Sugar...

[Clint]

I wonder if it was because it's easy to use..?

 

[Rodcx500z]

Hmm...it seems adding sugar isn't as "bad" as I thought...I have a few kilo of dextrose but might get a few kilo of Silver spoon in too..
I like the points made about subbing out some malt for sugar to get a bit extra from your supplies.

Clint i buy the big bags in iceland

 

[BeerCat]

I make golden syrup and add 20% to my RIS's.

 

[Sadfield]

Sugar is cheap nowadays, but sugar used to be more expensive.

Somewhere deep down in Shut Up About Barclay-Perkins, Ronald Pattinson has an analysis on the price of sugar vs. the price of malt (I think between the wars), and came to the conclusion that there was a very good reason to use sugar in brewing, because almost all British brewers used it, even though using malt would have been cheaper.

One reason I recall from his Scottish talk was, different darkened sugars were used for colour adjustment post primary fermentation. So that the same beer could be sold to different regions based on customer expectation of how the beer should look.

 

[airymary]

I think sugar is an unduly maligned adjunct amongst home brewers. My first kit beers back in the 80s were always the contents of the kit can, plus a bag of sugar. Produced very acceptable beers. As others have said, it raises the alcohol content, but I use it in all grain brews as posted previously, to emulate commercial brews.

I also agree that it helps you get more beers from a sack of malt. The 300 to 400g I add to the boiler let me get 5 x 45L brewlength beers from a 25kg sack. Target gravity being a 'robust' session beer of around 4% abv.

I've used sugar to prime beer when racked into cornies - something else that's often said can't or shouldn't be done. When all's said and done, if your methods, kit and recipes produce the beer you want to drink, then you've got it right, whatever the purists might say!

 

[Drunkula]

It's adding back yeast and wasting some of the first pint that I don't recommend sugar priming a corny - you waste far more than the cost of the gas. You save about 9p doing it with sugar, and it'll cost you an extra 15p over the gas if you use dextrose.

 

[Sadfield]

It's adding back yeast and wasting some of the first pint that I don't recommend sugar priming a corny - you waste far more than the cost of the gas. You save about 9p doing it with sugar, and it'll cost you an extra 15p over the gas if you use dextrose.

Depends what you are aiming for. Force carbonation and secondary fermentation are two different things. Each appropriate to different styles.

 

[Keruso]

Hello all,
I've been looking through my brew books and the GW book has recipes that use quantities of white sugar.
Does anyone use sugar or dextrose in their ag recipes?
In amounts up to 500g what does sugar or dextrose do and can it alter the taste?

Hi, I use Dextrose frequently, it's often included in big IPA's. A recent article in BYO magazine, and plenty of other resources out there recommend brewers should embrace the use of sugar and don't stick to just the white stuff. It comes in many forms and can introduce a number of effects.
Interestingly there is a debate on table sugar versus dextrose, a couple of articles you may find useful:-

All malt versus some sugar Sugar Additions: All Malt vs. Sugar Added During The Boil | exBEERiment Results!

Dextrose versus table sugar Sugar Additions: Dextrose vs. Sucrose | exBEERiment Results!

 

[Fireside Ales Homebrewery]

Hello all,
I've been looking through my brew books and the GW book has recipes that use quantities of white sugar.
Does anyone use sugar or dextrose in their ag recipes?
In amounts up to 500g what does sugar or dextrose do and can it alter the taste?

Hello. I Have used dark Molasses in a few stouts etc. The flavour from the sugar really comes through. If you are not familiar, the flavour is similar to treacle. I wouldn’t use it in great quantities but it did lend a really rich flavour. I would say that yeasts tend to gobble up such, highly fermentable sugars, often leaving the brew tasting thin. You could compensate for this by mashing at a higher temperature. This encourages more alpha amylase conversion from the starches, or un fermentable sugars to be present, building the body of the brew. You usually mash this way for porters and stouts anyway. However you can end up with a very sweet beer. In conclusion... some sugars can lend themselves quite nicely to certain styles of beer, but I would experiment with small quantities.

 

[Cheshire Cat]

I stopped using table sugar because it did make my brews taste like cider. I have made candy sugar from table sugar and that was fine. I use dextrose to prime my bottles and for adding to IPA's.

 

[Benfleet Brewery]

I'm brewing a tripel soon with 1kg of white sugar in it.

How did this turn out Steve?

 

[strange-steve]

How did this turn out Steve?

My "to-brew" list is a bit fluid and I've actually bumped this in favour of a bretted stout, so the tripel will be next month's brew.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Was listening to Stan Hieronymus on a BeerSmith podcast talking about Brew Like a Monk saying that the breweries were mostly just using normal sugar.

Different practices in Belgium and UK - the Belgians didn't have an empire in the Caribbean so use beet sugar, whereas British brewers had easier access to Caribbean cane sugar and reckoned you could taste the cabbage in beet sugar once it was boiled. So British brewers fairly universally use brewers' sugars that are forms of inverted cane sugar. The British processors use fairly unrefined cane sugar for making invert so there's quite a bit of non-sugar minerals etc which contribute to the flavour aside from the browning reactions that are pretty much essential to the flavour of eg mild. Also they thin and dry out the beer so act as "anti-crystal" - equal quantities of crystal and sugar are a good place to start for British styles but individual breweries vary a lot in their ratio.

The homebrew books of the 1990s used table sugar as an easily available hack to substitute for brewers sugars but golden syrup is a closer match to invert #1, and you can add (small amounts of) treacle to the syrup to simulate the darker inverts if you don't want to go the whole hog of inverting your own.

 

[trueblue]

GW explained his thinking in regards to sugar and his recipes on a forum several years back. The recipes are not scaled down versions of the brewery malt and hop bill but his interpretation of how to brew a beer as close to the original as is possible using ingredients that are available to the home brewer. The use of white sugar is because inverts are not readily available so he adjusts other fermentables to balance taste wise. For what it is worth I did manage to get some commercial invert No.2 and one of the first brews with it was GWs White shield, one I have brewed several times, and there was a difference in taste. One other thing he did state was unless you can get the yeast used by the brewery you can only expect to get a beer similar to the original.