Question about bulk priming with golden syrup

[duffymoon]

Hello folks, was wondering if anyone had any experience of bulk priming with golden syrup?

I've got a pilsener on & thinking of using the syrup in place of normal sugar to see if there is any improvement in the taste (the brew has been made using a mixture of extra light extract & golden syrup but I have no extract left).

I would normally bulk prime 40 pints of lager with 160g of sugar, so the question is really - does this equate to 160g of golden syrup??

Cheers
DM

[floydmeddler]

I looked into this before and never heard anyone speak of G.S imparting flavour. In fact, it seems that the general consensus is that it's tasteless sadly.

[duffymoon]

Hi Floyd, it's flavour I want to avoid...I don't want my priming sugar to do anything except priming! Unless I've severely messed up it should have a pretty good flavour already

Anyone know if 1g of sugar is roughly equivalent to 1g of tate & lyle golden syrup??

[floydmeddler]

thinking of using the syrup in place of normal sugar to see if there is any improvement in the taste

I thought you were going for taste??

Why not prime with white table sugar? That's tasteless... and cheaper.

[Pinto]

Usually add 15-20% more GS than sugar to counteract the water content of the syrup.

[duffymoon]

Thanks Pinto!

Floyd, sorry I should have explained further. Regular sugar is known for giving brews a slight "twang" - not usually a problem with low priming rates with ales but I was looking to use the syrup instead for my lager because firstly a lager needs more priming sugar than an ale & secondly the flavour is pretty subtle so any unwanted flavours would be more pronounced. The tate & lyle golden syrup is partially inverted sugar (similar to Belgian candi sugar) so supposedly ferments cleaner. Whether this is true or not I thought I needed to test for myself!!

Cheers
DM

[Pinto]

"Twang" is only a problem when large quantities of white sugar are used for the primary ferment tbh - the quantities used to prime a brew should not present a problem at all.

That said, theres nothing wrong with priming with syrup - and better yet you could invert your own white sugar to a colourless glucose syrup easily (same process as making candi sugar, you just dont boil the colour into it) - i'll dig you a method out later.