The rise and fall of invert sugar

To continue my researches into brewing sugars I followed a reference to the book Additives, Adulterants and Contaminants in Beer by Jeffrey Patton. It includes details of sugars and syrups and their use in British beer.

Back in the day Britain had its own version of the beer purity law, which only allowed malt to be used for providing the fermentables when brewing. The law wasn't brought in due to any concerns about beer quality or consumer safety - it was because tax was paid on malt.

Poor harvests made Parliament temporarily relax the law and allow sugar to be used up replace up to 25% of the malt in the years 1800 and 1812-13. In 1847 the law was changed permanently so that sugar was now allowed, though customs duty and/or taxes ensured that the equivalent taxation to malt was levied on it.

At first take up of sugar use was slow and up until 1866 it was never over 10 million pounds. After this time, due to a reduction in cost and sugar refiners producing better products use rose sharply so in 1879-80 over 127 million pounds were used.

In 1880 tax on both sugar and malt were abolished, and the mash tun was "freed" so that brewers were no longer restricted on what they could use to provide fermentable material. They weren't freed from taxation though, the goverment had shifted it to beer.

On the use of sugar Patton states:

"Initially sugar was merely seen as a replacemnt for malt, but the effect it had on the flavour of beers led brewers to introduce new beers in which the luscious flavour of the sugar was a more prominent feature. Primings, though they were introduced to give a quick maturation to running beers, also imparted their luscious flavour to the beer. As their use increased, running beers generally became more sweet and it accentuated the difference between the runing beers and the stock beers, probably hastening the decline of the latter."

This gives me evidence for my current theory on why invert sugar was popular with brewers. Invert sugar (glucose/fructose mix) is sweeter than the sucrose from which it is made, and people liked the taste.

I'm still dubious about the line that producing the invertase needed to break sucrose down to glucose and fructose stresses the yeast. In 1960 bulk liquid sugar, which is mainly sucrose, became more popular than invert sugar, and as far as I can see it didn't cause any problems for the breweries. And of course they benefitted from the tax advantage of hydrolysis gain.

When Patton talks of priming sugar he makes clear it carries out a dual role:

"1. To give sweetness and flavour.
 2. To provide fermentable sugar for a secondary fermentation"

He continues:

"They were first used at the end of the nineteenth century in weaker running beers, which did not contain as much residual sugars as the stronger beers. The priming sugars were fermented rapidly and enabled the beers to mature quickly. Initally the amount of priming sugar was limited to 1.5% of the volume of the beer and had to have a gravity no higher than 1150. There was some feeling at the time that when priming sugars were added to a beer, they gave the impression that the beer was much stronger than the gravity to which the primings had raised it and that because of this revenue could be lost ... A standard mixture which does not crystalise out is 55% invert sugar and 45% cane sugar"

 As it's now more expensive to get fermentable extract from sugar than it is from malt the use of sugar in brewing, inverted or not, has declined greatly. Ragus, the last remaining manufacturer of invert sugar blocks, says it now accounts for just 2.5% of their sales. 
 

 

Beer colour and colour units

I'm currently reading the Malt book in the Brewing Elements series. I was pleased to see a reference about beer colour from Breiss malt I remembered reading, but had forgotten where.

A powerpoint presentation explains how a range of different coloured beers can get the same value when the colour is measured in a laboratory. As different malts absorb light in different parts of the spectrum we get beers of different colour, but laboratory measurement at 430nm can't always tell them apart. Dark roasted malts absorb more strongly across the spectrum, leading to darker beers and browner tones at equivalent colour value.

So much like bitterness units are a very incomplete picture as a flavour descriptor, colour units don't actually tell you what colour a beer is.

You really need to look at the slides, but here's a little taster which I've translated into English:

Colour (EBC)	Caramel malt	Black malt
20	Orange	Tan
40	Red	Brown
60	Mahogany	Black

  

A visit to Greene King brewery

The Brewery History Society AGM was held at Greene King brewery on the 6th May. It was a fantastic day and included one of the best brewery tours I've ever been on.

