From Beer & Food: An American History, by Bob Skilnik
Since the 1860s, American brewers had been experimenting with the addition of yellow corn meal in their beers. The logic of adding a grain that was cheap and abundant was evident. The results, however, had proven unsatisfactory as the level of sugary extract that was supposed to be achieved in the mash proved too low, and they resultant beer had a peculiar “corny” and bitter taste to it. Similar experiments with rice proved just as abysmal.
In the next few decades, further experimentation with adding starchy adjuncts to the malt grain bill showed that the use of white corn meal and the removal of the grain’s husk and germ corrected some of the earlier brewing problems with their beers, including the bitterness, most likely from tannins in the husks and germ.
In 1881, Doctor John E. Siebel of Chicago found that by boiling the corn meal in a separate vessel with a small amount of malted barley and then adding it to the larger mash tun of cracked malt and hot water, it was possible to achieve a high yield of extract from the entire mash. After husking and degerminating rice and subjecting it to a hard boil with the addition of a small amount of malt, similar results were achieved. This additional step in the brewing process meant the installation of more equipment in the brewery. Siebel and others, however, experimented with taking “shelled, dis-oiled and ground corn grits” and pressing it through heated rollers while steam was applied to the product. The result was white corn flakes that could go directly into the mash, by-passing the need for a cereal pre-cooker. Competing brands of flaked corn for brewers with names like “cerealine” and “maizone” made their appearances shortly thereafter, somewhere around 1883.
In 1891, a new process of creating corn flakes without steam was introduced in Detroit, the flaked cereal known as “frumentum,” pure white and as thin as tissue paper. It’s interesting to note that the Kellogg® Company’s history claims the accidental discovery of flaked cereal made from wheat by brothers Doctor John Harvey Kellogg and his brother Will in 1894 in Battle Creek, Michigan. In 1898, younger brother Will claimed credit for inventing the toasted corn flake, later flavoring the corn cereal with malt to distinguish it from competitors. The addition of malt in contemporary cereal products is still widespread.
The addition of a starchy adjunct to the brewer’s all-malt grain bill diluted the high soluble nitrogen content of the malted barley and produced a beer as clear as the finest Bohemian pilsners. It didn’t however, lower the cost of production. The preprocessing of corn grits or rice required additional brewing equipment while the processed flakes had a price far beyond corn grits. Corn and rice didn’t make American beer cheaper; it made it clearer and lighter in character.
John Winthrop, Jr. from the old Massachusetts colony must have been looking down and smiling. It took 200 years, but Indian maize—and rice, the old cash crop of the colonial Carolinas—had finally made their way into the commercial brewing of beer in the United States. It didn’t seem to matter, however, to American beer drinkers. In 1889, the per capita (every man, woman, and child) consumption of beer stood at 50.9 quarts.
That's grrrrrrrreat!