Brewer's Invert Sugar - the painless way!

[jof]

L buy fast cars, others go on luxury cruises, others still collect fine art while we beer hermits sit in our draughty garets snuggled in a blue anorak and contemplate the merits of various sugars.

Some buy fast cars, others go on luxury cruises, others still collect fine art while we beer hermits sit in our draughty garets snuggled in a blue anorak and contemplate the merits of various sugars.

Sometimes we loose sight that we are our own customer.
To know we can play with these easily available dark sugars as substitutes for invert in recipes should be enough to set us on our little alchemical paths to malty-hoppy nivarna.

 

[dad_of_jon]

I wonder how many of us had a chemistry set as a kid? - Brewing is one big chemistry set for us grown-ups and the end result is usually much more fun than a few poxy crystals

 

[An Ankoù]

And access to Billington's "Light Muscovado Sugar", probably no consistent replacement to be found on The Continent. E.g. I found nicely priced cane sugar in the Jumbo, but the color seems to vary from week to week.

Can you get St-Louis Vergeoise blonde and brune in Belgium? It seems to be readily available in the baking section of the supermarkets in Brittany and it isn't a local product. The blonde is about the colour of light muscovado and the brune is the average muscovado. You can get dark candi sugar 350 ebc from Braumarkt in the Netherlands.

 

[patto1ro]

This all rather begs the question: Why? To make some ghastly concoction that tastes as if it's come out of Tadcaster? As for heirloom recipes, they're interesting from a historical perspective. I've made a few of them and the sessionable ones haven't really stood the test of time otherwise they'd still be being made. The Belgian traditions of using candi sugars in their beers, on the other hand, has stood the test of time and if you can't get hold of the real thing then perhaps the partially refined confectioners or baking sugars might provide a decent substitute. Here's an interesting American website with a good recipes section, too. Some of the products are available on Amazon. I doubt very much, though, that the Belgians use US syrups although I could well be wrong.
https://www.candisyrup.com/

I totally disagree. Some of the best beers in the UK are brewed by Harveys in Lewes and their beers include invert sugar.

It's weird to say sugar in Belgian beer: good. Sugar in UK beer: bad.

 

[Clarence]

I totally disagree. Some of the best beers in the UK are brewed by Harveys in Lewes and their beers include invert sugar.

It's weird to say sugar in Belgian beer: good. Sugar in UK beer: bad.

Harvey are ok, even good, although I've only ever had their bottled beers. You miss the point, however, so I'll clarify it. Putting a bit of sugar in a beer to lighten the body is something I do myself. Using relatively large quantities of highly coloured sugars in "sessionable" beers to adjust the flavour and colour produces beers which would be nicer if the brewer had formulated his recipe without them, in my opinion. That goes both for Pattinson's recipes and Dave Lines reproductions of commercial beers of half a century ago (did they really taste like that?) Using sugars in strong beers that are meant to be kept and mature over months or years is a different matter entirely and they really come into their own there. Also in dark beers (coloured with dark malts) the slightest whiff of Demarara can be acceptabe. I prime my dark mild with light brown sugar but only a few grams per bottle. So it's not a question of English bad / Belgian good. As for Harvey's, I can't be bothered researching it, but I suspect their invert sugar is practically colourless. Might be wrong. Check it out if you're bothered. I'm not.

 

[peebee]

Yawn. Another peebee sugar rant.
Candi sugar:

Candi sugar is a Belgian sugar product commonly used in brewing beer. It is particularly associated with stronger Belgian style ales such as dubbel and tripel.[1] Chemically, it is an unrefined sugar beet derived sugar which has been subjected to Maillard reaction and caramelization. WIKIPEDIA

...

You failed to link the actual article from Wikipedia that you brandish in defence of "Candi" <sick> sugar. Here, I'll do it for you:

Candi sugar - Wikipedia

An incomplete "stub" that you've had to justify with "real" articles that talk about sugar (without mentioning "Candi").

Here you go ... A link to a very excellent watch that certainly does mention "Candi". Sorry, not free any more to "Prime" subscribers, but the £3.45 rental is the best money you'll have spent on "Candi" ... ever!

Happytime Murders

 

[peebee]

... What is utterly unnecessary is a reworking of two earlier threads ...

Oops ... very nearly rumbled just there. Still, the real reason remains secret but it isn't going to work unfortunately. Only a few days to run for my (probably unsuccessful) attempt at "cheating"!

 

[peebee]

Ooo ... look what I found!



Watch it! (Linked above, Amazon Prime). I do not receive commission BTW (perhaps I should ask?). Remember to have glass of "Candi Sugar" <puke> infused "beer" in hand.

 

[Clarence]

Completely barmy. Congratulations on inaugurating my ignore list.

