Tesguino - Corn beer, Originally made from pressed corn stalks

I am hoping to make corn beer.
I have a bunch of green stalks left over from growing dent corn and the stalks looks fantastic.  Here is the variety I grew from Adaptive seeds   Open oak party mix, I love this company


After reading a post on here about Small scale Sorghum and corn sugar pressing
And after reading it in The art of Fermentationabout how Tesguino was originally made with corn stalk juice I figured I would give it a go. Try it out.



I will upload my progress later as my internet speed is at 150kbps until tomorrow.


I pressed about 2 cups yesterday from about 8 or so stalks of corn. And I tried the "juice". It turns out it is insanely sweet. I would say it is so sweet that there is no other flavour. I can taste the corn flavour, however the sweet ness is strong. I am hoping this will create a good corn beer. Today I am hoping to press 3 litres and add the remaining with water/herbs to make a 1gallon batch of beer.

Does anyone have suggestion for things I can add to the beer? I am not much of a hops fan...

and

Has anyone made corn beer before?

I wish I could upload photos :(

I love what you're doing, extra use out of otherwise "wasted" materials.
I'm wondering if it would make a good vinegar.
You could add creeping charlie to cut the sweet taste, give a tonic effect and add complexity.
Maybe consider lacto fermenting some of it, or adding a chinese yeast ball that comes with its own fungus.
The lacto ferment could add tartness/fizyness, and lower sweetness.
Chinese style yeast supposedly can produce a 20% alcohol content without distillation.

so after about 4 hours of pressing. I became much quicker towards the end. I pressed about 3 cups in about 20 minutes.


so I came to the conclusion. Basically most of the juice on these stalks were in the bottom half of the stalks. The more I went up the stalk, less came out. This meant anything under 1/2 inch(diameter) was not worth the time, with the process I am doing.

I made it to about 3 litres and 1 cup. It might be slightly more.

I pressed the juice and than strained it through a folded up cheese cloth.  

My next step is to pasteurize it. as this is my first time and I want it to work well.  I have some yeast here which I will try. If it doesn't work out. I will try adding apple cider vinegar to it. and than hope it turns into vinegar as a last resort.

Based on the little bit of information I can find online about this. It appears nothing was really added to it. It has been made with sprouted corn which is than cooked for 8-24 hours. Hmm much different than what I am doing. I guess it is an experiment!!

Edited to add

I found this resource, Femented cereals a global perspective.
It showed some suggestions for plants to add to the tesguino.

William Bronson wrote:I love what you're doing, extra use out of otherwise "wasted" materials.
I'm wondering if it would make a good vinegar.
You could add creeping charlie to cut the sweet taste, give a tonic effect and add complexity.
Maybe consider lacto fermenting some of it, or adding a chinese yeast ball that comes with its own fungus.
The lacto ferment could add tartness/fizyness, and lower sweetness.
Chinese style yeast supposedly can produce a 20% alcohol content without distillation.

yea most of the plant has been used. it was even feeding the rats haha!.

The leaves which I took off in order to press the stalks. The leaves went to the goats.

The press stalks went back to the patch I grew the corn in as mulch.


I am going to have more to harvest in the next week or so. So I will take your suggestions into consideration william.

so the pressings are now aging. They have been in the airlock bottle for about 2 weeks now. I tried some of it at 1 week and it was not very tasty.
I did some reading on Home Brew talk and it seems its normal to wait at least 3 weeks for the yeast to do its thing.

I am looking forward to trying it out. maybe another 2 weeks still before I attempt the brew.

Alright after about 4 weeks of it being in the fermentation Jug. I have racked it into 750ml pop tops.

I tasted some of it and to be honest it is a new taste to me. It somewhat reminds me of pineapple juice. It had some unfermentable sugars in it. So it is still sweet and with a hint of acidity. It is pleasant and I imagine it will improve over time!

Heres to trying something new!

jordan barton wrote:It is pleasant and i imagine it will improve over time!

Jordan, what a great experiment. Did it indeed improve over time?

Jordan you absolute legend, thanks for sharing all of this. I live in the mountains of oaxaca and brew all our own beer. I also work with a lot of coffee producers and many of them make aguadiente which is the fermented juice of sugar cane. Often the press they have on the farms looks like two large rolling pins with 5mm(approx) deep slits criss-crossed on them, I may have to borrow one now when I next grown a round of corn to try this out!

A couple of extra notes.

When brewing beer you boil the wort for about 90 mins to, I believe, remove the veggie flovour from the grain juice. I wonder if that could help improve flavour. Saying that, I don't think you updated it with final flavours. Was it good, was it bad, any updates now?

Not sure what type of corn you had but down here they're not exactly sweet corn so not sure if this stuff has a solid amount of sugar or not but I this is traditional corn so possibly what they used to use to brew...

Anyway, thanks for the inspiration. Might take me a year or two to get on this but one day I will hopefully re-appear to update this.
Saludos

Hi Shaun,


Welcome to Permies.

Leigh Tate wrote:

jordan barton wrote:It is pleasant and i imagine it will improve over time!

Jordan, what a great experiment. Did it indeed improve over time?

What I love about permies is that people like experiments! So it looks like it has been about 2 years since I last tried the stuff.
It has been siting out in the unheated mudroom for the whole time. So it experiences freezing and 100*F+

Just opened the bottle and it nearly exploded!!!

Now I will say that the flavour has improved from what I remember. It is pleasant with an unfamiliar taste to it. It reminded me of ketchup. Its still very bubbly. I really wish I had some more so I could give it a better assessment.


Also the corn I grew would be considered field corn. I am currently breeding it to require very little inputs from me. https://permies.com/t/181216/Adding-endophytes-corn#1425908
Big thanks to Joseph Lofthouse for sharing all of his Landrace Knowledge

Jordan, yes, we definitely love experiments! lol And we're even treated to a picture, thank you! All very interesting and something I may try one of these days myself.