Brewer's Invert Sugar - the painless way!

[peebee]

This is a follow-on from Brewer's Invert Sugar (Part II)

The scenario is you have a beer recipe.

It's asking for "Invert Sugar", "No.1", "No.2", "No.3", even "No.4" if really unlucky!

You look about and no-one seems to sell it (you can buy it, but it costs loads and you may have to get 25Kg of the sticky stuff). All the suggestions are to make it yourself. There are published instructions on the Internet, but all seem to involve boiling sugar syrups for ages and ages to get the right colour. And boiling sugar syrup is flippin' hot!

Most give up at this point, and hardly surprisingly. But what if you were to learn there is actually no need to boil sugar solution for hours on end, or at all for that matter! In fact, no-one in the breweries ever did that! That you could make an imitation much (much!) closer to the original from stuff you can buy from the Supermarket! It will use a method not dis-similar to that used by Ragus ... the last UK sugar refiners to still make Brewer's Invert Sugar. And yes, even Ragus make an "imitation" because the original raw materials don't exist anymore.

So put away the saucepans for boiling sugar syrup and follow these simple instructions (for which you need only your kitchen scales!).

(This is an >off-site link< for now ... to "Jim's Beer Kit" forum. The responses will dictate how I present the instructions on this forum. Possibly another "treatise" in my signature space below?).

 

[chthon]

So put away the saucepans for boiling sugar syrup and follow these simple instructions (for which you need only your kitchen scales!).

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.

 

[Pennine]

If it's as simple as using table sugar and muscado, could one technically skip both and just add a bit of molasses to get some of the flavours from adding invert while keeping the malt bill hearty rather than using any sugar?

 

[peebee]

@chthon : Ah, badly placed brand name. Billington's is good for the UK and a few other places. There was a brand in the US, forget its name ... but "Muscovado" did seem a generic name that might point to more or less the same stuff wherever you are (not the Continent you say?). Names like "Demerara" seemed to mean wildly different things to different people. "Brown Sugar" could mean anything! And the likes of "Molasses Sugar" didn't seem to mean anything to some, even to folk in the UK.

Billington's Muscovado if fairly variable too, hence I don't try to dictate very tight quantities any longer. I have learnt in the course of this little "project", small differences to the sugar quantities will go un-noticed!

 

[brewSJ]

So what do your mixtures taste like? I've been through the back issues of the Journal of the Institute of Brewing, and that's the one thing no one seems to discuss (I guess you're just supposed to know already).

 

[peebee]

If it's as simple as using table sugar and muscado, could one technically skip both and just add a bit of molasses to get some of the flavours from adding invert while keeping the malt bill hearty rather than using any sugar?

Possibly? Any solution is just a blip in someone else's solution. (Crikey, I'm getting all fisilofical now ... or sumit like that?).

 

[peebee]

So what do your mixtures taste like? I've been through the back issues of the Journal of the Institute of Brewing, and that's the one thing no one seems to discuss (I guess you're just supposed to know already).

You are in danger of being pointed directly to the last line of my off-site post!

But I'll relent! Taste comparisons were done with the Ragus products. Just one product? ... At this moment in time there is only one!



[EDIT: In the States you do have a producer of a product for the home brew market. I don't think they will be very happy with me!]

 

[Pennine]

[EDIT: In the States you do have a producer of a product for the home brew market. I don't think they will be very happy with me!]

Do share?

 

[peebee]

Do share?

It used to be advertised on Ron P.'s blog site ... but not no more. It was flippin' expensive delivered over here. And couldn't possibly compete with what we already have (and I do know how that sounds!).

 

[Pennine]

It used to be advertised on Ron P.'s blog site ... but not no more. It was flippin' expensive delivered over here. And couldn't possibly compete with what we already have (and I do know how that sounds!).

I wonder if it's Beckers and yes it's crazy expensive, $28 for 3 pounds.

 

[peebee]

So what do your mixtures taste like? I've been through the back issues of the Journal of the Institute of Brewing, and that's the one thing no one seems to discuss (I guess you're just supposed to know already).

You are in danger of being pointed directly to the last line of my off-site post!

But I'll relent! Taste comparisons were done with the Ragus products. Just one product? ... At this moment in time there is only one!



[EDIT: In the States you do have a producer of a product for the home brew market. I don't think they will be very happy with me!]

I seem to have a bit more time to answer this query now. The anticipated steamroller of questions never rolled over me! So ...



@brewSJ: You've been through the back issues of the "Journal of the Institute of Brewing"? Pretty heroic! Probably (certainly?) many more than I have.

When I started this project almost a year ago, I'd got hold of samples of Ragus block Invert Sugar (No.1 to 3). The first thing I did was taste the No.3 (they call it "Dark" now). It tasted virtually identical to raw brown sugar (like Muscovado) ... and so, the journey started.

There's no reason to think it would taste of anything else! Ragus make their Invert Sugar much as I'm doing: Flavouring an inert base syrup with a molasses. They use an inert invert syrup, I don't bother with the "inversion" business and just use a crystalised Sucrose sugar base (I couldn't find any advantage in using "invert syrup" for home brewers, though some insist it does make a difference?). I also occasionally used some "dextrose" (aka. glucose or corn sugar) as it did modify the nature of the fermentation, but not the flavour as I could detect.

