Brown Sugar and Molasses

I made a real good beer with 1lb brown sugar. It was like a London Sweet ale.
Next batch I replaced the brown sugar with 12oz of molasses and it made it into a type of Belgian ale.

Its not bad, but its not what I wanted, I didn't think it would change the beer that much.

We did this, kind of serendipitously. We were ready to prime and bottle a brown ale (our 3rd beer, I believe), and after bottling about 1/3 of them we realized that we hadn't primed it. D'oh! MrFebtober ran to the store to get some corn sugar while I opened and dumped all the bottles back into the bucket, and he couldn't find any so he came back with some molasses, so we primed with about 2/3 a cup of that. It worked great and was one of our most popular beers ever. MAJOR taste difference, for sure, but the molasses complemented the brown ale amazingly.

OK, share your recipe for "brown ale". I'd like to see what kind of beer is complemented with a molasses prime.

It was one of Charlie Papazian's - we couldn't remember - we don't think it was the Naked Sunday Brown, but I'll let you know after MrFebtober gets back from the Indy 500 But I know it's in the Joy of Brewing, and it was an extract beer. We wanted to enter it in a homebrew contest but we and our friends had drank all of it by then!

interesting. molasses is super thick..did it disolve pretty easily? please share your recipe because im interested in trying this.

My very first beer was a Northern Brown, and I carbed with molasses. It was delicious. Then again, my recipe was not terribly Brown Ale -esque.

It dissolved no problem - it's no thicker really than extract syrup (though of course when you're priming you don't have the heat to help but I don't recall any problems with it).

I plan on posting the recipe tomorrow after we make sure which recipe we used - it was just a pretty basic extract brown ale though from the Joy of Brewing .

The cooking standard for substituting: 1 cup brown sugar = 1 1/2 tablespoons molasses plus 1 cup granulated sugar. So you increased the molasses flavor by a factor of 3-5 times.

1 cup packed or 1 cup loose?

Molasses can be detected even after long term storage. Not that it is necessarily unpleasant, but you need to make sure the flavor is fitting.