© 2024, Randy Mosher / Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine
Back in the Dark Ages of homebrewing, the revolutionary idea was to use 100% malt instead of the 50:50 malt extract + corn sugar recipes popular since Prohibition. That relegated sugar to pariah status, but a little history and experimentation ultimately revealed that sugar can be a fascinating and versatile partner in the brewhouse.
Belgium is home to the one European beer tradition known for employing sugar. Monastic-style ale and other strong-ish brews benefit from sugar’s ability to lighten a beer’s body, making it less ponderous (and more dangerous!). More than anywhere else, beer in Belgium is viewed as core to its gastronomy, so this makes perfect sense. Big beers with crisp and lively characters make superb food-pairing partners.
In Belgium, it wasn’t until the beet sugar industry ramped up in the late nineteenth century that brewers had easy access to sugar for brewing. According to some sources, the strong ales we think of as typically Belgian were partly a response to the government’s post WWI ban on the sale of spirits (genever) in cafés, which left patrons thirsting for something strong-ish. In these strong ales sugar is a required ingredient, adding drinkability—something unnecessary in normal strength beers.
Sugar’s body-lightening ability is a crucial part of style guidelines for most stronger Belgian ales, including strong golden ales, tripels and most abbey-type and Trappist ales. I have judged a fair number of tripels that the brewer apparently thought could be improved upon by using 100% malt. Bad idea. Such brews lack the light-on-their-feet quality of the real thing and often make poor partners in food pairings.
Aside from Belgium, there aren’t really any other brewing traditions employing sugar for artisanal purposes, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be countless options just waiting for your resourcefulness and creativity to bring to life.
Sugar in beer: a little history
In preindustrial times, practically no pure sugar was available, with honey often the only available source. Experts have speculated that fermented diluted honey may have been humanity’s first alcoholic beverage, as the only required technology is a vessel to contain it. Honey in beer is chemically documented in the “Neolithic grog”—as anthropologist Pat McGovern calls it—that was found in the Phrygian King Midas’ c. 700 BCE tomb and later reinterpreted in Dogfish Head’s Midas Touch. Aside from sporadic use in meads and honey beers called braggots, sugar was a rarity for millennia.
Sugar production from cane began in India 3,000 years ago but was not on an industrial scale until the seventeenth century on hellish slave plantations in the West Indies. Back then it was so valuable it had to be locked up in the homes of the privileged few who could afford it. Only later did industrialized production make sugar affordable enough for brewing. The earliest documented use I have found for sugar (as opposed to honey) in brewing goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century when Tizard (1857) mentions how brewers loved the “luscious” flavor of “concrete” unrefined sugars in their IPAs. This was illegal until after some disastrous British barley harvests, when in 1847 the government allowed the use of sugar so long as a tax based on the equivalent gravity was paid. As the beers of the day were relatively strong, this made sense in light of sugar’s ability to enhance drinkability.
Sugar types for brewing
Which sugar to use in a particular recipe depends on what you want it to accomplish. First is simply thinning the body by diluting the malted barley. This is the case in Belgian strong golden ales such as Duvel, where corn sugar (dextrose/glucose) supplies twenty percent of the gravity and adds no flavor of its own.
In discussing more characterful possibilities, it’s useful to review the sugar refining process. Juice, whether from cane, sugar beets or palm sap, is heated to evaporate most of the water. While not an objective, this does add some caramelization. At some point the syrup becomes so dense it can be poured into molds where it solidifies into “concrete” sugars like Piloncillo.
The heating processes for different concrete sugars vary, and so does the degree of caramelization and depth of color. Keep in mind that caramelization is a distinct process from the kind of Maillard browning defining most malt types, bringing its own unique set of flavor compounds. Because of how they’re produced, caramel/crystal malts can have some caramelized flavors, like the burnt marshmallow notes of caramel 80–120 °L, but they’re not the same as cooked sugars. Caramelized sugar, wherever you find it, gives the brewer a broader range of flavors than those contributed by malt alone.
