Brewing with Sugar! Are you adding too much to your beer?

It's a silent killer say the health specialists.

It's the devil's food!

Diabetus!

And yet we need to ferment sugar to make beer.

The real question is how much sugar do we need to use in beer?

That answer to that question is kind of like when Gandalf says to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Rings: "A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.”

Which kind of says to me that you should use as much sugar as you need or as little as you need depending on what you need to make great beer.

Sounds like some ropey logic right?

Hear me out.

Have you ever had a beer gusher?

It's when you open your beer and whoosh! the beer zings out in a foaming stream and your beer drinking experience is ruined.

It looks a bit like this:

So in that sense, you don't want to add too much sugar to your beer if you are bottle conditioning with sugar.

But if you are wanting to increase the alcohol content (ABV) of your beer, then you will need to add more sugar at the primary fermentation stage.

And thus it's about knowing when to add sugar to the beer and when not to.

Let's talk about increasing the alcohol % /ABV of your beer

When your beer wort is undergoing fermentation what happens is that the beer yeast eats the sugar and that produces alcohol.

More sugar for the yeast to eat should mean more alcohol production right?

Too easy.

Yes, adding extra sugar to your beer will, in the main, increase your ABV.

A big caution is that the more sugar you put in, the more pressure you may place on the yeast. The more alcohol that is produced, the slower the rate at which fermentation occurs. A keen player will consider adding more yeast nutrients to the wort which may give the original yeast a new lease of life and extend fermentation.

Remember though, the more sugar you add, the sweeter your beer will taste and the greater chance your beer will have that classic 'bad homebrew' taste.

Instead of sugar being used in the primary fermentation stage, many (most?) brewers will use dry malt extract (DME) as their sugar source. If you are wondering where to get some DME, your local brewing shop will have some (it's a rarer find in a supermarket) - it's usually the main ingredient found in beer enhancers!

As a rough guide, an extra pound or 1/2 kg of DME will add an extra half percent to your beer. Doubling that will give you an extra whole percent.

Roughly.

There are some alternative sources of sugar that you might be interested in using too.

Maple syrup

, honey and brown sugar can all be used as well but remember, like jelly beans, they will influence the taste of your beer.

Carbonation drops can be a way to get a uniform amount of sugar into your beer.

So that was adding sugar to beer but what about using less?

Perhaps you are looking to drop some weight and might want to have a lower calorie beer to help with that.

Is adding less sugar to your beer the solution?

No.

The best solution is to cut back on your drinking and get out in the sun and do some fun shit with friends and family.

If you're looking to get a well-conditioned beer that won't explode when you open it, cutting back on the sugar when it's time to bottle your beer is a fine idea.

There are two main schools of thought when bottling beer. One is that you can 'batch prime' the entire batch of beer in one hit or you can add sugar individually to each bottle.

I've been a fan of the latter as doing it feels like I'm really being involved in the process of making beer.

However after many gushers over the past year or so, I've come to the conclusion that for myself, batch priming beer is the way to go.

It also means that I'm adding less sugar to my beer as I am using a single measured amount of sugar to carbonate my beer rather than adding random teaspoons measures of sugar.