do comercial breweries use sugar to cut costs?

do commercial breweries use sugar to cut costs?

I keep wondering this. My first batch of beer was a kit that used a can of malt and 1kg of corn sugar. I learned that I can make a much better tasting beer, if I use all malt. But that first batch wasn't too bad of a beer. It certainly had more flavor then the American light beers. So the question which keeps coming up in my mind is do the commercial breweries use sugar to make there beers so light? Put another way, how much malt would I have to subtract from my first beer, in order to make my beer as tasteless as an American light beer?

There are a few other ways they could make their beer so light without adding sugar:

1) keep specialty grains to a minimum
2) reduce the alcohol content.
3) mash at lower temperatures.
4) add amylase enzyme.

Is there any way to find out if they use sugar versus any of the other methods of making the beer lighter?

many of them use a lot of rice which is cheap also.

Sugar is more expensive than malted barley

The amylase enzyme is used to create true "lite" beers, as it converts sugars without producing carbs.

khiddy said:

The amylase enzyme is used to create true "lite" beers, as it converts sugars without producing carbs.

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The enzyme just breaks the unfermentable sugars down, so the yeast can eat them, thus eliminating the sugar carbs.

To make the light beer, they take 4% beer, add amylase which will increase the alcohol to 6%, then water it down back to 4%. That is why the big breweries like making light beer. They get 33% more beer for the same input.

babalu87 said:

Sugar is more expensive than malted barley

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I don't really know how much breweries pay for their ingredients. I'm just basing it on my prices. Corn sugar cost me $1.25 / pound. 2-row costs $1.17 / lb. Pound for pound corn sugar cost slightly more, but I'll get more alcohol from a pound of corn sugar, then from a pound of two-row. If I use cane sugar, then there's no competition. Cane sugar is less then half the cost of 2-row. I'd assume that prices for breweries would be similar prices in comparison to each other but over all cheaper since they buy in bulk. In other words, I'm sure they pay less for 2-row, but they probably also pay less for sugar. But I could be wrong, maybe sugar costs them more then the grain.

You'll also have to remember that 2-row also adds flavor, something not to be overdone when making an American lite beer.

Seems that there's lots of questions today regarding the use of simple sugars!

Simple sugar has its place in many recipes, depending on style. Belgian beers are well known for the use of either candisuiker (I love that word!) or just plain old table sugar to lighten the body and make it more digestible; there is also a strong tradition of using sugar in English brewing as well.

But I can't say that simple sugars are compulsory for light, easy drinking beers. Kolsch is incredibly light and refreshing - no adjuncts!

Don't forget that profits increase whenever someone has an extra beer since he's been drinking light all evening. Past that, I think the big commercial breweries do save money using corn and rice for sugar sources rather than just barley malt, but in the present I think it's a small factor. Compared to the promotion, distribution, labor, etc. costs these companies incur, economies of scale and mild, lightly hopped recipes mean that ingredient costs for an archetypical American beer are low and their main worries become consistent product and matching their market's idea of what a beer "should" be. If rice suddenly became more expensive than malt, I don't think Budweiser would quickly reformulate to save money or anything - Bud tasting like Bud every time matters more to them than the exact costs, since more money goes into all the cool commercials than into the mash.

Now, the past is another story. I suspect that since Prohibition ended during the Depression, and this before the modern era of huge multimedia ad campaigns and bar sponsorships, cheap ingredients for a cheap product mattered a lot more. People wanted their beer again, it had been years since the good stuff was on shelves, and it wasn't hard to beat a lot of the cheap hooch people had been getting illegally in the meantime. A perfect time to make crisp, light bodied, lightly hopped beers to sell in mass quantities. Then generations grew up expecting that's how beer should be.


Costs of ingredients are going to be somewhat different when you're dealing on large scales too, both within a market and depending what market you buy from. When buying from the LHBS you're buying in a specialty market(home brewing), meaning things are likely going to be more expensive than buying a massive bulk commodity like cane sugar at a large-volume business like a supermarket. At industrial scales corn sugar is cheaper than cane(due in large part to sizable tariffs on sugar imports, I understand, which will remain constant at any purchasing scale), which is why for example soda manufacturers use so much corn syrup instead of sugar. Similarly, corn and rice might cost more than malt when purchased from the LHBS, but that's since in home brewing supply channels 2-row malt is a high volume item and corn or rice are specialty additives used for certain beer styles. I imagine that if you were looking to purchase 100 tons of grain at a shot on the commodities market the cost balance might be different.

Now as for the main question: I'm pretty certain that they don't add refined sugar to typical American brews, or at least not in quantity. It's cheaper to get corn or rice and let the mash turn it into sugar for you, when you're buying at that scale. As for the rest, as I've said before the attention to consistency at a big brewery is immense. I imagine their malts, yeasts, mashing, and fermentation are all carefully designed to get the light products, with enzymes saved particularly for light/low-calorie brands as said above.

babalu87 said:

Sugar is more expensive than malted barley

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Can't imagine that being true to be honest... By weight? Maybe... But if you consider the Extraction potential in each, sugar ends up being cheaper.

As much as many malign the American light lager and the macro breweries for reducing the style to nothing more than swill, it pays to look to the history and clarify a few points.

1) Corn and rice as adjuncts helped to lighten the body and help with clarity, as the ubiquitous American lager was historically brewed with 6-row barley, a malt teeming with protein.

2) The foundation of the style is Czech Pilsner; early German brewers began incorporating adjuncts to both suit the American palate that found German lagers a bit heavy and as a way of dealing with a completely different malt.

