yeast nutrients with brown sugar?

mxyzptlk · 10-15-2005, 04:22 PM

I am planning on doing two brews from the book "Sacred and herbal healing beers" using brown sugar exclusively as a sugar source . My question is would it be advisable to use a yeast nutrient, and or a paticular strain of yeast? if using a liquid yeast how should I go about making a starter, with exclusively brown sugar?

any help would be apreciated.

Thanks

**david_42** · 10-15-2005, 04:57 PM

I would add yeast nutrients. Brown sugar is just refined sugar plus a little molasses. Hopefully there are a lot of herbs & spices in the recipe or you have a high tolerance for really vile beverages.

mxyzptlk · 10-15-2005, 06:05 PM

I am trying to recipes, for one the author specifically recommends brown sugar as the only fermentable. The one recipe is for a yarrow beer, the other is for a ginger ale. Has anyone tried anything similar?

ScottT · 10-15-2005, 08:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mxyzptlk

I am trying to recipes, for one the author specifically recommends brown sugar as the only fermentable. The one recipe is for a yarrow beer, the other is for a ginger ale. Has anyone tried anything similar?

Are you fermenting them to completion? I just pitched in a soda pop type ginger ale two days ago and will be putting them in the fridge tonight to shut down the fermenting.

I just started 1/2 tsp dry yeast in a cup of warm water with a teaspoon of demura sugar.

Pitched that in a 1 gallon batch of ginger ale that consisted of 1/2 cup demura sugar, 1/2 cup honey, 2 oz grated fresh ginger, and the juice of 2 lemons and 1 lime.

It took off like crazy and had krausen until today at mid day. The bottles are plenty tight and I'll be drinking it by tomorrow.

**david_42** · 10-15-2005, 08:48 PM

I've done ginger ale with both apple juice and pale DME as a base, but not with just sugar. The juice based one came out better.

mxyzptlk · 10-15-2005, 09:34 PM

my ginger ale recipe calls for 1 week of primary fermentation and then straight to bottles. I was thinking about using brown sugar also for priming, any idea how much I should use?

**Orfy** · 10-15-2005, 09:52 PM

Depends what size bottle you are using.

mxyzptlk · 10-15-2005, 09:55 PM

I usually make a priming solution and rack the beer of the primary before bottling (so bottle size isn't an issue) - I'm doing a 5 gallon batch.

I've seen some other recipe call for as much as 3/4 cup of brown sugar for priming so I'll think I'll go with that-