Help identifying brown corn variety

I obtained an unidentified "ornamental" flint corn variety I'm interested in propagating with dark brown, broad and short kernels. It appears to be a flint variety as grains are quite hard, the cob and a few attached husks were also grayish-brown and darker than your average husks, the ear was pretty long, like 10-11 inches.

I've exhausted my googling ability looking for anything similar, so I thought I'd throw a note up here looking for assistance from real live people.

Has anyone ever seen an identified variety meeting this description? Are brown varieties rare? There doesn't seem to be much info about them out of the internet.

No idea but Blake Lenoir might and I'm sure he'd be interested in what you've found.

https://permies.com/u/324782/Blake-Lenoir - he may turn up and answer or you can send him a message to look at your post.

I have never heard of an all or rather, always, brown variety. There is an old variety I believe originating with the native peoples of the North East called Bronze Beauty.  It is a flint corn. It has white endosperm, no color in the aleurone layer and varies in pericarp from a creamy white to pretty dark brown and occasionally red.

Because only the pericarp color is variable and is maternal (part of the mother plant) any individual ear is all the same color. It is a beautiful corn and because of the qualities mentioned I've included it in my landrace corn project.

How many rows of kernels are on the cobs? Bronze Beauty generally has 8 to 12 rows on long thin cobs.

This thread has pictures of Lofthouse Landrace corn that might interest you:

https://permies.com/t/73551/Landrace-seeds-Joseph-Lofthouse#612817

Beautiful colors like brown, burgundy, and black amount normal yellow.

He says that adding vinegar to cooking water brings out the color.

Lofthouse-Astronomy is old fashioned sweet corn, therefore, it germinates very reliably in cold spring weather. Kernels are chewy, and not sickly sweet. Flavor is robust, and variable due to different colored kernels contributing different flavors to each bite. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Adding a hint of vinegar to the cooking water really helps to brighten the colors on the table.

Here is a picture of some corn I planted this spring. Those brown kernels are descended from Bronze Beauty. Each of those kernels produced single colored ears this year but the color of the seed planted isn't necessarily the same as the ears that grow from it. Still, if for example you only planted only  brown each year, over time you might develop a variety that is all brown.

Mark Reed wrote:Here is a picture of some corn I planted this spring. Those brown kernels are descended from Bronze Beauty. Each of those kernels produced single colored ears this year but the color of the seed planted isn't necessarily the same as the ears that grow from it. Still, if for example you only planted only  brown each year, over time you might develop a variety that is all brown.

This brown variety has kernels shaped like the pink ones near the bottom of your picture, and the brown color is darker than the brownish ones shown, with the dark brown color fairly uniform over the whole surface including the germ. That's some  beautiful corn you have, btw.

Anne Miller wrote:This thread has pictures of Lofthouse Landrace corn that might interest you:

https://permies.com/t/73551/Landrace-seeds-Joseph-Lofthouse#612817

Beautiful colors like brown, burgundy, and black amount normal yellow.

He says that adding vinegar to cooking water brings out the color.

Lofthouse-Astronomy is old fashioned sweet corn, therefore, it germinates very reliably in cold spring weather. Kernels are chewy, and not sickly sweet. Flavor is robust, and variable due to different colored kernels contributing different flavors to each bite. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Adding a hint of vinegar to the cooking water really helps to brighten the colors on the table.

Some of those browns look dark enough, but I can't get a very good look at them from that image.

I did come across a brown variety that might be similar, but I don't know if the cob and husk color is right.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/586407849/coffee-brown-corn-25-seeds?ref=shop_home_active_134
Sorry, it won't let me link just the image or post it here. They are calling it Coffee Brown Corn, but that's the only site a google search of that name turns up. I can't imagine that a small random roadside country store in Kansas would be selling such an apparently rare variety of corn mixed in with all their other "Indian corn". I guess stranger things could happen. The lady at the store had no idea where the corn came from.

Edited to add: OK, I found this in another Etsy shop (... actually several listings on different e-commerce sites using the same image.)
https://www.etsy.com/listing/549731308/dark-brown-chocolate-corn-10-fresh

This looks exactly like the kernels I got from the uniformly brown ear of corn.