cereals are the domesticated grasses that are cultivated for human or animal food. Their starchy seeds or grains, the parts most commonly used, are generally high in carbohydrates and relatively low in proteins, with a varying amount of oils. Cereal grains are widely used in the production of spirits such as whisky, vodka, gin, aquavit, baiju, shochu, and others. See aquavit; baijiu; genever; gin; shochu; vodka; and whisky.
Major cereals used for making spirits include corn/maize, rice, barley, wheat, sorghum, and rye. The process for using their grains involves breaking up the starches in the grain by cooking and enzymatic conversion, fermentation, and distillation. The resulting spirit may be aged in wood, or not. That is not, however, the only way they are used: the sweet sap that fills their stalks before they produce their seed-laden ears can also be squeezed out and fermented. This is still done with sorghum, and in the early United States it was done with maize, making “cornstalk rum” or “cornstalk whisky”—it is not obvious under which of those categories it falls.
There are also a few so-called pseudo-cereals—quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth—that have been used by US distillers to make spirits. These spirits have often been labeled as “whisky,” but their definition is a bit of a gray area, given that the spirit regulations define “whisky” as made from a fermented mash of “grain” without defining that word as a “cereal.”
“Cereal.” Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/cereal (accessed March 18, 2021).
27 CFR 5.22: The Standards of Identity.
By: Lew Bryson