Why use brewing sugar

This is in contrast to the mostly fermentable sugars that we might use. Rice solids, honey, and lighter molasses or treacle varieties are mostly fermentable ranging from 75 percent to 95 percent fermentability , but nonetheless may contain small but significant amounts of proteins, minerals, or unfermentable sugars such as dextrines which can add body or flavor to a beer.

Still, the use of these sugars will yield a substantial percentage of its potential gravity to the fermentables pile, thereby adding to your potential ABV. After all, lots of that sugar is going away, and what remains may taste dramatically different. Ranging from the barely there of clover honey up through the intense and dark buckwheat honey, honey offers a huge range of flavors for brewing.

The flavors are truly staggering, with the marshmallow-like flavor of Meadowfoam honey to the richness of Tupelo honey, the floral notes of orange blossom honey, and more. These flavors, especially in the darker varieties, can be quite persistent even post-fermentation. Another source of brewing sugar is saps or natural syrups. Agave syrup or nectar—the very thing used to create tequila, when drawn from the blue agave! Then we have the classics like maple or birch syrup.

These can be devilishly tricky to work with, since although they have distinct and noticeable flavors pre-fermentation, after their sugars are fermented off they can nearly disappear entirely!

Then we have the intense flavors of molasses and treacle. Lighter-colored molasses can be used to deepen the toffee-like flavors we often see in crystal malts, but as we move towards blackstrap molasses and black treacle, the flavors become potentially overpowering.

This is also an appropriate time to add a PSA: be very careful with brown sugar in beer. To be certain, when you taste these sugars pre-fermentation they certainly do convey different flavors based on their color. Having said that, they much like the maple syrup mentioned above are completely fermented off in the brewing process, and impart only subtle flavors even when using the darkest varieties.

The first step in adjunct sugar usage is deciding just what it is you want out of your sugars. Derived from the sap of the sugar maple tree, boiled to concentrate. It takes 35 to 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup. Honey: Bees do the work of converting starches in flower pollen to a type of sugar, then store it as a food source for their offspring. Honey ferments slowly compared with malt and other sugars but can be used in almost any type of beer.

Or use it exclusively and make mead. Golden syrup invert sugar, cane sugar : a syrup made by processing cane sugar so as to break the bond between sugar molecules, allowing a cleaner fermentation. It is useful for strong ales because it adds fermentables without influencing color or flavor much.

There are other sugars available, such as coconut sugar, fruit sugars, and date sugar, but their use is not yet widespread in brewing, at least in the English-speaking part of the world. If you should find something that intrigues you, try it! The most important rule of thumb is to use a light hand. Honey and maple may take so long to ferment that you get cloyingly sweet beer or way overcarbonated bottles. So be cautious but not rigid.

Here are six recipes in which it is perfectly acceptable, even de rigueur, to use some non-malt form of sugar. Some are classic, old-world beers, some new-fangled American styles, but each has its place in brewing lore and tradition, past or future. Molasses Licorice Porter 5 gallons, grain, extract, and adjuncts. There is reason to believe that a recipe like this was brewed frequently in colonial and revolutionary times by such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

Good enough? Heat 1 gal. Hold for 75 min. You should have about 2. Add malt extract and molasses, bring to a boil. Boil 15 min. Boil 45 min. Steep for 30 min. Prime with corn sugar and molasses. Bottle age for six weeks. Belgian Dubbel 5 gallons, grain and adjunct. How do the Belgian brewers get such high alcohol contents without cloyingly sweet flavors? The answer is candi sugar. This is a very big beer. Use a good, tolerant yeast.

In 4 gal. Hold for 90 min. Run off to kettle, sparge with 3 gal. Add corn and candi sugar, stir in well. Bring kettle to a boil for about 20 to 30 min.

Add Hallertauer hops. Boil about 40 min. Total boil will reduce wort to 5. This temperature variation method is used by Orval, among others. Prime with corn sugar and bottle. Age well 10 to 15 weeks and sip slowly. Smoked Maple Amber Ale 5 gallons, extract with specialty grains and adjuncts. A Vermont specialty, especially if you can get real sap! Instead of boiling with sap, use 3 gal.

Steep malts with the heat off for 30 min. Turn on heat and add DME and syrup. Bring to boil. Add Cascade hops, boil 60 min. Add Northern Brewer hops, remove from heat, and steep 30 min. Cool, add to fermenter along with enough pre-boiled cold water to make 5. Rack to secondary. After a detailed description of the process for making invert brewing sugar, he has this to say on the question of economy:. For a number of years, in fact, not until , did the use of sugar make much headway in brewing, very severe restrictions being placed upon it, so that it was only in those years when good barley was scarce that it paid the brewer to employ sugar at all….

Which would seem to suggest that the decision to use sugar, if not driven purely by economics, was certainly influenced by the relative price of malt vs. This section, meanwhile, suggests that sugar became popular because it helped to make the kind of beers the public wanted:. Slowly a taste for a lighter and less alcoholic class of beer began to spring up.

This meant storage for much shorter periods, so that quickness of consumption was thus fostered. This necessarily involved earlier conditioning and brightening in cask, and to meet this new state of things the brewer has been led to use less malt, fewer hops, and more sugar… For the last 50 years the use of sugar in brewing has been recognised by Government as a legitimate material in the manufacture of beer, and whilst the public taste generally demands a light beer of such a character as can only be produced with the aid of sugar, no agitation of so called protectionists will ever be able to prevents its use in the brewing of that beverage which we claim as our national drink.

All the above examples date from the very tail-end of Victorian period — what about later? This paper by J. Little need or can be said in this connection which is not obvious. Cane sugar per unit of extract remains expensive and its replacement by cheaper glucose preparations is a matter of individual consideration. Instead, Mr Harris suggests, the real economies are to be made through using replacement cereals wheat, corn , extracts especially from barely-malted malt , hop extracts, and changes to fermentation processes.

Can I just point out that Michael Hardman is wrong when he says sugar was illegal before It was actually allowed from , as long as duty was paid on it. And that duty is why it was uneconomic to brew with sugar before — tax made it much more expensive than malt. I can dig out some examples if you want from brewing records that list the prices of the ingredients.

Calmly and reasonably, and using primary sources. The lingering ancestral idea is interesting. In I was in an English Lit class as a 20 year old which had a very elder fellow taking the class for fun. He said he had met someone who met someone who knew the Brontes when we were studying their books. Then he told a story about their lives that had been passed on. Everyone in class stopped and started counting fingers. He heard it in in his undergrad, from someone who heard it in from the guy who hear it first hand in the s.

Entirely reasonable but a bit shockingly direct. Seem to recall Miles Jenner telling me that he used sugar in the brewing of his beers as it gave him something extra to play tunes with or something along those lines. I worked for Camerons in the 90s back in the dark days of Bent sorry, Brent Walker Breweries and sugar was used partly as a flavour but mainly to supplement poor malt bought because the company was in such dire straits malt supplies were limited to spot buying and the quality was variable, as was the beer.

Moving on a couple of years later to Jennings and block invert sugar was used in most recipes, but mainly mild and bitter, to add flavour but I was under the impression that the age of the brewery and mash tun meant that regardless of the malt, a full extraction was difficult so the sugar would bump up the SG of the wort.

Whereas presumably cheap grain would have come from the Baltics and the United States but also perhaps from Canada, which would somewhat complicate my theory.