I’ve read that to brew an “authentic” English ale you need to include some brewer’s invert sugar syrup. A couple months back,
stpug commented that it was easy to make and posted this link on how to do it.
http://www.unholymess.com/blog/beer-brewing-info/making-brewers-invertSince I’ve become enamored with English ales and it sounded like a fun brewing/cooking evening’s project, I decided to give it a go.
I chose to try the first of the two methods in the link since the ingredients were easily obtainable or on hand. I had lactic acid and the local supermarket sold a 4 lb. package of Sugar-In-The-Raw turbinado for $6.65. (No sense in making just a little) So, recipe was:
4 pints water
4 lbs. Sugar-in-the Raw
8 ml. lactic acid (88%)
.25 lb. corn sugar
Aside: I didn’t have a remote reading thermometer but my quick read, pen style thermometer worked fine (Javelin Pro, similar to Thermopen).
Bring water to boil, turn off heat and stir in sugar. Add lactic and resume slowly heating to 240 deg F. This takes a lot longer than you would think (an hour +). First you have to boil off most of the water. Then it gets to 231.8 *F and sticks there for like 20 minutes while it makes funny looking bubbles. I’m guessing that is when the sugar is inverting. Then it stops bubbling and slowly increases to 240*F.
At that point it was probably invert #1 but I was going for invert #2. So I stuck the pot in our convection oven set for 240 and checked it every 20 minutes. After 2 hours it was at 243*F and looking nice and dark. I poured it in pint and ½ pint jars and pressure cooker canned it at 240-250 for 30 minutes. Should stay good for months (years?).
Results: It definitely got to invert #2.
I think about SRM 34. It looks a little darker in the photo than in person. This was looking down thru 5 cm of syrup at a white sunlit background.
I ended up with 4.9 lbs. of syrup from 4.25 lbs of sugar so some water got bound in. That calculates to ~86% sugar. And turbinado is ~96% sugar and 4% impurities. (It’s that 4% that gives it the flavors that you’re after). So, .86 x .96 = .82 or 82% yield for entering into BeerSmith.
Now for the flavor. Mmmm, delicious! Definitely lots of raisin and honey with a little caramel and a buttery mouthfeel (not flavor).
I tried it at 10% in a ordinary/best bitters on Monday. I’ll report on it in 3-4 weeks.