 

[Pennine]

Harvey are ok, even good, although I've only ever had their bottled beers. You miss the point, however, so I'll clarify it. Putting a bit of sugar in a beer to lighten the body is something I do myself. Using relatively large quantities of highly coloured sugars in "sessionable" beers to adjust the flavour and colour produces beers which would be nicer if the brewer had formulated his recipe without them, in my opinion. That goes both for Pattinson's recipes and Dave Lines reproductions of commercial beers of half a century ago (did they really taste like that?) Using sugars in strong beers that are meant to be kept and mature over months or years is a different matter entirely and they really come into their own there. Also in dark beers (coloured with dark malts) the slightest whiff of Demarara can be acceptabe. I prime my dark mild with light brown sugar but only a few grams per bottle. So it's not a question of English bad / Belgian good. As for Harvey's, I can't be bothered researching it, but I suspect their invert sugar is practically colourless. Might be wrong. Check it out if you're bothered. I'm not.

I am pretty sure Ron has checked it out already.

 

[Pennine]

Yawn. Another peebee sugar rant.
Candi sugar:

Candi sugar is a Belgian sugar product commonly used in brewing beer. It is particularly associated with stronger Belgian style ales such as dubbel and tripel.[1] Chemically, it is an unrefined sugar beet derived sugar which has been subjected to Maillard reaction and caramelization. WIKIPEDIA

Sounds to me like it's a hybrid using various colours of not-fully-refined (brown) sugars and then using the caramisation process like the one proposed by Patterson and others. I suspect Candi Syrup Inc do something similar. In fact I'm going to ask them.
So why are you referring to these beers as fantasies?
Why is Candi Syrup Inc "scary"
Of course there's a tradition of using sugar in Belgian beers. Whether you like their spelling or not is nearly as irrelevant as your thread.
Clarence and I are working together on cloning some of the less commercial of these Belgian beers, hoping in the summer, to be in a position to taste our attempts side by side with each other and side by side with the originals, which I can easily get. We won't be using Billington's, I can assure you except when the recipe calls for cassonade.
So. To cut a long story short. It would seem that inverting the sugar is not the intention with prolonged boiling of a syrup. The objective is to get the maillard products and, perhaps, some caramelisation.
Did you know that CSI D-180 uses 50% date syrup ? I wonder what that brings to the party. I must get hold of some and try it instead of having a mini-rant about it.

I am curious about the date syrup as well, might be a more mild version of molasses that they are mixing in with light invert for the colour. Might be exactly like Peebee is suggesting.

I will be interested to hear if you get a reply from them or try it for yourself.

 

[Sadfield]

Using relatively large quantities of highly coloured sugars in "sessionable" beers to adjust the flavour and colour produces beers which would be nicer if the brewer had formulated his recipe without them, in my opinion.

It probably depends on what point in time the recipe was formulated, what malt was being used. If one was to replace Chevallier malt in the grist, with invert sugar that offered a similar flavour, you'd possibly end up with a greater degree of attenuation from saccharomyces. A more drinkable beer. And one that would be less changable through secondary fermentation by brettanomyces and the likes.

I see a fundamental flaw with a lot of 'historic' homebrewing which revolves solely around the recipe without any accuracy or care for replicating ingredients, process, storage, or contamination with brettanomyces.

Does malt, hops, supermarket sugar and a corny keg make a historic recreation? Or do you end up a mile away and miss the point of why the recipe was formulated that way?

 

[peebee]

Okay, enough digression into "Candi Sugar". This thread is about "Brewer's Invert Sugar".

Re-read the OP for clarification ... and don't forget to click that off-site brewing forum link!

... Does malt, hops, supermarket sugar and a corny keg make a historic recreation? Or do you end up a mile away and miss the point of why the recipe was formulated that way?

Who know's? But what is known is the more people chipping away at it, the closer we get to what things were like. Of course, some ideas are going to be red herrings, but as long as someone is chipping away, those "red herrings" can be purged (which is what I've been trying to achieve with those daft caramelised "Invert Sugars"). Do nothing and we will never know ... ever! History reduced to some unread dusty papers on dusty shelves.

Some of my greatest brews in the last few years have been attempts to resurrect bygone tastes.

And it's been lots of fun too!

 

[peebee]

It may be wrong, but it's not completely daft. Heron's 1896 paper (the one you linked to as well) has a mini-rant about brewers who make their own invert by boiling with acid because the caramelization destroys the fermentability of the syrup. They weren't idiots back then, so I figure the product couldn't have been too different from the commercial product or everyone would have noticed and complained. I've wondered if dilute old-style molasses might not have left a caramel-like flavor, which is how the confusion started. That's actually why I was asking you about the taste.

P.S. I went through the Instutute articles the easy way: I searched for "sugar" and "invert" on the website. You don't get that many matches, so it's a manageable reading load.

Sorry, thread took a bit of a "wobble". I can assure you this is quite normal when talking about sugar in beer! There are loads of very ingrained ideas to battle through.

And like you're pointing out, the arguments were rife in those 19th C. Heron documents too.

Look at how Ragus go about "inverting" sugar. You can find links at ... oh, there's some links in a follow-up post to that off-site link article I posted. The link to "Golden Syrup" covers it. Ragus do use very strong acid but neutralize it very quickly (minutes) into the process because the acid will start destroying sugar. They also leave the syrup very slightly acidic (pH6-ish) because alkalis destroy sugar too!

