Brewer's Crystals

anyone ever try these and have any 2cents on these:

"Granulated corn syrup solids with dextrose mostly converted to maltose, ~56%. This sugar mimics
the fermentable/unfermentable ratio of sugars of barley malt wort. A good gravity booster when
additional alcohol and dextrines are desired but additional malt flavor, aroma and color are not.
(871-E-1) Brewer's Crystals 55 pound bag $40.65"

Don't buy it. Sounds like the 'Booster' from Mr. Beer.

Give no malt flavor, just some extra alcohol + unfementables. maybe a little body.

Boost your beers with Malt extract. Even Mr. Beer says to use malt extract in place of the booster to improve their beers. The fermentability is about the same.

If you buy it, you might use a couple of lbs per brew for a few beers, but will soon decide you would prefer not to use it, but you will have 40 lbs of it left, that you will be obliged to use ... knowing that you are using sub-standard ingredients just to use them up.

Calder said:

... knowing that you are using sub-standard ingredients just to use them up.

Click to expand...

I guess Surly Brewing uses "sub-standard" ingredients too, seeing as their "A" rated IIPA, Abrasive Ale, uses brewer's crystals...

I'm interested where OP found brewer's crystals as I've only seen a couple online retailers selling it.

I saw these at the LHBS earlier today. A friend of mine has demanded something along the lines of Zima (don't ask me why, I guess just cause you can't buy it any more). Perhaps this might work well for that kind of application?

It's the same stuff that AHS uses for their alcohol boost packs.

*BUMP*

So I was looking to brew the Surly Abrasive clone which uses Brewers Crystals. You can see that Brew Rite lists this composition:
56% Maltose
16% maltotriose
8% dextrose
20% higher saccharides

I then saw that Briess listed this composition for their light DME:
48% Maltose
14% Maltotriose
13% Glucose
19% Higher Saccharides

That is ridiculously close. And at ~6% in the Abrasive clone, which uses a ton of hops, I can't imagine you'd taste the difference. So I could sub in DME, but that doesn't seem to make sense when I'm doing a 1.080 gravity IPA. I could just add more base malt.

The odd thing is that the brewers crystals are about half the price as DME. Anyone know what's going on?

Brewers Crystals don't have much of a flavor. DME does. They are used as an alcohol booster or to soften the malt character of a beer without drying it out, as would be the case with dextrose or sucrose.

How do you explain the compositions being almost identical?

The composition is similar because they are made in a similar way to DME...just made from corn rather than barley malt. The similar profile of sugars does result in similar fermentation characteristics, they do not dry out a beer in the way that adding simple sugar would.

I brew gluten free and have experimented with these as an adjunct (as they are gluten free). They work as advertised, I used them in a couple of pale ales that were very nice.
I dont often want to raise my gravity without adding any malt flavor, witch is what these are intended for...so I dont find my self using them often.

Flavor compounds are often chemically incredibly potent, with thresholds in the ppm or less. I would assume, because it's not actually barley malt wort, but just sugar with a similar chemical composition, that those flavor compounds that make barley malt wort taste like it does simply aren't present and aren't high enough to register as percentages of composition. End result is similar fermentation profile, but without the flavor. If they're made from corn, that would explain it, although I thought corn had a different sugar profile to it (unless it also produces maltose just at a lower level and the sugars are isolated and then recombined in the appropriate ratio, which I suppose is possible, to my non-scientist uneducated mind at least.

I wonder how this would taste if you used this as your primary fermentable in a smash or ipa, I would think you would be able to taste every bit of your hops

BrianK3721 said:

I wonder how this would taste if you used this as your primary fermentable in a smash or ipa, I would think you would be able to taste every bit of your hops

Click to expand...

Taking the beer out of beer surely sounds fun.

Miraculix said:

Taking the beer out of beer surely sounds fun.

Click to expand...

Alcoholic hop tea!

BrianK3721 said:

Alcoholic hop tea!

Click to expand...

Hahaha, whole new level of hooch

When I saw "corn syrup" and "mimic" that just translated as "sugar booster".
You're not going to get any protein content or glutens from this and the yeast will simply turn it to alcohol and gas.
More often than not, my "sugar booster" is about 4-6oz of clover honey to get a couple of gravity points.

Never used them, never would. Name sounds cool.
So many ways to skin a cat in the brewhouse depending on how microscopic your focus is. On paper they look like they are to be used when the mash tun is completely full, but you need more extract so you'll be adding sugar to the boil, but as it is quite a lot of sugar, more than can be reasonably adjusted for with a slightly higher than normal mash temperature and you don't want to excessively dry out a beer you need a sugar with a similar ratio of dextrins to all malt wort produced in a standard single infusion mash at 65.5C?

This is a very specific and niche purpose. Except under that very specific situation there are lots of other ways to get a similar outcome. If I was doing things like that a lot I'd be questioning how suitable my equipment was and if I was brewing to my strengths.

Here it is quite a common sight to find maltodextrine powder in 'table' NEIPA's to bring up the body and mouthfeel in a beer which otherwise would struggle to finish higher than .004.