Endovelico said:

Can't imagine that being true to be honest... By weight? Maybe... But if you consider the Extraction potential in each, sugar ends up being cheaper.

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You dont really have to imagine anything, its true.
Big brewers (Bud) get efficiencies of over 90% in their mash

I don't really know how much breweries pay for their ingredients. I'm just basing it on my prices. Corn sugar cost me $1.25 / pound. 2-row costs $1.17 / lb.

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CANE sugar is cheaper than CORN sugar

Bud probably pays about 50 cents a pound for Barley, hell when we do a group buy I can get it with shipping for around 65 cents a pound

babalu87 said:

You dont really have to imagine anything, its true.
Big brewers (Bud) get efficiencies of over 90% in their mash



CANE sugar is cheaper than CORN sugar

Bud probably pays about 50 cents a pound for Barley, hell when we do a group buy I can get it with shipping for around 65 cents a pound

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Local brew pubs here get it for around $.35/ lb, BMC have contract growers and I would guess get it for about $.20 lb.

Consider that rice and corn run $2-4/bushel (that's about 45 lbs), I doubt any commercial brewery would buy sugar, cane or corn. Except for certain styles.

One of the main reasons the big brewers add corn syrup is so that they can get a consistent product. The sugar distribution in each barley crop is slightly different, so the brewers need to add blended syrups to the fermentables so that every batch tastes the same.

RogerMcAllen said:

One of the main reasons the big brewers add corn syrup is so that they can get a consistent product. The sugar distribution in each barley crop is slightly different, so the brewers need to add blended syrups to the fermentables so that every batch tastes the same.

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No, they analyze each lot and adjust mashing procedures accordingly.
Its a myth that big brewers add sugar/corn syrup.

amstel light uses sugar of some kind, says right on the can in the ingredients, on natty and bud cans it says "cereal grains".

sully said:

amstel light uses sugar of some kind, says right on the can in the ingredients, on natty and bud cans it says "cereal grains".

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Cereal grains (IE Rice, corn)

Cereal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

American Big Breweries used Corn/Rice as an adjunct to lighten the taste and make the beer cheaper. Lot's of Corn and Rice in America.

In Australia where there is boatloads of Sugar the big breweries use Sugar to lighten the taste and brew cheaper.

Rudeboy

Since my earlier comment has gone unnoticed, it bears reiteration here:

The use of rice/corn in high percentages in American Light Lager, Standard American Lager and Premium Lager (sometimes all malt, but occasionally with adjunct to a lower percentage) is not merely a cost consideration. These adjuncts are ubiquitous to their respective styles, and were used by German brewers in the US to deal with clarity issues stemming from a protein-heavy malt (6-row) and adjust the beer to the emerging American palate that preferred a lighter bodied beer to more traditional German lagers.

Local ingredients and brewing techniques evolve together, not in a vacuum.

flyangler18 said:

Since my earlier comment has gone unnoticed, it bears reiteration here:

The use of rice in American Light Lager and corn in Premium Lager is not merely a cost consideration. These adjuncts are ubiquitous to their respective styles, and were used by German brewers in the US to deal with a protein-heavy malt and adjust the beer to the emerging American palate.

Local ingredients and brewing techiques evolve together, not in a vacuum.

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I wouldnt say it went unnoticed, I mentioned cereal grains once

flyangler18 said:

Since my earlier comment has gone unnoticed, it bears reiteration here:

The use of rice/corn in high percentages in American Light Lager, Standard American Lager and Premium Lager (sometimes all malt, but occasionally with adjunct to a lower percentage) is not merely a cost consideration. These adjuncts are ubiquitous to their respective styles, and were used by German brewers in the US to deal with clarity issues stemming from a protein-heavy malt (6-row) and adjust the beer to the emerging American palate that preferred a lighter bodied beer to more traditional German lagers.

Local ingredients and brewing techniques evolve together, not in a vacuum.

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I find that any comment made here that doesn't reinforce someone's prejudices will go unnoticed.

Sugar is a relatively expensive ingredient, and as far as I am aware is chiefly used in the production of high gravity Belgian beers (and nobody has complained about them being cheap, last I checked).

The use of adjuncts in American beers comes from a period when malted barley was considerably cheaper than rice or corn. A light lager in the early 20th century would have cost a pretty penny compared to an ale, but folks literally drank it up.

Interestingly enough the cheapening of beers through most of history has come from changes in the tax laws and breweries' attempts to circumvent the tax laws. The introduction of sugar into Belgian beers was almost certainly due to the backwards tax laws which taxed on the volume of the mash tun -- sugar goes straight to the kettle.

babalu87 said:

Its a myth that big brewers add sugar/corn syrup.

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No it isn't. Without getting too far into things, I make a pretty good living selling it to them.

At Coors, the lower end beer, Keystone, is made with corn starch as the adjunct. Coors Banquet uses rice.

All the beers are brewed at high gravity, roughly 1.070, and then "blended" (de-aerated water added) to hit correct alcohol and taste profiles.

The mega-breweries pay far less than $0.20 a pound for malted barley. Coors is the last of the big guys that still malts their own.

As a pub-brewer, I was paying $0.20 a pound for American two-row buying in 10,000 lb quantities. The big guys would go through that much in less then a day.

My annual production at Sandlot gets made every 25 minutes at the Golden brewery. 20,000,000 bbls is a LOT of beer.

RogerMcAllen said:

No it isn't. Without getting too far into things, I make a pretty good living selling it to them.

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Your the only one who seems to have any actual data on the topic. Can you elaborate? I'm assuming your a sales rep of some sort.