Brewing Sugars: Finding your sugary zen
Possibly one of the most often repeated myths in homebrewing is to never use sugar. The main rap you’ll hear is that sugar makes your beer taste cidery. That’s the real myth. You’ll hear other negatives about sugar — “it doesn’t add any flavor to your beer”; “it cheapens your beer”; “it’s bad for the yeast”; “real beer doesn’t use sugar.”
It’s all a part of the same puritanical purity that derides anything that moves away from the four blessed beer ingredients of the past 500 years. Don’t let malt machismo dissuade you from discovering the power of sugar. We see value in using sugar in our beer and see no value in setting it aside!
Let’s take a look at what brewers get wrong about sugar before we focus on the available types of sugar and what they can bring to your beer. The first thing to remember about sugar — it’s a modern miracle. Until the 1800s sugar was a remarkable luxury. Today, thanks to industrialization, we are awash in free flowing sugar crystals. Whether or not that’s the best thing for our health, we’ll leave to others.
The Miracle At Our Tables
When you think sugar, you probably think of that industrial, snow-white crystalline product called table sugar. Refined from sugar cane or sugar beets, it’s the stuff that makes the world sweet. In beer making it’s primary purpose is to raise the gravity and thin the body of your beer.
Ok, you get why it’s a good thing to raise the gravity, but thin the body? Why would you do that?!?
For that, you need to look to the Belgians. Belgian beer is often driven by a notion of “digestibility.” In the US, we might use words like drinkability — same idea. It just means you can drink these beers without getting filled up, the way you might from a high-gravity all-malt beer. Like most solid (non-liquid) sugars, table sugar comes in at about 45 ppg (points/pound/gallon), which means that adding one pound (0.45 kg) to 5 gallons (19 L) of wort will raise the gravity by 9 points.
The sugar can be either added to the boil (which is what we usually do) or added to the fermenting beer. Some people claim that adding sugar after fermentation helps to get the yeast off to a good start so it can easily deal with the added gravity of the sugar. And while it is true that yeast prefer to uptake simple sugars and adding sugar to the boil “could” lead to stalled fermentations we’ve found that if you pitch an appropriate amount of healthy yeast, waiting on the sugar additions isn’t necessary. One exception might be if you’re brewing a very high gravity beer and have big sugar additions. Otherwise the benefits are basically negligible.
Sugar also plays into people’s mistaken rescue strategy for a stuck ferment. “Add sugar, it will dry your beer out!” Wrong! “Wait, didn’t you just say that above?” Yes, but in terms of a planned addition that replaces part of your malt. If your fermentation is stuck — nothing about adding sugar will magically dry it out. If you’re lucky, the yeast will start to ferment again, but sugar doesn’t have the nutrients that yeast that have stalled really need. (Usually a ferment stalls from yeast health issues including a lack of sufficient nutrients and glycogen.)
About this cidery thing — this idea seems to come from the “bad old days” of “kit and a kilo” brewing. This is in reference to recipe kits of old that contained a 3.3-lb. (1.5-kg) can of hopped liquid extract to which you added a kilogram of table sugar. The sugar was an important addition as the extract was created to leave residual body because they assumed you’d add the sugar to add gravity to the small amount of extract and thin out the beer. This is less of a concern today.
Informal testing done in the late 90s showed that the real culprit was the extract, not the sugar. These kits sat on shelves for quite a while and the liquid extract went stale. Because the sugar was tasteless it didn’t cover the stale off flavor and the sugar got the blame. Even today, if you’re using extract, make sure you get the fresh stuff! A great and busy homebrew store will buy in bulk drums and run through it before it gets stale.
Experienced (read old and crusty) brewers in the know would say that you should use more extract rather than sugar. That made a certain sense. The fresher extract helped cover the flavors from the stale extract. But that isn’t appropriate for every style — particularly ones that you want to finish dry like a saison or a Pilsner. If you have fresh ingredients to start with it’s also unnecessary.
Looking Beyond The Table
Don’t stop at the regular bags of white sugar or corn sugar, start hunting in other parts of the grocery store (or even other stores all together!) Other types of solid sugars that you can find in your local grocery store include brown sugar, demerara sugar, and raw sugars like piloncillo (a Mexican sugar in a cone shape) or jaggery.
Don’t let malt machismo dissuade you from discovering the power of sugar.
Regular brown sugar is simply the white sugar with a measured amount of molasses added back in. The slight molasses flavor seldom lasts through fermentation. We find it of little value and recommend to just use white sugar in its place. The exception here is if you’re using a lot of brown sugar in a very light beer without a lot of other flavors in it. In that case, you may be able to detect the brown sugar. If you really want to use brown sugar — go find the good stuff — particularly true molasses brown sugars. Those flavors will lend an interesting punch.
