Title: 100% Corn Bourbon - Mixing Mash Bills? - General Bourbon Discussion - Straightbourbon.com
Headings: 100% Corn Bourbon - Mixing Mash Bills?
100% Corn Bourbon - Mixing Mash Bills?
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Content: Well, the former science teacher in me prompts me to add some clarification (I hope). Sweet corn is immature corn that has sugars in it, but that isn't used in bourbon, after all. Mature, dry corn is not sweet - it has almost no sugar. As the grain matured, it was polymerized into starch (the sugar molecules are strung together in long, branching chains called starch). This is how grains store their food reserves for their baby plants to use during sprouting. If they were stored as sugars, every mold, yeast and bacteria would glom onto them. But most of these microbes, as you say, can't digest starch. So when the baby plant sprouts, it produces enzymes that cleave off sugar molecules slowly at just the rate it can use them over a period of days until the baby plant produces leaves and can photosynthesize its own sugars. Brewers and distillers speed up the process by heating the sprouted grains (called malt) to about 150F, which converts the starches to sugars in less than an hour, as opposed to days. We do have enzymes in our saliva that convert starch into sugar, but it is not a fast process.