Brown sugar stout?

[Funkenjaeger]

When I was in Hartford, CT a few years back I went to the City Steam Brewery Cafe, and had what they called a Jamaican brown sugar stout. It was very much a dessert beer, as it was quite sweet, and tasted strongly of brown sugar. I tried getting in contact with the brewmaster a while back, but never heard back from them.

Anyone have experience getting a distinctive brown sugar flavor in beer? I've used a pound or so in a few batches in the past, but never enough to really make much difference as opposed to using just plain sugar. I know the "brown sugar" flavor is essentially molasses, so I figure I may have to just skip the sugar and use molasses directly, so as not to end up with tons of cane sugar leading to a thin, cidery stout. But, of course I have no concept for what quantity of molasses to even use as a starting point.

I'm planning to buy (and subsequently dump down the drain) a couple 1-gallon glass jugs of cheap wine and repurpose the bottles as fermenters for 1-gal experimental batches, so I may try brewing up a couple gallons of a generic base stout recipe and add varying amounts of molasses to it in each fermenter, but if anyone has any advice on a good starting point it would save me a lot of time.

 

[Evan!]

I'd try using Sucanat too. It's less refined than even turbinado. I've used it in several things (Papazian has it in an ESB recipe I believe), and it works well. Has some amount of fermentability, but brings alot of that brown sugar taste without being refined.

 

[Brewpastor]

I would think that the brown sugar could cut or dry a strong rich stout to give it a better attenuation. Brown sugar is refined sugar with molasses added. It might be interesting to use aan unrefined sugar like EVAN suggests and a bit of molasses.

Was the beer roasty, sweet, chocolatey, bitter? Give us some ideas of what flavors you want in balance and we can probably come up with something tasty!

 

[Funkenjaeger]

Sucanat looks interesting, I wonder if I can find it around here - I'll have to look. I like the idea of using some sucanat and some molasses.

It's been like 2+ years since I had it, and my beer palate at the time was pretty undeveloped, but as I recall, it wasn't extremely roasty, chocolatey, or bitter - more smooth, full-bodied, and relatively sweet. Not that I don't enjoy a nice bold stout in general, but as I said, this is more of a dessert beer - probably a bit too cloying to drink more than one of in a sitting though.

Hrm, maybe a nice thick smooth oatmeal stout would be a good starting point - after all, brown sugar goes well in a bowl of oatmeal, so why not in beer?
With that in mind, I'm thinking of starting with the basic oatmeal stout recipe from BYO, scaling it down to 2 gallons, and tweaking to include the sucanat/molasses, something like:
3lb pale malt
6.4oz crystal 60L
7.2oz quick oats
3.2oz chocolate malt
3.2oz roasted barley
6oz sucanat
<some amount of molasses>
bittering hops only (english - EKG or fuggle), and irish ale yeast