Piloncillo is a raw sugar that is often referred to as Mexican sugar. It’s made by boiling cane juice into a thick syrup and pouring it into a mold to cool. It has a rich, caramel, and molasses type of flavor, even though no molasses is added to it. Piloncillo has a deep, complex flavor. Caveat: Denny has seen some piloncillo that has oil added to it to help it maintain its shape. Check the label before you buy (really you should be doing this anyway.) Jaggery sugar has a similar sweet, earthy flavor profile and is made from palm, coconut, or java plants.
Other sugars that you might want to check out for brewing include demerara, which has toffee notes (think Sugar in the Raw in the US), sucanat (made from crystallized cane sugar with a high proportion of molasses with an intense, slightly burnt flavor), muscovado with a strong molasses flavor, and turbinado with a light caramel flavor, which is made from the first pressing of the cane and retains more molasses than brown sugar.
While we’re on the subject of solid sugars, let’s mention rock candi sugar. There’s a reason we left it until the end of this section — we’ve never found that it does much, if anything, for your beer that table sugar doesn’t do. Even the darker ones add little to no color to your beer.
Years ago, Denny did a blindfolded taste test to see what he thought about rock sugar. He couldn’t tell one type from another. We consider it a waste of money. But if you’ve used it before and like it, be our guest. (Note — Drew has seen rock candi sugar at some very well known Belgian breweries, but really it’s still no reason to use it.)
Going Liquid
Candi syrup, on the other hand, can have a huge impact on your beer’s flavor, especially in Belgian styles. The first time Denny used candi syrup to make a Belgian dark strong ale, his reaction was “this is what’s been missing!” There’s a whole world of liquid syrups, and we’re starting with our favorite and easiest to procure.
What makes candi syrup unique? It’s an invert syrup (more on that later) that’s a leftover of the sugar-making process, like molasses. It really shouldn’t surprise you that a waste product with a ton of sugar ended up in the brewing process. It’s a cheap and flavorful boost, because the real stuff carries flavors over from the violent process of creating beet sugar. (It’s a seriously nasty bit of chemistry.)
Prior to the importation of proper candi syrup in the US (by Dark Candi, Inc. – now part of Country Malt Group), brewers trying to recreate the potent magic of a Belgian quad like Westvleteren 12 threw massively complex grain bills at the problem. With Dark Candi’s introduction, the creation of a proper Belgian quad become an act of simplicity – some pale malt, some dark candi syrup and proper yeast management. It’s truly astonishing stuff.
These days other competitors have risen, including Candi Syrup Inc., which sells syrups by color impact from clear to 45 to 180 to the potent 240. Any of these syrups we’ve tried deliver a punch and a half for so little effort. Drew, when brewing a big batch of beer, will often split the wort in two and dose one part with a candi syrup to change the color, boost the gravity, and send it to a different place altogether from the first one.
The important part about these syrups is that, well, they’re syrupy — they flow like honey (a topic for another day) instead of binding up. It’s not just a matter of water content. It’s a matter of crystallization. If you mixed table sugar into water, boiled it to a syrup consistency and let it sit — it will slowly recrystallize. The sugar molecules will do their best to take a nap in their favorite low energy state.
If the sugar molecules have been “inverted” — which is chemistry shorthand for an orientation shift in the arrangement — the molecules can no longer align into their crystalline state and remain free flowing. Also importantly, from a brewer’s perspective — invert sugar syrups are easier to use and more available to the yeast. (Regular sugar molecules require some enzymatic work on the part of the yeast before they chomp down — think like how you cut a piece of meat for a young kid.) Inverting sugar is a matter of heating the sugar in syrup form, lightly acidifying and letting it ride in temperatures like you’re making candy. A little time, heat, and magic works wonders. (Again, we find that healthy vital yeast obviates the need for this step since the yeast can utilize non-inverted sugar just fine, but some brewers swear by it.)
There is one place where invert syrups are impossible to dismiss and Drew would argue that makes it impossible for American brewers to really recreate the low-gravity, full- flavor magic of British ales. The British have a whole series of Brewer’s Invert Syrups that, like the Belgian Candi Syrups, range from the pale (think Lyle’s Golden syrup) to “How is that not burnt”? These carry a different set of flavors than the Belgian Candi syrups.
These British syrups are unique and unfortunately, not available in the US at the homebrewer level. Ask “Dr. Google” to give you results on “British Brewing Invert” syrup to get a few articles on how to daredevil your own or cheat with blackstrap molasses and pale sugar! (And trust us when we say — it’s another world of difference.) We’ve seen a lot of recipes to make your own candi syrup, and tasted more than a few beers made with homemade syrups. None that we’ve tried have the depth of flavor that the commercial candi syrups have. There are reports of good homemade versions of the British syrups, so look around for recipes if you have time on your hands!
So if you’ve been avoiding sugar or trying to figure out how to use it, give it a go. It just could be the ingredient you need to perfect your next batch.