The "traditional" starting point would have been created in the sugar fields/plantations using "evaporating pans" to reduce the volume of material (juice squeezed out of sugar canes). This would have been the most heat the sugars got subjected to and would create the dark "molasses" (some caramelising, perhaps "Maillard" reaction products although at the time no-one had heard of "Maillard"!). Sucrose would have crystallised out of these liquids (it hasn't an extremely high solubility like glucose and fructose), and that product would have gone on for further refining.

"Jaggery" is perhaps the nearest we can get to the original source material, but I haven't explored this as yet.



As for caramelising invert sugars, manipulating pH to get the "Maillard" reactions, etc. ... complete and utter hokum! (Insert own, preferably rude, word in place of "hokum"). I don't know where these ideas sprang from, possibly UK home brewers in the 1970 or 80s? I believed in these daft ideas, only a year ago (see the start of that off-site thread I linked in the OP)! Caramelised sugars have crept into beer over time, but it never had anything to do with "brewer's invert sugar".

 

[brewSJ]

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.

 

[Clarence]

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/

 

[peebee]

This all rather begs the question: Why? ...

Humm ... I guess from the way that "question" is phrased, you're not looking for an answer. So, the question was utterly un-necessary.

"Candi" <sic> sugar was never intended to be part of this topic, but that link to a bunch actually producing "Candi" sugar on an industrial scale is scary. Very scary! I never guessed at the huge scale of gullibility associated in turning out those "Belgian" <sic> fantasies (they can't even spell "candy" let alone translate it to Belgian/Flemish. [@chthon ... have you seen this? ] Thanks for picking that out! It is certainly educational! Like you imagined, no respectable Belgian brewery is going to buy in such ridiculous foreign products. (BTW; there's no "tradition" of using "Candi" <sic> sugar in Belgium; the stuff might have been "invented" by the same folk who came up with caramelised "invert syrups").

Belgian breweries used "Invert Syrups" like the Brits. But also, any other forms of sugar they could lay their hands on (they were quite imaginative, even recycling sugar scrap from the many candy retailers - apparently, I need to double-check with @chthon, the "man-on-the-ground").

 

[Pennine]

Humm ... I guess from the way that "question" is phrased, you're not looking for an answer. So, the question was utterly un-necessary.

"Candi" <sic> sugar was never intended to be part of this topic, but that link to a bunch actually producing "Candi" sugar on an industrial scale is scary. Very scary! I never guessed at the huge scale of gullibility associated in turning out those "Belgian" <sic> fantasies (they can't even spell "candy" let alone translate it to Belgian/Flemish. [@chthon ... have you seen this? ] Thanks for picking that out! It is certainly educational! Like you imagined, no respectable Belgian brewery is going to buy in such ridiculous foreign products. (BTW; there's no "tradition" of using "Candi" <sic> sugar in Belgium; the stuff might have been "invented" by the same folk who came up with caramelised "invert syrups").

Belgian breweries used "Invert Syrups" like the Brits. But also, any other forms of sugar they could lay their hands on (they were quite imaginative, even recycling sugar scrap from the many candy retailers - apparently, I need to double-check with @chthon, the "man-on-the-ground").

In their defense, they do have a really nice bunch of clone recipes for quite a few of the best from Belgium.
https://www.candisyrup.com/recipes.html
I guess these are just invert too... Hmm

 

[An Ankoù]

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.

 

[Clarence]

Humm ... I guess from the way that "question" is phrased, you're not looking for an answer. So, the question was utterly un-necessary.

Hmm. I guess rhetoric isn't really your forte, is it, old chap.
What is utterly unnecessary is a reworking of two earlier threads that tell us nothing very much about brewers invert sugar anyway. Happily, I don't need to repeat what Ankou has said above.

As a matter of interest, we're using the candisyrup recipe for Westvleteren 8 using what we can reasonably get hold of. Ankou has sourced candi sugar lumps of the same colour as D-180 in the Netherlands and I'm thinking of "rendering down" some unrefined sugar until I get what I judge to be 350 ebc. He's cultured the yeast from a bottle and I'll use the prescribed White Labs or Wyeast product. There certainly won't be any molasses or black treacle going in there. It'll be interesting to taste the results. Three excellent beers, no doubt (including the original), whether they taste similar remains to be seen.

 

[jof]

Interesting discussion.
If my beer requires it, I just use whatever soft dark sugar I can find at a reasonable price, usually from Lidl.
After all, we are not all made of money.

 

[Sadfield]

I don't really get the issue with Belgian use of sugar either. Most use of candi sugar is to replicate current and recent trappiste and Abbaye beers, not historic, so ingredients are likely similar.

Most of these threads appear to be selecting the history to fit the methodology, rather than altering the methodology to fit the history.

I'm wondering if making invert would have less hassle than sourcing samples and alternative ingredients then running numerous trials for analysis. Starting it off in a pan, then transfer to an oven for prolonged and controlled heating, is the best method I've heard.

 

[An Ankoù]

Interesting discussion.
If my beer requires it, I just use whatever soft dark sugar I can find at a reasonable price, usually from Lidl.
After all, we are not all made of money.

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.