sugars

[rocket ronnie]

When I brewed in the 8o's I followed Dave Lines book 'Brewing Beers Like Those You Buy'. and I noticed that most recipes stated either dem sugar of soft brown. Knowing that sugar is sugar is there differences between those sugars and household white? I have since moved on to 'Brew Your Own British Real Ale' by G Wheeler and the beers vary greatly from Dave Line. I find G.W beers better to my liking but was wondering about the different sugars. Also I noted daves recipes used more volumes of hops in those days, my taste bubs must have changed. Also if using dem or brown sugars whould you use 'sugar solid invert' on 'Beer Engine' as there are no places for dem/brown sugars.

[Kev888]

I find that plain white sugar leaves very little taste behind after fermentation, the more flavoured ones do seem to have slightly more of a taste to them. To be honest though I only rarely use sugar and then only in really quite strong brews myself, where too much body would be cloying (as the sugars add very little unfermentable matter); these types of brews are unlikely to highlight gentle flavours so i tend to just go with white sugar myself. Maybe someone else has slightly more informed thoughts on that one..

Hops do change a lot over the years and in fact harvest to harvest, so you would have needed different quantities to todays hops to get the same bitterness. The thing to do to match current hops with older recipies is to use the %AA (IIRC Alpha Acids) as an indication of the amount of bittering oils they contain, and some sort of calculator (or a calculation) to estimate what that will mean for the bitterness in the beer. Its not an exact science and nor are the %AAs quoted on hop packets specific to the exact pack you have but it seems to work for me. For info, the calculation involves the %AA, the boil volume, the time the hops are boiled for and the gravity of the wort.

Cheers
kev

[Horatio]

This looks like an interesting piece on brewing with sugars...

http://www.cascadiabrew.com/understandi ... sugars.asp