Has anyone been able to buy commercial brewer's invert syrup and compare it to what they made?
AFAIK, even in the UK it is only available in industrial quantities, such that even smaller craft brewers are SOL. Hence the interest in making it at home. On a related note, brewers caramel, aka class III or ammonia caramel, is not only unavailable to homebrewers but impossible to make for yourself. Making true to style British beers is a challenge.
You can buy Brewers Caramel in small bottles. I bought some from a company called hop and grape. They are in the UK so even though the actual product is only about $6.5 US dollars you will end up paying around $12 or more in shipping.
https://www.hopandgrape.co.uk/brupaks-brewers-caramel.html
I just bottled a batch of Scottish Export (the beer formerly known as Scottish 80/-) based on a 1957 Robert Youngers recipe from Ron Pattinson's
Let's Brew book. Grist was 7 lbs Crisp pale malt, 1 lb corn grits (stone-ground Tennessee corn grits to honor my Scots-Irish heritage), and 1 lb of Lyle's Golden Syrup (because I wasn't in the mood to make invert, although I have done it before). And the plan was to get the color from Brupaks brewer's caramel. I have a friend in London and had a UK homebrew shop ship it to her and then she forwarded it to me for probably half the shipping cost of what the homebrew shop was going to charge me.
I took pictures along the way to document what 10ml of caramel adds to a 5 gallon batch.
The first image is the wort after first wort hopping, so hazier than the runnings were!
Next is after 10ml caramel added. This is before sparging and before boiling.
Here is the 5 gallon batch after fermentation was complete.
The color was lighter than I wanted, so I added an additional 10ml caramel to the priming sugar solution.
I'll post a shot of the finished beer in a few weeks. This was brewed for a club quarterly style competition. I'm pretty sure I am the only one that brewed a traditional recipe, as opposed to a more modern recipe with roasted malts (same was true for our dark mild competition). Oh well. I won't win, but I will enjoy drinking it.