Brown Rice syrup and Monk juice in Tonic water

The Homebrew Forum

Help Support The Homebrew Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Richie_asg1

Junior Member
Joined
Mar 31, 2016
Messages
1,034
Reaction score
462
Location
Aberdeen
Yes I've never heard of them either!
But I was browsing into the ingredients of tonic water as I do have a soda stream I wondered if it was possible to make the syrup concentrate myself.
Then this happened-
41JBgKkIkNL._SX425_.jpg

Most people know that quinine is the main flavouring of tonic water, but using the Cinchona bark to brew your own is risky because you don't know what concentration you are making. Effects of overdose are nausea, vomiting, vertigo, incurable tinnitus, heart arrhythmia and...death.
Using the rough chopped bark is safer as there is less extracted, erring on the smallest quantity recipe you can find safer still, and so far the best method I have seen is to replace at least half of it by weight with another bittering bark instead.
So how much do you really need in a tonic water?

I found this syrup produced for sodastreams that contains the mysterious Brown rice syrup and Monk Fruit Juice.
https://www.lakeland.co.uk/content/documents/62059_label_1.pdf
It seems it does have quinine in there at 0.01%, but not sure if that is in the finished syrup or the made up drink, and am inclined to think it is the concentrate due to no mention of "when diluted to...")
With that in mind I think I will abandon the idea of quinine as I'm not suffering from malaria and just use the other ingredients.

Turns out that Monk Fruit Juice is a sweetener - possibly not fermentable as it contains zero calories, and brown rice syrup is 3 versions of glucose - so it is. (maltotriose (52%), maltose (45%), and glucose (3%))

I thought that both these ingredients may be useful in wine or beer and have never heard of them before.
Anybody else used them before or even heard of them?
 
What are you attempting to make?

I've heard of both. As you say monk fruit is used as a sweetener (people use it instead of things like stevia). The brown rice syrup is unlikely to add any flavour (if your making beer) it'll just up the ABV%. So you could just use flaked/torrified rice instead
 
I was amazed they could extract glucose from the brown rice actually. Maybe they malt it the same way as barley still in the husk?

The quest was originally to make some tonic water based on sugars rather than aspartame. I'm not forking out £6 for a bottle of sugar syrup. But if the result is death I would rather pay the £6. :laugh8:
 

Latest posts

Back
Top