Goya sugarcane juice in brewing?

Has anyone ever used the canned goya sugarcane product as a sterile sugar addition in the boil, or during a begian fermentation or as priming sugar? Take a look at the pics and let me know what you think. I will take a gravity reading on this stuff tomorrow. But it looks promising as a sterile 12 once sugar addition.

This looks great. Please update on the gravity if you get a chance.

Side note: I regularly use Malta Goya in starters with great success. Sterile wort in a bottle!

I tasted the product at dinner with the family. It reminded my wife and I of that time (when you are a kid) that you add a boat-load of table sugar to some water and mix it up and then taste it (minus my mom yelling at me for doing something so foolish). This also had a faint taste of some brown sugar mixed in. It was a light tan in color. It wasn't unpleasant, just undrinkable as a dinner drink because it was too sweet. I wonder if people use this for baking or something. It wasn't carbonated. The kids didn't enjoy it so I froze the rest of the can and intend to defrost and take a SG when I get down into the basement for a few hours.

I fully admit that this is a rant on a technicality, but it's highly unlikely that it's "sterile". Most likely, it's been pasteurized and is relatively stable, but the term sterile is an absolute that generally only medical equipment gets labelled with.

I'd be very interested to see what you end up doing with it. It's a good idea for sure, but my guess is it will not lend a whole lot of interesting flavors. Like you said, it's probably mostly plain old sugar water. Depending on how sweet it is, you could keep it around as a simple syrup substitute in cocktails or to make "individual size" lemonade.

Yeah, I can't verify that it is sterile.

BUT - I wouldn't hesitate to put something (suitable) into a beer that came from a commercial canning process and that is stable at room temps. I/m always looking to save time and effort by not boiling small amounts of sugar water and I think this may be an interesting alternative to priming sugar or sugar additions during fermentation. I've been pressure canning my priming liquids along with my wort starters and if I can get the sugar straight out of a can it might be simpler for me.

How about real sugarcane, can i use this in brewing? I work on a sugar farm.

Naturallight16oz said:

How about real sugarcane, can i use this in brewing? I work on a sugar farm.

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I've brewed with raw, fresh pressed juice my Uncle grows for his personal cane syrup supply. He has kindly supplied the juice in exchange for an hour or two swinging cane knife. I have used the syrup several times with excellent results, so I was interested to try the juice. It is a green-brown color with a taste best described a very sweet herbal tea with a distinct grassy, vegital note. The gravity clocked in around 1.062.

First batch was an experiment, split into three. One with plain white sugar, One with the syrup, last with the juice, all figured for equal amounts of sugar. There was no discernible difference between the plain sugar and juice. I suspected the aromatics might have been blown off in fermentation.

I made a Saison and wheat beer, and added the juice to secondary in both. Honestly, there was no noticeable character that you could say came from the juice. It is either extremely volatile, or the herbal, vegital flavors just blend in with the hops.

It was a nice conversation point, though. Give it a shot and see if you get better results.

So I tested it. The og of the 11.8 fluid ounce can was 1.045 which was confirmed by beersmith after looking at the gams of sugar in the nutritional info. There is about an ounce and a half of table sugar equivalent in each can. So it would take like 3 cans to use a priming sugar. That seems like a lot of liquid to add prior to bottling. So, now I don't think these cans are all that useful.