Many of my fellow beer nerds have a very dim view of Greene King, and seem to consider them to be if not the Great Satan, at least part of the Axis of Evil. I think it's down to them having an IPA which is not very exciting and 3.6% ABV. Despite them making it for the best part of a century apparently IPAs are inauthentic unless they're at least 6% ABV and taste of grapefruit. Having had such a wonderful time at Greene King I'm completely biased in their favour and as far as I'm concerned they can call any beer whatever they like.

We were hosted by their QA manager Susan Chisholm, who'd dug out some of their archives for us to look at:

The books on display were only about one percent of the records they have, though sadly at the moment they're not very well organised.

The historian Richard Wilson was given honorary life membership at the AGM. I knew he'd written the history of Greene King, so I'd made a point of reading that before the meeting. Rather 
embarrassingly I didn't realise he's also the Wilson half of Gourvish and Wilson, authors of a classic brewing history text I haven't got round to reading yet. He's also written on the history of British lager brewing, which I'm sure if of interest to many, but not me.

Rather foolishly I didn't take a notebook on the tour so there may be fascinating facts I've already forgotten.

The tour starts up on the roof where they have water tanks. They have their own wells but the water is treated with reverse osmosis to strip everything out, before salts are added back to match a particular brewing liquor. Greene King brew beers from the various different breweries they taken over and closed, and they match the liquor and still use the different yeasts from them.

There's a great view from the roof:

And you can see a maltings on the other side of the town:

The brewery dates from the 1930s and is a tower brewery, so as we headed down from the roof the we came to the floor with the four roller mill:

They have pale, amber and crystal malt in silos and the other speciality grains and adjuncts are in sack. The hops are pelletised.

Grist cases are on the floor below:

And the mash tuns are next:

They're copper clad but are relatively modern. When looking to replace their old mash tuns they did look into getting a lauter tun or mash filter but decided that as a traditional ale brewery mash tuns were best. With their microbrewery they have the flexibility to very the brew length from 10 to 1600 barrels.

Sparging

As we were here about the history we had to have a look at the 5X vats, where a 12% ABV beer is stored for two years. There's barely any change in the ABV during ageing so they can't have many bugs growing. Last time I'd look round I'd seen two vats, but I was delighted to find out they actually have four, and have the space to add some more.

Here's the other two: one new, one old.

Here's the new one again:

I think the new one is 150 bbl, and the others 100 bbl. I wonder if I could persuade them to fill one with old style porter?

We got down to the sample room, where of course we had a taste of the 5X. It is wonderful stuff.

And we had a peek at some old bottles from the 1930s. Sadly this beer was around 4% though apparently some bottles are still drinkable.

I also got to try their XX mild at last, which like I've seen others say, I did prefer to the IPA. They brew 60 bbl a week of it. Having various milds in the portfolio from the breweries they've taken over they rationalised it to just one recipe, and had tasting trials to decide on the best one. Despite the name it's sold under it was actually the Hardys and Hansons mild that won.

Susan Chisholm has found in the Green King archives recipes for all the X beers from one through to five.

Here she is getting a certificate from BHS chairman Jeff Sechiari

They have plans to get the archives into order, and I can't help but think that it'll then be time for Ron to have a holiday in Bury St Edmunds.

Brown stout porter

I learnt a lot from making my first old style porter using 100% brown malt. It certainly tasted quite different from the beers that you can buy today, and adding Brettanomyces had, in the end, got the fermentability to a respectable level.

Adding a pure culture of B.claussenii seemed a rather sanitised subsitute for ageing in an oak vat for a year though. The old porters will have been exposed to a range of bugs back in the day so for added authenticity I really needed to add a mixed culture. Looking at the cultures available Wyeast Roeselare blend seemed like it was just what I was after. The name Wyeast have given to the mix is hinting very strongly the Rodenbach brewery, which is surely the closest that we have to an old porter brewery today in terms of how they age beer. I was a little peeved that they're not totally forthcoming with what the bugs are, as it made my research a little uncontrolled, but then again a bit less controlled was what I was after anyway.

I added the Roeselare blend after primary fermentation and then left the beer under an airlock for a year. I wasn't overly optimistic when it finally came to bottling the beer as  I suspected it might well be undrinkably sour. So I was very pleasantly surprised with how it had turned out.  There's the roasted flavours from the malt, some residual sweetness and sherry like flavours from the ageing.

