Maltodextrin to Sweeten?

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

BrewOnBoard

Well-Known Member
Joined
Dec 8, 2008
Messages
204
Reaction score
7
I was reading that maltodextrin is an unfermentable sugar that can be added to beer for mouth-feel. In the food industry it is used as a sweetener on some salty snacks and other things.

Since it's non-fermentable it could be added at bottling yes? Will it sweeten my cider or does it only taste sweet on salty things? I ask because I hate all the artifical sweeteners I've tried (haven't tried stevia yet) and my companion drinker is lactose intolerant.

Anyone tried it?

BrewOnBoard
 
Yep, Maltodextrine isn't going to sweeten the way you want.

However, you can do this with Lactose (milk sugar) which is the nonfermentable sugar often added to stouts to lead a residual sweetness. Your idea was right.
 
In my newly acquired subscription to Cooking Light magazine, there was an ad for a stevia sweetener, which I guess have finally been legalized by the FDA. I think it was called Truvia?
 
I saw an ad on tv for it also. I wonder if that uses dextrose as a bulking agent like the small packets of splenda.
 
I think maltodextrin is fermentable. I recently added it to a recipe that did not include it. OG was a lot higher than the original recipe.
 
maltodextrin is suppose to be nonfermentable according to what I have read but I won'r disagree with you. I added the granulated Splenda(sucrolse and maltodextrin) to my raspberry cider to backsweeten it and it is bubbling away again.
 
I think maltodextrin is fermentable. I recently added it to a recipe that did not include it. OG was a lot higher than the original recipe.

No, it's not fermentable. It will increase the OG, but also the FG, since it's not fermentable. It gives body, and "thickness" to the beer.
 
Maltodextrin is 1/10th as sweet as sucrose. I don't perceive as sweet at all.

An amusing story about how science works:

Sucralose may have the strangest "accidental discovery" story. Tate & Lyle, a British sugar company, was looking for ways to use sucrose as a chemical intermediate. Halogenated sugars were being synthesized and tested. A foreign graduate student, Shashikant Phadnis, misunderstood a request for "testing" of a chlorinated sugar as a request for "tasting," leading to the discovery that many chlorinated sugars are sweet with potencies some hundreds or thousands of times as great as sucrose. Substituting three chlorine ions for hydroxyl groups on an ordinary sucrose molecule makes Sucralose.

Sucralose is 600 times as sweet as sucrose.
 
I think maltodextrin is fermentable. I recently added it to a recipe that did not include it. OG was a lot higher than the original recipe.
Gravity is just measuring what is dissolved into the liquid, it has nothing to do with whether those things are fermentable. MD will increase both gravities slightly. I think How To Brew has a value for the amount somewhere, actually.
 
Maltodextrin is about 12% fermentable (according to Austin Homebrew and somewhere else that I'm too lazy to look up and cite right now), so you may see just a little action when you add it, but the other 88% goes to adding body to your brew.

As mentioned above, lactose is typically used to sweeten beer, and will work fine unless you're lactose intolerant.
 
I think maltodextrin is fermentable. I recently added it to a recipe that did not include it. OG was a lot higher than the original recipe.

If you add any powder or liquid to a batch of beer it will raise the gravity. If it is fermentable that extra gravity will dissapear. If it is not fermentable the gravity will stay there at the end.

Forrest
 

Latest posts

Back
Top