Sugar in Beer ??

[Bobb25]

Just a general question out of curiosity. When I mentioned that I was home brewing to my mother, who is 98 Y.O. she told the story of walking to the corner store for her mother to get supplies for her to brew beer for her dad. This would have been in the late 1920's probably. It was one of the cooking jobs that her mother did, they were polish immigrants. Anyway, she said one of the ingredients was a large ( 5-lb. ? ) bag of sugar. We don't add sugar to the modern all grain beers we brew, unless we are bottling. Why the difference?? As an aside, I asked her what kind of bottles the beer was placed in back then, and she said " canning jars, of course " .

 

[Psylocide]

Cane/Corn Sugar is added in some beers, some IPAs/DIPAs to dry them out some, as one example.

Also, sugar was readily available then and easy to ferment. I doubt their beer tasted very similar to ours.

 

[hunter_le five]

If you look at a lot of old (pre-legalization) homebrew recipes for beer, they tend to include large amounts of white sugar. My guess is because it was cheaper than malt extract and readily available. Fortunately, we've learned better since then, and have access to a much larger variety of ingredients than our parents and grandparents.

 

[m00ps]

just dont try to make a beer with a large %age of sugar. The yeast gorge themselves on it and get fat and lazy. They wont finish attenuating the complex grain sugars

 

[jrstaples1]

I bet the beer was pretty flat too, unless they had a kind of canning jar that worked on positive not negative pressure. Cool history though. That'd be an interesting thread, old timey brewing stories.

 

[unionrdr]

They used a lot of sugar with those malt extracts in the baking needs isle of the grocery stores of the day. Not very good stuff.