This was as dark as I could get it to look

It's dark brown, not black, so in both taste and appearance it's nothing like a modern stout or porter. I'm really pleased with how this one has turned out, it's time to do one aged in wood next.

Fable for a failed race

Having made my own malt I then had to decide what beer to make with it. It would have to be single malt so I could best see how my malt had turned out. And single hop seemed appropriate too, as should the brain eating living dead destroy civilisation as we know it I'm sure we'll have a lot less hops to choose from. Which I'm sure will be one of the pressing concerns of the few scattered survivors.

The hop really had to be English too, as I'll have to find something growing locally and the delicate flavour of English hops won't overpower the malt. I did go a little off piste in choosing Flyer though as it's now only grown in small amounts on one farm, but I had some in stock and I'd been meaning to use it for a while and this seemed a good opportunity.

I stuck to the self sufficiency thing by propagating the yeast myself, from a bottle of Summer Lightning before it went keg (I also had other plans this yeast but that's another story).

Not always being entirely on the ball in the morning I did ask myself what the grist was when I saw how dark the wort had turned out. It seems with the long moist kilning I'd ended up making munich malt rather than pale.

Just to be certain that starch conversion had taken place I got the iodine out:

It was good to see that all was well. The fermentation stopped fairly early leaving the beer sweet, but the high alpha Flyer hops did their job and gave plenty of balancing bitterness and a pleasant fruitiness. The yeast gave nice flavours too, and I'm glad I got some on a slope before Hopback stopped bottle conditioning.

If this is how post-apocalypse beer is going to be then I don't think we've much to worry about.

Home malting

As a brewer and microbiologist I have felt a certain smugness when contemplating the zombie apocalypse. Though civilisation may have collapsed around me, I'm sure with minimal equipment I could make my own beer. But once I'd thought it through a bit more a cold feeling of dread came upon me. Where will the malt come from? Making inferior fruit based beverages may be a simple task, but making booze from a starchy substrate is an altogether more involved process. There was only one thing for it, I would have to try home malting.

My Mk II mash tun seemed like an ideal candidate for a steeping and germination vessel. It's made of a home brew bucket with holes drilled in the bottom inside another one with a tap at the bottom.

Here's the inside:

I decided to start with an overnight steep.

Here it is in the morning:

Draining it for the first air rest:

Air rest until the afternoon then the second steep:

And then drained again at night:

After two steeps and air rests it  was ready for germination:

Chitted grains:

See the tips of the rootlets poking out

The rootlets start growing very quickly:  

day 3

day 4

day 5

day 6

It's important to keep mixing the contents of the germination vessel to stop the roots tangling and hot spots developing. For the laboratory scale malting at work we take the grains out and shake them in a bucket. I thought rolling the vessel around, like a drum malting, would be enough but it wasn't. Look at this bolted bastard:

I'd had a clump in the middle that hadn't mixed and the grains had got a lot hotter and grown a lot more. Fortunately most of them were like this:

I decided to include a withering stage, letting them partially dry on the floor.

That a few grains had bolted showed that the germination process needs tweaking a bit but nothing too major. My real problems started with the kilning. Keeping the malt on a tray meant I could only put a small amount at a time in the oven. I left the rest on the floor to wither more, but it was a long and involved process to get it all kilned, and even then the moisture content was still high at just over 8%. Initially I heated with the oven at a very low setting to remove as much water as possible before cranking up to over 100°C for the final kilning.

I did even worse with removing the rootlets and in the end admitted defeat. I tried shaking the grains in a colander but as well as the roots falling through the holes quite a few grains did too. I could only do a very small amount of grains at a time too, so rather than spend hours doing it I gave in and used the machine at work. Who'd have though that one of the first tasks of a post-apocalyptic society will be to build a deculming machine?

Tune in for the next episode to see if I'll be happily sipping a pint as the zombie hordes hammer at my door or if the brewing all went horribly wrong.

May Day Greetings!

Once again it's time to remember our martyred dead and seek out pints of mild. It's often hard work finding mild round my way, but as I get older, and senile lightweightism weighs more heavily upon me, I've been appreciating it more when I find it. I'm quitely confident I'll track some down this month as I've got a few possibilities scoped out.

I wish you all success in your struggles in the coming year.