Cane/table sugar to beer to up gravity

I overheard someone at the LHBS talking about using table sugar to up the gravity a few points when they were off.

Anyone every heard of this? Does it work? If so, how much per gravity point?

It'll thin out your beer and make it taste cidery if you over do it. It's a lot better to add a bit of DME to boost your gravity. Will taste a lot better.

Depends what your looking for. Adding too much will make it cidery which is certainly not what you want. But if your looking for a dry beer, a Belgian, sugar is a great choice. Just don't go over 20%.

I add 2 pounds to a lot of my brews and dont notice any flavor change although some are alittle thin (which isnt always a bad thing)

For a small adjustment, it would work.
Table sugar or DME yields about 46 pppg, corn sugar about 36 pppg.

-a.

anyone have any idea of how many gravity points a half cup would be??

For gravity adjustments I use DME. I normally avoid table sugar unless the style benefits form it, like the Belgian Golden Strong Ale that I'm brewing now... that beer is supposed to finish quite dry, so I'm using 2# of table sugar to help me achieve that.

A Half American measuring cup holds nearly 4 oz sugar, so that would be about 10 points per gallon

-a.

^ What everybody said. Sugar thins the body and adds a cidery taste. Go with DME

that cidery taste is a myth

bkov said:

that cidery taste is a myth

Click to expand...

Depends on the recipe proportions but for the most part, yeah..it's overblown.

Sugar, honey, DME, LME, ect..can all be use to add additional fermentables to your wort but none should be used if you can't predict the effect on your outcome.

A lot of the Belgian ales, such as strong golden, strong dark, dubbel, trippel use a variety of sugars as an important part of their profiles. And different sugars can give acceptable results: table, candi (rocks or syrup), invert, turbinado.......... Check out Brew Like a Monk by Stan Heironymous

I recently listened to a couple of podcasts from Basic Brewing Radio (12/28/06 and 3/13/08 episodes) where a homebrewer did an experiment brewing Belgian beers with various sugars. It was very interesting hearing the results. I recommend listening to them. I got the podcasts for free from iTunes.