A Cereal Cooker is a brewhouse vessel that enables brewers to use unmalted cereals such as corn (maize) or rice as part of their recipe as well as malted barley. The proportion of rice or maize may vary depending on the beer and normally makes up 20%–30% of the grist. The cereal cooker is very much like a mash mixer; it contains mixing paddles and is heated, usually by steam panels. The raw cereal is added to water to create a porridge, which is then boiled. This boiling gelatinizes the raw starches, making them susceptible to breakdown by malt enzymes in the main mash. After gelatinization, the “cooker mash” will be added to the main barley mash, where barley malt enzymes will break down both malt starches and adjunct starches into sugars. Cereal cookers are generally found only in large breweries that regularly produce beers from mashes with high proportions of raw cereal adjuncts.
