Does anyone know what type of sugars, and the amount, you get from wild rice? This site calorielab.com - calorielab Resources and Information. says 1.1 gr. of sucrose per 160 gr. of rice, but it also seems to suggest a total of 4 gr. of sugar. If that’s the case, does anyone know what else is in there?
Maybe you can decipher this information, better than I can…
http://ddr.nal.usda.gov/bitstream/10113/29993/1/CAIN769119248.pdf
Don’t know whether it’s of any help, or not.
I also wonder whether the guys mentioned in this article would have any input…If you can find them:
http://www.byo.com/stories/article/indices/38-ingredients/1665-wild-wild-rice
Gray Owl Foods is located in the town where I grew up.
They might be worth contacting.
denny, your website doesn’t have complete or accurate data. doesn’t make sense. if you look at calories from carbs it is 480 calories which implies 120 g of carbohydrate (4 cal/gram) this supports its notion that there is 119. gram total carb but not their breakdown. i will look at the other reference as well. but look at that same site and see what the breakdown is on regular white rice. it will be close. i will recheck and update.
From the USDA link posted it looks like around 1-2% sugar and 2-3% pentosans (polysacharides) which I would guess would convert in the mash. But IANAS (I Am Not A Scientist)
Thanks, guys…keep it coming! The question is more about the types of sugars than the amounts, but all info is welcome.
Denny, they are talking about raw rice, which will be very low in sugar. There will be a lot of carbs, some protein, and some fat. Pentosans generally won’t convert in the mash, and are not fermentable.
A lot of the carbs will convert though, and I think you can expect to get a similar sugar profile after mashing that you get from just barley. My reasoning here is that the enzymes breaking down the carbs are from the barely and should work on the rice carbs the same way they work on the barley carbs. The rice carbs might have less branching than the barley carbs which would explain why it would ferment more completely, although that (complete fermentation) is generally the rule with white rice and may not apply to wild rice.
So, does this appear to be a fairly accurate statement?
“Wild rice, being a grass and thus similar to our favorite cereal grain, most likely mashes down into glucose, maltose, and maltotriose (among other things)”
I wouldn’t phrase it that way. It is not so much about how similar the rice is to barley, but that when you use it in a cereal mash the wild rice is being converted by barley enzymes. They should breakdown the rice carbs the same way they attack the barley carbs, so you’ll get similar proportions of the wort sugars.
I would probably phrase it like this:
“Wild rice is a grass and thus similar to our favorite cereal grain. It most likely mashes down into glucose, maltose, and maltotriose (among other things) in similar proportions to what you get from a pure barley mash”
Gotcha! Thanks for the explanation.
or think of it like this. most plant carbohydrate is either digestible by us (turns in to sugars) or undigestible. usually the fiber. some animals (cows, goats) can digest that as well. in the nutritional material when it says 120 grams of carbohydrate out of the 160 gm (and as tom pointed out raw) rice this is what we can digest (hence the 480 calories) most of this like in barley will likely be able to be converted by yeast,
the real question to me is how does grams carbohydrate equate to gravity potential per gallon…
Fixed that 
Assuming you get good extraction and some conversion, grams of carbs should equal grams of sugar in terms of determining gravity potential. How much of that is fermentable depends on the nature of the carbs (how much branching, etc) and conversion efficiency, so this will affect your FG.
thanks tom.
Denny,
You could contact Danny here: http://www.cautionbrewingco.com/news.html
He makes a wild rice beer and may have some research or at least practical experience in using it as a adjunct for brewing.
What I dig is the way it is harvested…by canoe! Oh and yeah the flavor rocks