Alochol

More sugar equals more alcohol (up to a point). Add some corn sugar (dextrose) or malt extract.

Fermentation may be more active and the Beer Machine has to deal with breaking down the foam so it won't plug the airlock - keep an eye on it.

"junkhunter" wrote in news:CF7be.370$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com:

Just add a bit more sugar, an extra 250g in the small model should help, but figure out what percentage your kit is giving and how much you should reasonably add, or someone else might suggest a figure that isn't just a wild guess as to what might be about right.

Use a pure sugar and it shouldn't affect the taste at all while adding some alcohol. Can someone tell me if table sugar is pure? Or is it something in there that makes people so reluctant to use it in brewing? You should be able to pick up a bag of dextrose anywhere that sells home brew supplies anyway.

Note that if the alcohol goes too high the yeast won't cope and will stop fermenting. Then you'll taste the unfernemted sugars. Too high is somewhere around 6 or 7% as I understand it. The thing to remember about the beer machine is that for the fermentation stage it's just a small carboy as far as you're concerned, so anything you read on homebrew information sites is going to apply once you adjust for size.

taught me a fair bit about the theory and practice of what I was doing. No matter how simple to use your equipment may be, it's nice to know just what's going on in there.

Apologies for things I've told you that you already know. Abject apologies for things I've told you that are wrong, I'm sure the nice people here will let us know about those.

peter

Thanks to all of you for the information it is very helpful ....

"Pure" is relative and subject to a lot of hyperbole. From what I read table sugar (cane sugar) should ferment out completely as should dextrose (corn sugar). All the sugar turns into alcohol . . .

Digressing for a bit . . . regarding hype and the word "pure." Ivory Soap has been "new and improved" some hundreds of times since it was introduced in the 1800's, yet it has always been "99.9% pure" (what?) Do they really thing I'm stupid enough to believe they can fiddle with the last .1% and make a real difference in the product? All they gotta do is fool some people into thinking the product is better because the packaging has changed.

I stick with maltose, but that's mainly because there was a lot of propaganda about cane sugar causing a cidery taste. It is entirely possible that maltose masks the cidery taste that would be present in all beer except for the masking effect. Frankly I don't know.

I make very good beer using all maltose, so, for the time being, I plan to continue making all maltose beer. The difference in cost? Not significant compared to good beer, the labor of love, and the spiritual sanctity of food. but that's just an opinion . . .

Read the theory, listen to the experts, all you want; in the end do what works for you. This is art and science. Learn the science; practice the art. Or, to express it another way: there are no experts.

Some yeasts are supposed (advertised) to go to 20% (distiller's yeasts). Champagne yeast tolerates ~10% with no problems. Now . . . if you brew with maltose and use a champagne yeast, that doesn't mean you get champagne. You get some bastard of a brew that may be good but don't expect to match some other style just based on ingredients. Ditto: baker's yeast pitched into wort doesn't yield bread, but makes pretty good beer, but it may not pin down the style you're trying for. In the 2-6% range it is dependant on the yeast and sugar- almost anything works - outside that you may need to let it ferment longer (below 2% who will ever know?)

Regarding carboys and sugar and percents of alcohol: I figure on about .8% per pound of fermentable sugar in five gallons of liquid. (or did back when I used a hydrometer)

Excellent site.

No need for the disclaimer. Some of the experts just need to realize we should all advance the art of homebrew. No one has all the answers, no one controls all the variables - not to mention the most important variable: One's individual taste!

Unless we all start brewing in passivated stainless steel with ingredients from the same place, and time, with equipment that came off the same cookie cutter . . .

Thomas Edison had something to say about that. He wrote something like "you read about an expert's knowledge and trust it because of the name associated with it, but when you do the experiment, you find that the idea isn't supported by the experiment." (not verbatim - too lazy to look it up, and I really don't think T.E. was a scientist, just a guy trying to make a buck from other people's discoveries, like Bill Gates, half a brain and a lot of showmanship and greed)

99.44%

On Mon, 25 Apr 2005 18:29:24 -0400, default said in alt.beer.home-brewing:

The cidery taste is mainly due to old kits that, coincidentally, told you to add sugar. (It's cheaper to get the alcohol content up that way than for them to add more extract.) It's the "old" part that makes the beer cidery-tasting. Sugar, whether malt, corn sugar, milk sugar or table sugar, won't do it. Using anything other than malt

*will*, however, make the beer "thinner" tasting.

Hi, I think the problem with adding maltose up the alcholol level that is alters the malt - hops balance? That is with just pure maltose you a re altering the taste.

To me rather than add some of the more expensive spray malts with hops, I have been buying two cheap kits in tins (like coopers) and combining them into one brew. I have found it to be very effective especially for stouts and draughts.

Try adding mash grains to a kit too. I found that to be a easy way to fortify the guts into it.

Cheers

On Mon, 2 May 2005 19:41:37 +1200, "Hataitai" said in alt.beer.home-brewing:

No. If you have a wort that's short on malt, adding malt will bring it up to where it should be. One would assume that you have the correct amount of hops added at each stage.

Yes, you are. Water needs to have its taste altered if you want to turn it into beer. Otherwise you could just make Budweiser (by adding a few drops of yellow food coloring to water).

Or just start with malt and hops. There's no need to spend the extra money on a kit, when all that's in a kit is malt and hops. And, by using your own malt and hops, you know what you're getting.

People add sugar (of one sort or another) to increase the alcohol content. Mashing specialty grains doesn't do that, it just adds flavor and/or color.

Hi,

I thought that the originator of this thread was just replacing added sugar in the recipy with malt, i.e. not adding more malt, hence my advice.

Yes adding malt will alter the taste which is the purpose of brewing , but most people prefer to retain the hop taste as well.

Lastly given the nature of the question gave the impression that the originator of the thread was inexperienced, I would never recommend to a begiiner that they try this until they have kits working well, followed by what that person was doing which was experiemting with ading taste.

Cheers