Can you clarify what you mean by using half a pound to full pound of cane sugar in an extract brew? When would this be added? Thanks
The idea of adding 1/2-1lb of cane sugar to an extract batch is predicated upon the idea that extract has already been mashed, lautered, and condensed into extract. In that respect, it can only move in one direction in the brew house, becoming denser, darker, and more heavy than the original wort was (at the same gravity) before it was condensed into extract.
There are great ways to mitigate the above limitation, be it the Texas Two Step method, late extract, full wort boil (FWB), or FWB+late extract. Adding cane sugar is another form of mitigation, but it also hacks a bit of lightness into the process by diluting the wort a bit while still contributing alcohol to the beer. It's not a solution, but it's a pretty good cheat.
By substituting cane sugar for extract, you're trading a very flavorful, dark, and not fully fermentable product in the form of extract for a much less flavorful, much lighter in color, and mostly fully fermentable product. The upshot being that you can make a slightly lighter colored beer with a drier, more crisp, and more defined finish. It has been my experience that people prefer an extract beer that has been partially cut with cane sugar because it finishes more cleanly, drier, and more assertively. It allows your late hops to poke through a bit more and the finish closes down more assertively, letting your bitterness poke through a bit more.
Extract beers are widely criticized for having a "twang." Personally, I don't preceive it as a tawng. I'd argue, instead, that there's a fullness, or fatness to extract beers and sugar really helps with that. It just clears up the finish, making it more crisp and less "homebrew-ish."
As with all things in life, this isn't a panacea, it's a trade off. You don't get something for nothing, ever. Cane sugar from the grocery store will lighten and focus your beer up to a point. Eventually, as you keep adding more and more sugar, your recipe will tip over the ledge and become less beer-like. If you're brewing below 1.050 you can confidently add .5lb of sugar without a worry. If you're above 1.055 a full pound won't hurt you. In the olden days of yore it used to be common practice to add a can of extract and a few pounds of sugar to create a wort. This is how sugar got its bad reputation in the homebrewing community. My .5 and 1lb recommendations are very conservative. If you don't believe me, look at the sugar bills of Belgian Tripples or British ales. There's all kinds of room for you to explore with sugar before it becomes distracting.
As for how to add it, there's a number of ways. If you're full volume brewing, you can simply dump it in before or after your extact and stir like mad. Doing this will risk the sugar sticking to the bottom of your kettle and burning. Not ideal, but you might pickup some flavor and color from boiling the sugar--that's no bad thing, depending upon what you're up to. You can also withhold it until a convenient point in your late boil, then add it and stir like mad. You'll pick up less color and flavor that way, which is great if you're trying to lighten the beer as much as possible. Stout? Add it early. Hefe? add it late. IPA? Depends on what you're trying to do.
Frankly, I prefer to add my sugar
off the boil in a separate vessel. To do this, I weigh my sugar in a vessel, then use a large 2qt measuring cup to pull wort out of the kettle into a large pasta pot. If you don't have a large measuring cup, just use your sauce pan to shovel your (boiling or not boiling, your call) wort out of the kettle and into the pasta pot. With the pasta pot filled with wort, you can now add some sugar, stir until desolved, add some more, stir until disolved, etc. If the wort in your pasta pot starts to become saturated with sugar and it becomes difficult to disolve the sugar, just dump the pasta pot into the kettle, stir like a mofo, then pull another volume of wort into your pasta pot and restart the process. Easy peasy. As a UK-focused brewer that uses a lot of homemade
invert sugars, I've found this to be the cleanest, most accurate, and easiest way to add sugar to the boil.
I hope you found this to be useful and I hope you find it helps. Don't hesitate if you have further questions.
