks Tom.

[AGarrison]

One thing I found interesting during the tour. Mr Kaufman told me when he was starting the company, he brought together at least 3 of the old time shiners in the county. They had all jealously guarded their process and formulas over the years, yet when they finally did compare, the formulas were the same (70% sugar, 30% corn). Of course Mr. Kaufman went on to tell me that's because Al Capone got a lot of his whiskey this county and had all the shiners use the same formula. I'll take the Capone part as perhaps embellishment, but it was very interesting to find they all used the same formula.

[squire]

Get two or more old moonshiners together and the same story comes up, that Capone fella sure got around.

[Leopold]

Having seen moonshine produced with sugar first hand, what I have seen is soured whole corn and sugar is the ingredients. The first run works slow. Then the next run gets a lot better cause they empty the still into the fermenters, sour mash. The dead yeast cells I know now gave the yeast the needed nutrients.

Ok, I read a paper on this a few years back (I'll look for it, RArnold). Well, not this precise process, but adding stillage to a sugar fermentation.

If I recall correctly, there was a three-fold reduction in ethyl acetate production. Levels were still elevated when compared to all-malt, however.

Wonderful stuff, Tom.

Edited July 13, 2013 by Leopold

[cowdery]

Moonshiners frequently ferment in their still. Add new mash to the tails and, voila, sour mash.

I have never heard an old time moonshiner story that doesn't feature an appearance by Al Capone.

[squire]

Cook the mash in 'em as well, or so I'm told.

[oke&coke]

When my grandfather passed away we looked through a box of old family photos and found one of him as a kid standing next to a copper still. What are the odds Capone owned that one also?