Bit of a minefield this sugar lark i'nit.

They keep the temperature moderated too (<70°C) 'cos once inversion starts, fructose forms, and it will caramelise at much lower temperatures than sucrose and glucose. Which, you guessed it, destroys sugar! Actually, small quantities of fructose breaks-down spontaneously anyway to form a yellow compound; hence you may see "turns pale yellow" as an indicator of "inversion" taking place. And chemical analysis depicting marginally more glucose than fructose in the finished product as a result. It is all, of course, academic ... we're making home-brew and don't really care.


By the way, there was once a time when I would refuse to allow sugar anywhere near my beer (just a year or two ago) ... but it turns out to be much too much fun to miss out on!

 

[brewSJ]

Now if only I knew what those old brewers meant when they called invert "luscious" or words like that compared to raw sugar. I've seen the Ragus stuff too - and yes, they're using basically the same procedure Heron was. It's bits like this I just can't figure out what they're really talking about

When syrups are heated, they first colour slightly, and then acquire additional fullness, and it is this property that makes a hundredweight of sugar properly cooked of more value to the brewer than the same quantity of raw sugar. When the heating is continued water is lost, until at about 110◦C caramel commences to be formed, and the syrup becomes acid owing to the formation of certain decomposition products of the sugars. (Evans, J. Inst. Brew., 1919).

It's the first sentence and "additional fullness" that's still bugging me. Obviously it's not caramel, he's clear that only comes with added heating, but then what was it? What's the difference he's talking about? If it's just the greater sweetness of invert, why not say so? I feel like I'm missing something...

 

[patto1ro]

Harvey are ok, even good, although I've only ever had their bottled beers. You miss the point, however, so I'll clarify it. Putting a bit of sugar in a beer to lighten the body is something I do myself. Using relatively large quantities of highly coloured sugars in "sessionable" beers to adjust the flavour and colour produces beers which would be nicer if the brewer had formulated his recipe without them, in my opinion. That goes both for Pattinson's recipes and Dave Lines reproductions of commercial beers of half a century ago (did they really taste like that?) Using sugars in strong beers that are meant to be kept and mature over months or years is a different matter entirely and they really come into their own there. Also in dark beers (coloured with dark malts) the slightest whiff of Demarara can be acceptabe. I prime my dark mild with light brown sugar but only a few grams per bottle. So it's not a question of English bad / Belgian good. As for Harvey's, I can't be bothered researching it, but I suspect their invert sugar is practically colourless. Might be wrong. Check it out if you're bothered. I'm not.

I've seen tubs of No. 3 invert at Harveys.

The signature flavour of Dark Mild is No. 3 invert. You'll struggle to get the right character brewing all malt. Which is the reason most US attempts at Dark Mild taste nothing like the style.

I've drunk plenty of low-gravity beers brewed with sugar which were excellent. The ones from Pattinson's recipes were particularly good.

 

[An Ankoù]

I've seen tubs of No. 3 invert at Harveys.

Did you happen to notice the manufacturer's name?

 

[peebee]

Damn, my "Plan" isn't really working. I think I can come clean now on my motives for this thread (the "cheating").

It was a (thinly veiled) attempt to get large numbers to click that "off-site link" (to my thread on "Jim's Beer Kit" forum) in the OP. That off-site thread had a chance of attaining 10,000 hits within one year (anniversary in a week); a remarkable number for a small UK home brewing forum. And I like tidy numbers (I may come back to that).

But that is not irrelevant to this thread! Although that off-site thread has a different title (about late 19th C. and early 20th C. beer) it was mostly concerned with "Brewer's Invert Sugar", because UK brewing at that time did encompass quite a lot of "Brewer's Invert Sugar". The "remarkable number" of hits can be seen as an indication of how desperate home brewers are to secure some "Brewer's Invert Sugar".

And I was offering a simple means of attaining that product. Using sound evidence to back it up. Creating an emulation that wasn't just cheap and easy, but a whole lot closer to the reality than the popular outrageously complicated (time consuming, expensive, ... dangerous even!) alternatives. And it doesn't matter if the ingredients are cheap (i.e. not created by charlatans trying to deprive you of your money), from a Supermarket, etc., they produced a result based on documented evidence.

But what of the "caramelized invert sugar" ideas going about, such as those in Ron Pattinson's 2014 book? Ron Pattinson is a historian. He likes "documented evidence". The words "historian" and "bigot" just do not go together, and he has been lurking about this thread and hasn't personally complained, has he? Oh aye, and he doesn't mind a bit of bribery ... err ... Has everyone noticed he's got a new book out soon? It'll be called "Stout!" and has to be essential reading to any of us ... (@patto1ro: I hereby relinquish any claim for sales commission on the "Stout!" book).

 

[patto1ro]

Did you happen to notice the manufacturer's name?

Pretty sure it was Ragus.

 

[patto1ro]

Pretty sure it was Ragus.

Or maybe not. Here's a photo.