If you are brewing a Belgian, stick to the table sugar. It serves a purpose in that style of beer- it raises the gravity and thins the body.
The idea that "sugar in beer is bad, because it makes beer cidery" is really an oversimplification and shouldn't just be repeated as gospel. That's actually another one of those brewer's myths that new brewer's tend to repeat over and over like canon, without full understanding what they're talking about.
Too much sugar, in a recipe can give off off flavors, or make a beer cidery, but we're talking about someone who wants to bump up the alcohol on his 6 pounds of extract beer by adding another 6 pounds of table sugar to it.
That whole thing about not adding sugar or else you make "cidery" beer is one of those little "chestnuts" that noobs repeat without thinking deeper about it. When we talk about it being a bad thing, is when the ration of sugar to malt quite high, like frat boys trying to bump up their coopers can...yeah that's a bad thing...but we're not talking about that here, we're talking about an acceptable brewing process for many styles of beer...and in your case just about priming your beer.
I mean do you like Belgian beers? Are they crappy tasting because of the simple sugars that are added? If you like them, that's how they achieved the beer you like.
Belgian beers are a style that are supposed to have simple sugars in it. It raises the abv, but it also cuts down on some of the body, promotes the formation of certain flavors and helps dry the beer out.
Brewing Belgian Beers said:
However, sugar does play an essential role in Belgian brewing. It allows you to brew strong beers without the heavy, full body typical of barley wines. Depending one the style you're brewing, you can use at least a pound of sugar per 5 gallons for beers of 1.060 and up. For triples you may want to go substantially higher than that.
For all-grain brewers, brewing with sugar lets you increase your original gravities without increasing your mashing and lautering capacity. My zapap lauter tun maxes out at about 15 lbs of grain, but by adding sugar to the kettle I can increase either the gravity or the quantity of the finished wort.
The Beer Guy said:
Some people find it difficult to imagine that sugar actually dries a beer out, but the science behind it is fairly simple. Plain sugar is 100% fermentable by brewers yeast. Corn sugar, candi sugar and even regular table sugar, are simple sugars and brewers yeast can eat and ferment all of them completely. The sugars produced by mashing malted barley and much more varied and some of them are complex types of sugar which yeast can’t ferment. The typical mash made from100% malted barley is about 75-85% fermentable by the yeast, and as a result 15-25% of the sugar is left over in the finished beer, which is what gives beer it’s richness and sweetness. To make higher alcohol beer, you normally use more barley to extract more sugar, and if 15-25% of the sugar is left in the finished beer, then the more barley, the more leftover sugar, and the sweeter the beer. If you make a high alcohol beer and use sugar and malt, you increase the amount of sugar in the wort, but the percentage of residual sugar in the beer is lower, because you started with a higher percentage of fermentable types of sugar. The use of sugar is what makes a 9% alcohol Belgian Tripel a drier beer than a 9% alcohol barley wine, which is typically brewed from all malt.
A pound or two, especially if the recipe calls for. Even a cooper's which people want to deride, or some others suggest replacing with malt extract,
is really meant to have exactly the amount of sugar the recipe might call for. But if you willy nilly add a couple more pounds to it, that's another story.
It's about balance in a recipe, the correct amount of sugar in a recipe is fine, and often serves an important purpose.
If you're making a Belgian, stick to the sugar. If you didn't add it to a Belgian beer, and replaced it with DME you'd have a barleywine....That's a good comparison, go get a 9% ABV Belgian Dubbel or Tripel, and a 9% or more Barleywine, and do a side by side comparison. They both will have similar grainbills, and obviously have the same alcoholic content, but the bodies will be completely different.