In addition to their pleasant flavors, unrefined sugars offer a hidden benefit: they contain a range of fatty acids. These are insignificant for their own sake, but are meaningful precursors for particular esters formed by fermentation, adding unique vinous, “rummy” and other characters to a beer. Barley wine springs to mind.
Alternatively, the sugar in the concentrated syrup can be encouraged to crystallize. What remains is molasses, consisting of non-crystalizing impurities; this is removed. Molasses has some history in brewing, especially of the weak “small” beers such as the 1757 recipe in George Washington’s hand. And of course it is the main raw material in most rums. The sugar crystals at this point still contain a little molasses, and these come in various types: demerara, muscovado, turbinado and others. Further refining removes virtually all the impurities, resulting in white sugar. It should be noted that the brown sugar found in grocery stores is nothing more exotic than white sugar with a little molasses mixed in.
Brewing sugars known as “sucre candi” or “kandijsuiker” in Belgium are often in syrup form. Starting with relatively pure sugar, controlled heating adds color and flavor. These come in a number of different colors from amber to brown to near-black. Each has its own set of flavors, and they’re often quite different from kilned or roasted malts, expanding the brewer’s palette of flavors. The famous dark Trappist ales of Rochefort employ caramelized syrups to great effect, with creamy, milk-chocolate notes. Brasserie d’Achouffe is also said to rely solely on cooked sugars for their beers’ color, impacting their flavors as well. `
While less common today, kettle caramelization can add a layer of rich flavors to beers. It was not uncommon in nineteenth-century Belgium, for example, to boil worts for eight to twenty hours to darken them. To a far lesser extent, this is a benefit of decoctions, where even a brief, partial mash boil of ten or fifteen minutes can add rich maltiness to pilsners and bocks. It is even possible to run off a small amount of first wort into the kettle and boil it until it’s reduced to a syrup, making a little pool of caramel. Keep a close eye on this, as browning happens very rapidly once the water is driven off. The rest of the wort can then be run onto this, dissolving it.
The ancient technique of heating wort or mash with hot stones achieves a similar effect, sometimes with smokiness from the fire. Wort caramelizes onto the rocks as a sugary crust, dissolving when added to the wort during fermentation.
Aggressive wort caramelization comes with a caveat. Modern brewing science generally tells us that this is detrimental to the proteins responsible for body and head in beer, and may create compounds that accelerate staling.
Brewing with Sugar
This really is pretty simple: just add it to the kettle. Granular and syrup types can just be stirred in until they’ve dissolved. Broken-up concrete sugars may need more stirring to make sure the lumps are dissolved.
Solid and granular sugars are completely fermentable and can be calculated at 100% yield of their weight. Honey and syrups typically contain somewhere in the neighborhood of 25–30% water, so figure them at those percentages of their weight. For more precise metric, weigh a specific volume and do the math; comparing it to water will give you OG of the syrup.
Brewing Sugars Around the World
Sucrose: Not recommended, as it is difficult to ferment
Glucose/Dextrose: No flavor, but ideal for simply adding gravity/alcohol
Demerara: Lighter, partially-refined sugar with subtle flavors; paler beers
Muscovado: Like above, but darker and more intense
Barbados: Hard to find, but elegant rummy character
Thai palm sugar: Comes in pale and darker types; pale is subtle, luscious
Rapadura: Brazilian concrete cane sugar; bright and a little grassy (pronounced “HOP-a-doo-ra”)
Jaggery/Gur: From India; may be cane or palm, which has subtle maple character
Pilonçillo/Panela: Darkish raw cane sugar from Mesoamerica; rich, delicious
Gula Jawa: Very dark, rich, fudgy Thai palm sugar
Taiwan Black Sugar: Dark, minerally, definitely toffee-like
The best brewers I know are always looking for more tools in their kit, no matter how subtle or classic their brews. Long considered unworthy for serious beers, sugars can play many important roles in brewing and definitely deserve a second look. They make great additions to desserts and things like barbecue sauce as well.