"After my George Washington Rye disaster, I'm trying a rye whiskey again and hopefully, this one will do well. My Sweet Feed whiskey is good, my UJSM is great - working on my 4th generation now, and the Carolina Bourbon (NcHooch's recipe ) turned out really nice this week. The GW was a total waste and I can't figure out what went wrong - it smelled like puke. Anyway, I found a Rye Whiskey recipe at the Copper Moonshine Still website and it looked fairly easy. It calls for 7 lbs Rye, 2 lbs Barley, 1 lb malt, 6 gallons of water and 1 oz yeast. Heat water to 70 degrees and mix in malt and grain. While stirring the mixture, heat to 160 degrees. Keep mixture at 160 degrees for 2-3 hours, stirring, to convert starch to fermenaible sugars. Strain the mash and place into your fermenter and allow to cool to 70 - 80 degrees. Pitch yeast. To avoid secondary fermentation and contamination, add 1 gram of ammonium flouride. Stir for one minute, then cover and seal with an airlock. Mash will take 5-7 days to ferment. After fermentation is complete, pour into the still through a pillow case to remove all solids.

I made a few modifications - first I used all malted grains, no flaked grains as I did for the GW disaster. I poured 4 gallons of water into my big pot, added the malt and grains and heated the mash to 150. I held it there for 90 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes. I did the Iodine test at the end of 90 minutes and it showed that all of the starches had been converted to sugars. I strained the the mash and into the fermenter, rinsing the grains with the two gallons of water I held in reserve. I topped the fermenter with more water so I have 6 gallons in my fermenter. By this time, the temperature had dropped to 94 degrees. I checked the specific gravity and found it was 1.040. I added 3 lbs of sugar to my wash to raise the starting SG to 1.080. I pitched Red Star champagne yeast and put the top on the fermenter with an air lock. Within an hour, fermentation had started and it is now going quite strong 4 hours later.

It looks like I have plenty of malted grains working for me in this case, so I think it should turn out well. I'll keep everyone posted. If it does work, I probably will go back and give George another try, only I will be using whole / cracked grains, not flaked.
Highlander "

Yes, I adjusted for the 94 degree temperature - actually at 94, it was 1.010 so with the +4 according to the chart I used, it really was 1.050, but I raised it to 1.080 anyway. The fermentation is going very strong this morning - can't wait for it to be ready to run! Thanks, Bushy!

Actually, my hydrometer chart reads between +.0047 and +.0051 at 94 degrees. Just sayin'

I'm not sure. I know that the UJSM process uses a portion of backset for the next generation ferment, but I'm not certain what it would taste like using all backset.

Well, here I am "starting again". This time I used Ian Smiley's rye whiskey recipe using flaked rye, malted rye and a little malted barley. The mash was super-think because of the flaked rye - a real "porridge". After mashing according to Smiley's directions, I strained the flaked stuff out and found my wash to be really "gummy" - obviously the malted rye and malted barley wasn't enough. I let it "rest" overnight and then reheated the wash to 160 and added 2 lbs of crushed malted 6-row barley and let it rest for about two hours, holding the temperature between 149F and 151F. I strained the barley out and sparged it, getting a much less gummy wash. My SG was 1.040. so I added about 5 lbs of sugar to the wash to raise the SG to 1.080. When the wash cooled to just under 90F, I pitched a packet of Prestige Whiskey Yeast and by the next morning, fermentation was going very steadily. That started on January 15th and it is still fermenting steadily, although no-where near the strength it was for the first few days. I'm planning to rack it into a carboy to let it finish fermenting and the settle out. When I'm ready to distill, I'll report back with my ending SG. I'm hopeful about this recipe and how it is working, but I think I said that before :)

Oh one more thing....I would bet that other site said it would be finished fermenting and ready to run in 5-7 days, right?? Well give it 12-15 days so it can settle and finish for sure. If its a little cooler where you are then it may not even be bubbleing in the airlock but it may still not be done. A little more time is better than not enough.---IMHO........

I ran the rye the other day and it is a good whiskey! My yield was 6 pints - I saved 5 of them and they are aging on Jack Daniels smoking chips. The color is a rich gold already after just two days. I cut the proof to 120 for the aging process. Finally, I have a success with rye! I will do more of this recipe, although it will be all grain instead of flaked grains as Smiley calls for - I find flaked grains too messy to work with.